New Politics

Review Rinse Repeat recently had the opportunity to sit down with the band New Politics, who hail from Denmark. The trio have signed to RCA Records and are touring the country in support of their self titled debut album. Among other things, their hit single “Yeah Yeah Yeah” has seen an abundance of airplay. In the interview, we discussed their new album, the said signing to RCA and the success of their single. Here is what went down.

Mark@RRR: I'm here with New Politics could you say your name and what you do in the band?

David Boyd: My names David I sing and sort of preach, rap and jump around, monkey about.

Poul Amaliel: I'm Poul I'm the drummer, and backing vocals and secret bass player.

Mark@RRR: Secret bass player?

Poul Amaliel: Yeah.

David Boyd: Søren does vocals and guitar.

Mark@RRR: So you guys just had an album come out last month, so how was that?

David Boyd: It’s great, pretty crazy. The whole rides been pretty crazy.

Poul Amaliel: Putting an album out is not the only thing you’re fighting for but then you actually did it.

David Boyd: It’s there.

Poul Amaliel: It’s out and people can buy your stuff and it’s hard to explain but it’s a really great feeling.

David Boyd: Its like a part of your art is out there its timeless, it will always be there, its just a really good achievement.

Mark@RRR: Could you guide us through the writing process?

David Boyd: Well we just sit down and write, come up with stuff and that’s pretty much it

Mark@RRR: Do you do the lyrics first and then the melodies?

David Boyd: Sometimes we have lyrics done, I write a lot of lyrics I have a ton of stuff I’ve written. Søren also has some old productions and stuff so sometimes we just put them on each other. A lot of the tracks were just started from scratch, we just find a bass line or a drumbeat or something and find a flow. Sometimes it just becomes a chorus or verse and we write to it as we go along with it.

Mark@RRR: Could you guide us through the recording process?

Poul Amaliel: It’s a different recording process. Maybe the modern way of recoding, everything is basically recorded at our own studio, in the apartment. We can’t do drums.

David Boyd: We do midi drums .

Poul Amaliel: it’s a high-end home studio so the vocals, the guitars, and stuff like that can get recorded and then we can go into a studio and record the drums at an actual old school studio.

Mark@RRR: Do you do it right to tape or do you do it to a computer?

Poul Amaliel: I'm old school so I always think if you can record as much at once as possible then you’ll get the energy in the flow of the beat and the singer, but this is done in a cake way, they have the song and then I record to the song on the computer.

David Boyd: We record it individually. We’ll do the base line, record the bass or the other way around record the drums first and build it off of that. He [Poul ] would play the drums off the demo and we’d just put them in the files of the demo and take it from there and replace them from there with proper analog stuff and rerecord what had to be rerecorded, vocals and stuff. Pretty simple and standard and with the time we had and how it bubbled for us considering we formed the band like a year and a half ago almost. It just went like a rocket ride I mean we were in Denmark a year ago to talking to you now. Didn’t have any clue that we were gonna make an album or get signed or move to the states and tour and have all these things open for us in the future. And when the radio picked up on Yeah we had to do the album. It went very quick so we did it very standard but we made sure we were involved with everything, which we were, from the beginning to the end.

Mark@RRR: How did your signing to RCA come about?

David Boyd: It was a mix of hype and having what we had which people were obviously interested in and liked. We won this competition in Denmark and started playing gigs at some festivals and stuff. There was this industry booking festival call Spot Festival where a lot of European bookers and agents come up to see upcoming artists and stuff like that. We had gotten a slot between two bands for about forty minutes or something that wasn’t promoted or anything it was just lucky that we got in there because we had won this competition thing and the right people heard it from some of the bigger places and it just created some kind of a hype and labels jumped in and management and we got a lot of interest in the UK, all of a sudden a lot of labels out there and stuff. And when that happened I knew someone over in New York that was connected sort of in the industry from another project I had worked on, and I sent him material and told him what was happening and that this is what we wanted to do and that we felt good representing this music it wasn’t like we were going on and putting on a mask to let the words come out. It was us from the begging to the end, we created it. And he just wrote back that we struck gold and that we didn’t know what we getting ourselves into. He sent it to some people and all of a sudden there was some buzz there at the same time as England jumped into it. All of us growing up as artists had this dream, this is what we worked for, so when an international label comes over and can help us get visas and live out this dream we jumped on it. We came out here played a couple showcases, contracts came and we took the label that believed in us the most, gave us our creative rights, didn’t interfere with publishing. It was a deal we couldn’t refuse. RCA came to our showcase, 25 people from the label, Vice President, President, Managing Director, they were all there and they all loved it and wanted it. They understood it for what it was and gave us creative rights. We could choose what we wanted to do with this, we’re not stupid of course were gonna work together with them, we’re a team. That was it, we continued writing, went on tour, and ended up having 30 songs for the album.

[Søren comes in now talking about his missing shirt]

Mark@RRR: You guys are going on a big tour with 30 Seconds To Mars that’s amazing for such a new band. How did that come about?

Poul Amaliel: We honestly don’t know

David Boyd: I think CAA our bookers they know all the big bands going on tour and they pitch all their artists and I don’t know who chooses.

Poul Amaliel: There is an amazing team behind this project. We’re also pretty lucky with timing because all the big bands from RCA either have an album out and are touring or are in the writing process so there’s a whole in the big system for a new band like us that they wanna push so everyone is pushing us.

Mark@RRR: Your single “Yeah Yeah Yeah” is huge how has that helped you?

David Boyd: Yeah I can actually see on our Facebook you can see in February we had a three week tour in the UK and you can see the UK fans slowly going up and we just got off a tour with The Spill Canvas a month and a half before we started this that was in April, May, and you can see in April, May its at 4,000 American followers. And then the single comes and were on tour and it really jumps a lot. Its still a hard thing a lot of people still tell us “What you guys are the ones with ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah?” because they don’t know New Politics. You can always write a song.

[Søren finally found his shirt and sits down]

Mark@RRR: That’s all the questions I have so thanks so much for doing this.

Søren Hansen: You’re welcome.

[All laugh]

Check out New Politics self titled debut out now on RCA Records and be sure to catch them on the Into The Wild Tour with 30 Seconds To Mars.