Bido Lito! Issue 56 | Page 5

Bido Lito! June 2015 5 They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. For us the was something we felt we could explore.” Throughout the absence of OUTFIT since they packed away their lengthilygestated debut LP Performance in early 2014 made us eager to hear its follow-up. For the band, absence has been more acute in the intervening months, and somewhat defining to the blueprint of new record Slowness. Parted by motorways and split between oceans, Outfit’s latest album has been written through the lens of separation and distance. Periods apart from the each other, from friends and from loved ones, all feed into an album that deals in much more personal material than their previous releases, and the resulting album is certainly their most coherent and intimate work to date. Written with the band living across Liverpool, London and Brooklyn, Slowness is an album borne of late-night Skype calls, long-distance relationships and perpetual struggles with online identities. “Going into the album there was definitely a sense there were things we wanted to do differently,” vocalist Andrew Hunt tells me from his New York home. “We wanted to compose a whole album arc and have something that felt like a singular piece.” Though writing for the album began almost immediately after touring their debut LP Performance, the album wasn't really fleshed out until one solid session across three months, with all the band together in Liverpool. “We really thought we'd finished it after that process,” says Andrew, “but coming back to it after a few months we realised that we hadn't really finished at all. To begin with it was this very focused process, but as time went on it became gradually more fragmented.” Even while separated, the band were determined that the album be written and recorded with them together as a group, thus avoiding the temptation to work remotely. “If we're going to bother being in a band together, which is quite difficult at the moment, we should be in a band together. Make it worthwhile,” he explains. This commitment to writing as a band is perhaps what allows the album to retain a satisfying continuity throughout. Slowness is propelled by pulsing synths, stuttering samples and heavily-effected guitars and though the results are at times otherworldly, the sounds and feelings are unmistakably human. The narrower sound palette for the album too definitely gives it this sense of cohesion. "We really tried to limit ourselves on the equipment we used,” says Andrew. “We had some strict ground rules when we went in. I was going to play just the piano, Nick [Hunt] was going to play guitar and Tom [Gorton] was going to play one keyboard and just the drum kit with only a couple of samples. We really just wanted to move towards this live band feel.” The title of the album is a reference to the novel by Milan Kundera in which the ostensibly disparate narratives of people separated by time and space are interwoven to tell an overarching story. Likewise, the album threads together the snapshots of different experiences to form a larger work unified by its themes. “We wanted to get away from all our ideas being encased within a pop song and do something where we could stretch it out a bit more,” says Andrew. “We didn't really feel like we had anything to lose, so it album, songs touch on similar themes of isolation, crossed communication and, particularly on track Genderless, sexuality in contemporary life. Though the internet was not used directly in the writing process, the experiences of living on it and maintaining relationships through it have certainly left an indelible mark on the album. “There's a discussion around physicality and bodies, and the presence of these bodies online,” explains Andrew. “These ideas, coupled with the experience I was having of being away from m 䁱