Slowdive: KCRW Live from HQ

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Andrea Domanick: The new record, everything is alive, reckons with the passage of time and starting anew. What do you think about and experience as you yourself reckon with that?

Neil Halstead: I remember my dad, when I was about 14 and he was in his 40s. He was like, “I just still feel like a 20-year-old.” It didn't make any sense to me then, but I suppose as you get to that point yourself… you know, you never feel like you're getting old.

But I suppose musically, we've been around awhile and I think some of the themes on the record are about getting a bit older, looking back on different things, and feeling a bit different.

Calling an album everything is alive in 2023 is a bold move. We live in this age where everything is so digital, permanent and impermanent at the same time, and disconnected. What's the story of how the album's title came to be and what do you want people to take from it?

Nick Chaplin: With this one, a lot of it was created and recorded through the pandemic, or immediately after the pandemic. We all had different experiences through that, some quite negative experiences. A lot of life changes happened for us, as well as a lot of other people. I think the title appealed to us because it showed that there was hope at the end of it. A lot of the music we make people think is quite melancholy, but we're not melancholy people. Having the title everything is alive, we felt that it gave some hope to the feeling that we'd had over the last few years. It was quite a long process recording the album so [it’s] like a chink of light at the end. 

Especially at the end of the record, it does feel quite literally alive — vibrant, organic, hopeful.

Nick Chaplin: We did think quite seriously about the tracklisting as well, about what should start the record and what should finish the record. Everything is so different nowadays as to how you're supposed to do those things. We were told, “Oh no, you have to do it in a certain way for streaming and all that kind of stuff.” But we did stick to our guns to order the record in the way that we wanted, with the final track being the final track. We treated it much like a record that we would have made in the ‘90s in that way. The order of the tracks is quite important.

What were some of your considerations as you were thinking about that? 

Nick Chaplin: Back in the ‘90s, we were used to a record being Side A and Side B. So you want to sort of have a certain feeling with each side and the order is very important. But now we're told that nobody listens to records like that anymore. It's all about tracks and you just have to front load everything. But we wanted to make it a whole piece rather than just a bunch of fragmented tracks.

The way that the band has used technology has been one of your signatures. It's a very future forward way of crafting art. But now the future has caught up with you. Other than making the process a lot easier, how has your creative relationship with technology changed?

Neil Halstead: It's not a lot different. Speaking for myself, I think when you're in the studio, it's still all about… it's almost like you're trying to create accidents, you know? If you don't really understand how things work, I think that can work for you with the kind of music we make. When we started we used to make a noise so we thought, “well, we'll make the biggest noise we can.” We bought pedals that did that and it was a good way to hide behind our lack of musicianship, really, and technical ability 

Nick Chaplin: Still do that today. 

Neil Halstead: So there's still an element of that. What I love about digital recording is the fact that you can restructure things and you can edit things. You used to have to cut tape up to kind of do the kinds of things you can do digitally now. It's amazing, that kind of technology. I guess we first started doing it with Pygmalion when we started using loops and things on sort of old Atari-based sequencers and stuff. But yeah, I think it's brilliant. I love all that stuff and I think as a band we enjoy just messing around with bits of kit, and pedals, and stuff. 

Your fanbase is on par with the same demographic as artists like Faye Webster, Phoebe Bridgers, and Claud — very young and very online. And, of course, you’ve gone viral on TikTok. Why do you think that is?

Neil Halstead: Well we’re just getting older. [Laughs]

Nick Chaplin: As a subject I went viral. Well, I mean, just vaguely viral, not massively viral. None of us are personally on TikTok. I think the thing that we quite like about it is it's a format that’s totally organic. You don't have to get involved and I think if we did get involved, we started popping up [as] official Slowdive, it wouldn't have the same appeal that it does. 

I've said this before everyone's bored of me saying it, but my daughter knows about the band through TikTok probably more than she knows about it through me. She's not interested in what I do as her dad. When it's on TikTok and her friends are like, “Hey, isn't that your dad's band?” Suddenly she's impressed. So a lot of the shows we've done on this tour, we've tried to make them all ages where possible. It is really noticeable. The all ages shows are so much more fun to play because the crowd is so much more into it, like, vocally into it. We see kids with their parents waiting for autographs and stuff. We haven't seen that before, that's definitely a new thing.

What do you think it is that resonates with this younger generation?

Nick Chaplin: If we knew that we do more of it, probably. [Laughs] But I don't know, it's just one of those weird things. I have no idea. Why Does anything happen on the internet? 

Neil Halstead: The kids kind of look like how we looked in the ‘90s as well. Maybe it's like… the music has a kind of teenage appeal. I remember the first time we ever came to America, we were 18 or 19 and we were playing shows that kids our age couldn't get in to. You’d meet them after. They'd be hanging [around] outside, really upset because they couldn't get in the show. Obviously we connected with the kids our own ages and it's interesting that we still kind of feel that connection sometimes. 

Nick Chaplin: I think when we came back in 2014, we expected that the audience would be mostly people of our age who experienced the band the first time around. That was broadly true, but it has gradually skewed younger. And this album definitely has made a massive leap to that. It's not to say that we don't appreciate the oldies like us as well, of course we do. We love everyone.

On a personal level, what does continuing to collaborate and play together provide you with?

Nick Chaplin: We're all really different individuals, but we're quite similar to how we were back in the ‘90s. I suppose one of the differences now is that we're not together constantly like we were in the ‘90s. A bunch of us shared a house [back then]. It was 24/7, whereas now we're all living in separate parts of the country and we get together to rehearse and to record. 

But there's something like… if you took any one of us out, something would be missing. I know a lot of bands probably say this, but I think with this band it's particularly true. I couldn't say specifically what it is that I bring to the band apart from, like, I'm good at booking airline tickets. But the five of us together do seem to have something. [Something] happens when the five of us get on stage together, or get in a studio together. I don't think it would be the same if one of us was taken out. It's one of those things that it's a bit like the young audiences — don't really understand it, but you just go with it. We have a great time, [but] we're older now. It gets more tiring and we're not running around and seeing everything on tour. We need to rest a bit more. [Laughs] But we enjoy each other's company, the music's great, and long may it continue.

Credits:

KCRW Music Director: Anne Litt
Interviewer: Andrea Domanick
Directors: Vice Cooler & Angie Scarpa
Editor/Colorist: Angie Scarpa
Director of Photography: Dalton Blanco
Camera operators: Dalton Blanco, Vice Cooler, and Matt Smith
Recording / Mix Engineer: Nick Lampone
Assistant Engineers: Hope Brush and Henry D'ambrosio
Broadcast Producer: Andrea Domanick
Broadcast Editor: Zeke Reed
Executive Producer: Ariana Morgenstern
Producers: Anna Chang and Liv Surnow
Digital Producer: Marion Hodges
Lighting Design: Jason Groman
Art Director: Evan Solano