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