As regular readers will know, we’re enormous fans of New Young Pony Club here at the Quietus, including The Optimist in our top ten albums of 2010, putting them on live, and getting Ty Bulmer to write an excellent diary of life on the road with Katy Perry. Now, NYPC make their return into 2012 with a new single, ‘You Used To Be A Man’, a track that suggests they’ve lost none of their electronic pop nous. We’re chuffed to have the track and the video premiering above – the record is out on May 7th. We also dropped the band a line to find out more about what’s going on in the NYPC world in 2012. So! Hi NYPC, what have you been up to?
Ty Bulmer: Well we’ve been writing the third album since we finished touring The Optimist in 2011. It’s been an exciting process we certainly take a lot of the stuff that we’ve learned from writing the optimist and used it to hone our overall sound. We’ve been more productive than ever before with this album, more prolific and we’re very pleased. In addition to that we’ve also been touring in Europe and South America and playing lots of festivals throughout summer 2011. Since Christmas we’ve mainly been concentrating on the album but we do have our fingers in a lot of other creative pies. So we’ve been very busy.
Can you tell us about ‘You Used To Be A Man’?
TB: This track was written during the summer 2011 the bulk of the lyrics were written in South America and then we came back and added more instrumentation and production to the track when we returned. We’ve been crafting this track on and off for about six months but it still remains very pure and true to its original vision which is what we hoped to achieve.
Who used to be a man? What is he now?
TB: It’s about betrayal. A situation where trust is continually extended and destroyed to the detriment of that relationship and ultimately your view of that person. He’s not a man anymore in your eyes anymore. He’s a mole or a mote of dust or a hatstand or whatever.
Is the song indicative of your new material? How would you describe that?
TB: Our music has always been about trying to bring together our own creativity and sense of wonder about music making and all of our disparate influences and inspirations. I think our new material is very much a part of that journey. But the new material feels very confident, effortless if you like and that’s a wonderful feeling because making The Optimist was very emotional in contrast. ‘Used To Be A Man’ is indicative of our ongoing desire to challenge and excite ourselves. It’s wonderful to make a song and feel so satisfied with it. It’s why we make music to feel that excitement. We strive for that sense of rightness we have achieved with this track.
What’s the deal with the video, we hear it was done on a very expensive sculpture. Tell us more!
TB: Andy began collaborating on a personal project with a very talented artist called Laura Buckley in the early part of 2012. Through their collaboration Laura extended the possibility of creating a music video for one of our tracks within her installation which we were very pleased to be allowed to do. Laura directed and edited it with the help of an editor called Chris Beston. It is the only music promo ever to be made using this artwork.
