6. West Coast
That’s a record that Jack [Bevan] from Foals had discovered when we were living in Oxford writing Total Life Forever and there were eight of us in one house: other musicians, no TV, just a record player in the fireplace. The house was falling apart and that record was the soundtrack to that whole period, 2009 to 2011. It was the record I felt envious of not having made. They did something that I felt I was close to being able to make but also superior, and it wasn’t what I’d made! I thought: "Shit, they got there first!"
It’s a strange record from a strange group because they seem underappreciated and under-exposed and never really play live. We ended up going to record in Gothenburg and we met Dan Lissvik on this industrial estate in the winter. He talked about how life is a pendulum and he sits above it; he was chain smoking and was a good guy.
The record itself though is somebody’s idea of West Coast hip-hop filtered through a suburban Swedish kid’s imagination. It is at odds with what Gothenburg is like in the winter. The production on it is amazing, with elements of interlocking guitars, but it’s freer and maybe it helped us loosen some of the strictness that was in the band at the beginning sonically.
