Changing our religion

SINGLE Spiritual Leaders release new track ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ on November 10

The forthcoming new single, ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ stands as a totemic shift in sound, if not direction taken by the Spiritual Leaders.

Guitar and bass have been set aside, as synthesisers are embraced. While their choice of instruments is undoubtedly a surprise, and a pleasant one at that, the move is not entirely out of step with their musical trajectory.

The 2012 debut album of Brady brothers Fergus and Cathal, along with lead vocalist Dave Reilly, was essentially a best-of collection from the self-penned indie rock setlists they had played over the three previous years. The Leaders then folded with Dave relocating to Derby.

2019’s out of the blue reunion saw them explore a poppier sound on the ‘Albania Away’ mini album, exemplified by singles ‘Underwater with You’ and ‘Picture on the Wall’. Positive feedback spurred them on to keep their long-distance musical relationship going.

“For the first time we got a bit of traction with that stuff, and we were delighted – a good few thousand spins on the likes of Spotify and got a bit of publicity and good reviews,” Fergus Brady tells the Celt. “From then on we never really stopped.”

Collaborative

They may not have stopped, but something else certainly did: normality. Yep, Covid restrictions meant they couldn’t meet up for about a year - Albania Away was released without a launch gig, and their decade long hiatus from the stage persisted until this summer’s gig in Blessfest.

All the while, nine new tracks that would form forthcoming album ‘This Fictional Place’ were being nurtured. Despite being split between home (Cathal), the capital (Fergus) and Derby (Dave), the distance saw the trio work more closely on penning songs together, rather than writing songs independently, and simply arranging them.

“So we got very collaborative that way,” recalls Fergus, “and then we started messing around a lot more with electronic instrumentation, synthesisers and things like that.”

Out on November 10 ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ is the first taste of the Leaders’ new musical testament. For the occasion, they didn’t just add a couple of synths to their typical guitar sound, they went all in.

“That was an interesting song because that was one that had been written on guitar. That’s an older song, it was written about 10 years ago,” recalls Fergus.

Fergus and Cathal used to play an early version of it in another band called Jellyroll, back in the halcyon days of the Origins gigs in a half empty McGinnity’s Bar - then ‘Shadows and Tall Trees’ was rattled out on guitar, bass and drums.

“We started programming it in on digital synthesizers and it just became a completely different song – we ended up with this cheesy-dancey-ish thing going on.

“It opened a door up to us to explore a whole other set of influences, that we wouldn’t have done much before. Although you would definitely hear indie rock in our sound from our earlier albums, we all would have been very into electronic music – ‘80s, ‘90s, the likes of New Order, Chemical Brothers, and into the noughties with Hot Chip and Yeah Yeah Yeahs - it opened up a window into exploring sounds we would have derived from those kind of bands and then made it into our own.”

Such is the quality of home recording software, they were able to utilise their demos for the track and simply embellish it with vintage synthesisers when they got to the professional studio in Nottingham.

“There was a lot of evenings where I’d sit down and spend about an hour looking at a tutorial online, and about another hour actually playing. There was a lot of that.”

Pushed ourselves

“I was well out of my comfort zone, and part of me was like, God, I could just sit down and play guitar, it’d be a lot easier, but I’m glad we pushed ourselves more in that direction because it ended up sounding a lot different. We’re really happy with the end result.”

Well, they are happy now that they actually have an end result, as the path to the final cut was a tortuous cycle of video calls critiquing mixes of songs.

“You start going a bit mad in the head after a while. This song here, I’ve counted there’s been 11 versions of the song – at one point we called it the most over analysed song of all time.”

Some of the versions featured barely discernible differences in bass levels, but one version has an extra instrumental section, which Cathal was eager to ditch.

“Cathal was fairly militant on that should come out,” recalls Fergus, who had argued for its retention in the single.

“In the end we actually ripped it out and turned it into a shorter version.”

A compromise saw the extended cut make the album.

“It is a relief once you get to the point where you go ‘OK, I’m happy enough with that’.”

Fergus’s partner Lucy, with whom he has a young daughter, Clara and another baby on the way, is a “big fan” of the Leaders’ new musical doctrine.

“She said to me there the other day, ‘This is really very different to your other stuff, you know that?’

“It’s good to hear that because you kind of forget that yourself you know – when you’re so close to it.

“I went through a period – when you listen to it so much that I just couldn’t listen to it again. And then you leave it and three or four weeks later, then I listened to it again and go, ‘Okay grand’, relieved it’s still okay.”

Such was the Leaders’ happiness with how the track turned out they put Shadows and Tall Trees out front and centre, as a statement of intent.

“One of the reasons why we decided it was going to be the first single was because it’s so completely electronic, and it’s so different from what we’ve done before. It’s also quite a poppy tune. When we were deciding which songs we’d put on the album, and how we would record them, we made decision to try to make something fairly cohesive in terms of an electronic element in every single song.”

Fergus notes the guitar still features on most of rest of the songs, but it’s often joined by synthesisers and drum machines.

Tricks of the trade

“There is still a couple of fairly indie rock tracks on it, but definitely much more of an electronic direction, so that was the decision made.”

More singles will follow in December, January, and February before the album release in March and launch gigs in April.

They hope to build on the exposure they got for the singles off their ‘Albania Away’, and hopefully draw a few more followers.

“We’ve learned a few tricks of the trade, especially in the last couple of years. And there’s a lot more possibilities for bands like us to get out of there with streaming and with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music and all of that. We learned a few lessons about how to pitch ourselves properly for playlists and get on radio stations that will play unsigned acts or more alternative music – and got a good bit of traction that way the last time around.

“The lessons we learned from that, we’re applying now this time as well and we’ll see how it goes.”