Words by Skinny Hobos.
Creative people are always most excited about their latest work. Ask anyone. Nothing ever feels as good as finally presenting to the world that which has owned your recent thoughts and dreams. It is no different for me and Skinny Hobos as we prepare to release The Lucifer EP on March 15th.
The Lucifer EP has been an incredible and highly unorthodox recording experience for us. We didn’t actually plan for it to happen at all. When we entered Studio 509 for four days in early November 2018, we had no intentions other than to test and arrange some of the material we’d been working on over the last few months.
Ahead of the release of The Lucifer EP this Friday, Auckland-based duo Skinny Hobos run us through the circumstances that shaped their new release.
Studio 509 is not a conventional recording studio. It is not available for dry-hire. It is primarily used as a project studio for Auckland-based production company and Indie Record Label BigPop Music. It just so happens that one of their engineers, Rich Bryan, is an old friend of the band and offered his services in this matter.
A quick aside for those of you who are unfamiliar with the band – we are a two-piece; I use two guitar amps, a bass amp and LOADS of pedals to make it sound like we’re not a two-piece. Tex’s drum kit is immense and he hits it like a champion. Now back to our story.
We set up like it was a gig. Texas and I facing each other on the live room floor. We were limited to 16 available microphone inputs which may sound like a lot for two people, but it really isn’t when doing a proper studio recording. Once we started hearing the tracks back, we knew that we were onto something special. There was a certain rawness and energy that we found in the simplicity of the live setup. We felt it really captured the essence of the Skinny Hobos live experience.
At the end of the session, we went away and put the songs on the shelf. Skinny Hobos had a bunch of summer dates booked and it was now time to focus on them. We had it in our minds that we would take our favourite song from those sessions and book an expensive recording studio to record a single at the beginning of the new year.
Flash forward to December 16th, we are flying back from a couple shows in Christchurch and I figured I’d have a listen to the Studio 509 demos… only that’s when I realised they weren’t demos. This is what I’ve been looking for! This is real! This is raw! This is Rock and Roll! It is magic. It is exciting, and we need to release it now!
Here’s the problem: the release tour for our single has already been booked. It starts in less than three months and it goes until May. Anyone who’s ever released a commercial record knows that this is an impossible timeframe. Well… fuck it, let’s make this happen!
I conceded that this wouldn’t be released with the same fanfare that accompanied our debut album launch. There’s just no time to set it up. But I do believe that the music will be able to stand on its own merit. If I have any regrets from our first album, it’s that the final product is a little too polished for my taste. It’s also a record of our band trying to figure out how to make a two-piece sound like a full band. It has always been our goal to never record anything that cannot be reproduced live, but we were still experimenting with how to do our live show and I believe that those limitations caused the songwriting to suffer a bit. Over the last few years of heavy touring and constantly refining the live rig, we are no longer hindered by those limitations.
The Lucifer EP sounds like a concert. There is no guitar layering or drum sampling. The performances are live. It feels real, raw and out of control. It is more dynamic, better written and musically more interesting than anything we’ve done before. I couldn’t be more excited to share it with the world.
SKINNY FXCKIN HOBOS MAATE!
P.S. I’ll let you in on a little secret… These 5 songs weren’t the only songs recorded in the 509 sessions. These are just the songs that fit well together and that we were able to finalise in our extremely narrow release window. Could that mean part two will follow along shortly? I suppose that’s possibly possible…
Alex Elvis
08/03/19
The Lucifer EP is out March 15th.
