This is Big Cinema: The Howlers in Interview
Written by Maddie Nash, Edited by Millie Cain.
Based in London and traversing a musical soundscape ranging from the Wild West
to the mod scene of the North, The Howlers are far from your average rock band.
After months of painstaking teasing, the release of their EP ‘I Need Your Love’ as a
prelude to their upcoming debut album ‘What You’ve Got to Lose to Win It All’ is
causing a storm of feverish anticipation. I sat down with the self-professed desert
rockers to discuss their explosive new album, genre-bending style and how their
unique bond as a band influences their music.
It’s lovely to meet you, this is very exciting stuff so thanks for sitting down to
talk to us. One of the main things I want to talk to you about is you’ve had
quite a lot of success already before you’ve even released a debut album. How
has that been so far?
Adam: No of course, we love meeting and speaking to anybody, no matter what
you’re doing and the university papers are just as important as anything else out
there, so thank you for wanting to speak with us really. I mean, success is relative,
yeah, we’ve had successes and things like that, but to the people that we look up to
and we work with, you know, they’re vastly more successful than us and so what we
kind of always say is that it doesn’t matter what achievements you get in this
career, you can always be better. You can always work harder and you should
always strive for that. The next big thing. And that’s kind of what’s kept us pushing
forward and going and yeah, even though the things that we get that you know we
should celebrate, the more we get them it’s a great what’s next sort of thing. I think
that’s just our work ethic, but it’s nice. It’s nice to have that little bit of gratification
when you get an accolade or something or someone to write up about you or you
end up going to tour the band that you love.
You’ve described older movements such as Northern Soul, exceptional taste,
by the way, in your inspirations as well as kind of newer bands like the
Vaccines, and I was wondering, how do you like to play around with blending
the old and the new together in your music?
Adam: So what we say is that we’re kind of like a three-way Venn diagram, a little bit
like, you know, the old John Bonham logo. We all have the things that we love and
we all crossover with each other in different ways, but there’s also stuff that we like
that nobody else likes and that little sweet spot in the middle is where the band is
and it’s where our sound comes from. Being able to not be so dialled in on one
influence or another, I think it’s really good, because you need to be open to
influences and new production techniques, and looking backwards at music that
came before modern techniques, that’s where true musicianship is. And I think
looking at those musicians and seeing what they did and how they learned their craft
and how they honed it is more important than just taking the shortcuts that you can do now because music access is so readily available. I grew up listening to Northern
Soul and I would go down the Doc Soul Club and stuff when I turned 18. I’m from the
South, and Northern Soul was massive up north and particularly in London. I mean
I’m from a very working-class city on South Coast, it was a really small subculture
down here, so I kind of learned by hanging around with older people so to speak. But
yeah, it’s just figuring out something you love, and finding a way to make it your own.
We always say you can’t reinvent the wheel. You just can’t. Everything’s been done
before you. All you can do is put a few more spokes on it, and so it’s figuring out a
way to make something you love yours, I guess.
No, for sure, I find that’s such a good philosophy. I get it because I want to get
into music as well, but it’s always one of those things where I’m like, oh, how
can you possibly come up with anything original? But like, it’s just reworking?
Adam: Oh yeah, I rip off people all the time like. I do it all the time, but it’s the art of
being a musician and looking at the jazz world, not being pretentious in the fact that
you’ve taken influence from somewhere. If I love a song, I’ll look up the chords and
go oh, that’s interesting because I wouldn’t have thought it was those chords, and I’ll
kind of deconstruct it and play it differently, I have a very unique playing style
because I’m self-taught, so I don’t play properly. So yeah, it’s just making something
your own, and if you do it with enough conviction and passion, then it works.
I also read that you guys formed as a group while you were at uni, and as most
of the people who read this will be at uni I was just wondering if there’s any
way this has influenced your music or maybe your formation as a band, or if
you have any advice for people that are trying to break into the music industry
coming from university bands?
Adam: Yeah, I mean, like I think the biggest thing that we took away from it was that
we spent our entire time at uni not being a band, going out and drinking and partying
and doing whatever, and people would always come up to us and be like, alright, so
when you playing your first gig and we were like yeah, soon, soon. It wasn’t until we
both graduated that we thought we probably should start to do this properly. It’s just
using that time more effectively, I guess. But there’s no right or wrong way, and I
think university is such a great melting pot of ideas and different backgrounds, it’s a
chance to take in everything around you. I think if you close yourself off to that,
especially if you want to get into the arts, it’s never going to be that successful
because. you need to understand the people that you’re trying to sell your art to. And
university is designed to be a place where people come together and discuss things
and try things out. It’s a forum for making mistakes, and we’ve made plenty, but
there’s no right or wrong way to do anything. You just have to take a leap of faith.
You just have to go for it, and not be afraid to learn as well, I think is the biggest
thing. If you’re a university student then you obviously have this too, the desire to
learn and better your life in a way where you’re more academic, and I think like that
applies to the arts as well. Like make mistakes, learn from them, develop them, try
things out. And yeah, it’s there’s no, well, wrong really. It’s just trial and error.
No, for sure. I definitely feel like I’m very grateful for all of the so many
different kinds of people that I’ve met since I’ve been at uni, much more than
you can possibly meet at home. I’m also curious about your new album that’s
coming out in May, a very exciting release. What can we expect from this? Is
there any themes or songs that you particularly enjoy is exploring or writing
while you were creating this?
Adam: As a band we’ve been through a lot more trauma and pain and really bad
experiences than any other band that we know, and they probably wouldn’t have
survived the amount of stuff we’ve been through. I almost died twice. In the space of
this band’s four-year career, which is mostly in the pandemic, we’ve lost between us
five family members, four of them were mine, and I’ve lost two personal friends in
that short period. It’s been a horrendously tough thing to pull through and keep the
band alive through. If it hadn’t been for each other, then we probably wouldn’t be
here. And the album is kind of reflective of that. It’s reflective of that period, we just
wanted to make an album that spoke to everything we’ve been through. But also, we
didn’t want to make a political album. We didn’t want to do anything like that. The
easy route in music these days is to be a post punk artist or be new wave or
something like that, or be noise rock and we just didn’t want to do that because it’s
just a little bit cliche. We wanted to give people a bit of escapism. We all love
cinema, and we wanted to make an album that had the depth of a cinematic
landscape, and has the elements of a film score in it. Whether it’s a record that you
can put on in the background and ignore, or record that you can listen to and
understand the emotion and pain in it. So that’s kind of the record. Personally, I
didn’t enjoy writing it because it was about the experiences that we went through.
Every song was like a cathartic experience. ‘Cowboys Don’t Cry’ is a prime example
of that. It was written during a really, really tough period and we rarely play it live,
even though it’s one of the best songs on the album. But we rarely play it live
because it is too emotional sometimes to play, when you understand the backstory
of it and the time it was written. But we’re so proud of this record, it’s like nothing else
out there, it won’t sound like anything you’ve heard.
How would how would you define it then or define your style?
Adam: I would say it’s cinematic, that’s what I would say. If you think of bands like or
artists like Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys and bands like Black Honey, who are
good friend of ours, and there’s a band called The Blue Stones, they’re amazing, if
you never heard of them, but they’re bands that combine elements of soul and
spaghetti Western soundtracks like Sergio Leone and Morriconi and stuff like that. I
don’t know. I hate having to describe our music. I don’t actually have a definitive
answer. It’s like one of those things, you release music and people go well, what
genre is it? And we have to say it’s alternative or it’s rock because it’s not like the
days of iTunes where you can put your own genre in. Yeah, it’s weird. All I would say
is, if you like escapism and you like big films, you like being lost in in an art form,
then it’s the album for you, really. Yeah, I mean it’s obviously difficult for us on a in a
live sense, because we can’t just slip into the seam. When we gig and when we tour
it’s very difficult for us to find bands to tour with or gig with because we are basically starting our own thing. We’ve never played a festival like, ever in our in our career,
which blows people’s minds. But it’s because we’ve just always been overlooked for
popular genres, and it doesn’t mean that our gigs aren’t sold out or busy because
they are, it’s just one of those things. I think there’s a lot to be said for our tenacity
and our vision of doing our thing and not wanting to just fit in.
For good, or for better or for worse, really.
That sounds so exciting, I’ll be listening for sure. I mean, the fact that you’ve
got an album at the end of this after everything you’ve been through is very
impressive.
Adam: Yeah, we owe a lot to Black Honey as a band, especially Chris and Tommy
and Al. Actually, Al played on this record as well. And Izzy, Izzy is great, she’s been
great to me, me and her are very similar. But yeah, Chris and Tommy, particularly
Chris pulled us through all these really bad moments because they produced the
album and they helped work on the songs and things like that. There was a point
where we didn’t know if the band would actually survive, and they kind of sat us
down and went. Absolutely not. You’re doing this record. It’s too good. This song
you’ve written is too good not to go out there. And we’re going to be with you and
we’re going to put all this time and effort into the band with you. And they still do that
to this day, so if anyone reading this is a big fan of Black Honey then they’ll love this
record because there is so many bits and pieces that we nicked from them. There’re
loads of samples from their past albums that we just slapped on there. When we
were making this record, if we couldn’t get the sound effects right, Chris just looked
through his computer and he was like, oh, I’ve got this from the written and directed
album, oh, yeah Carl Barrett recorded this for us, so we’re going to nick that. We’ll
slap that on this album. They pulled us through a lot.
My next question, considering that you said you didn’t enjoy writing the album
you might not enjoy this one, I was just wondering about your writing process
as a band. Is there one of you or is it more of a collective?
Adam: I’m the songwriter basically, but how we write is I’ll write a song and I’ll send it
to Chris as a voice note, and then me and him sit down on zoom and we kind of
structure it and flesh it out. And then I take it to the boys and we kind of go, right,
here’s the bare bones of the song, what do you think? And then they basically write
their parts into the song. So, it’s kind of both. Gus is an amazing all-round musician
and bass player and he’s playing the bass, and he’s playing lead guitar, which is
amazing. And Tom is incredible drummer who plays for the song. He doesn’t try and
overdo it. He knows when to flare and when to not and that’s a really rare thing to
find in a drummer. We bring the skeleton into a room and then they put the flesh on
the bones so to speak. And the songs sound the way they do because of our
individual input in it. You know, if there’s a baseline already in the song and Gus
goes oh, I kind of like that but I could develop it, I might do this instead. It’s a very
collaborative process in that regard, but it all starts in my weird little brain.
Yeah, I’m guessing that’s how you get all the cool little unique influences you
were talking about. And then we kind of covered this a little bit earlier with that you saying everything you’ve been through in the last years, but I was just wondering what shapes you as a band?
Adam: I think the biggest thing is our experience at life, I guess. We’re all in our 20s
and we’ve been through a lot, and I think those experiences shape you and mold you
into somebody you weren’t before. Particularly the grief, the amount of grief that
we’ve been through, both personal and collective, you feel each other’s pain and
understand when they need space and when they need support. I always say that
with grief, you never actually lose it. You never stop grieving for someone, you just
grow around that. So, the grief stays the same, you just become a bigger person,
and I think that has a major part in it because it’s a continual state, particularly when
you lose loved ones and you lose close friends. We’ve always had each other’s
backs and we always support each other no matter what. When people have said,
oh, I’m quitting this job because I want to focus on the band, but it means I’m going
to be more skint, you’re like OK, man, whatever you need. It’s the experience that
that defines us as a band, being able to roll with the punches of each other. You
know, sometimes being autistic I lose my shit on tour over the smallest thing, I’ll calm
down, I’ll apologize, but without the boys understanding how my brain works, then
that could quite easily explode into a major argument. It’s just it’s understanding each
other and being earnest and honest and authentic. We don’t walk out on stage like
we’re hot shit, we just walk out on stage like three people that make music and if
people dig it and they enjoy it that’s all that matters.
It sounds like you guys have something really special there with you with all of
you.
Adam: We try, we try, you know, nothing’s perfect but perfection is imperfect. There
is no such thing as being perfect. There is imperfection in everything, and it’s about
embracing them and understanding that. But music is one of the best forms of the
arts to do that.
It is, yeah, for sure. Anytime I want to have a big cry, I just put on my sad
playlist
Adam: Exactly. Like, you know, I met someone recently who genuinely said they
didn’t like music, and I was like, well, what do you, what do you listening to? And
they’re like I listen to podcasts and I just said that’s crazy. But yeah, I guess it’s just
experience and things like that and trying to live out your experience in musical form
It’s clear there’s no slowing down for this genre-bending powerhouse of a trio;
starting off the marks with such an eclectic sound and a stream of success under
their belts already, the future is looking bright on the highway to stardom. Don’t miss
out on the frenzy of their highly anticipated debut album ‘What You’ve Got to Lose to
Win It All’, streaming on the 17th May.
