Deceiving You, Loud And Clear

Over the last decade, Liars have loitered menacingly in the margins, constantly reinventing their dark, mysterious sound and freaking everyone out with paranoid tales of witches and weirdos. Now, on the occasion of their sixth album WIXIW, the trio have decided to scare themselves instead. “You would think it would get easier the more records you do, but if anything I find it gets harder,” admits frontman Angus Andrew. “With this record, it wasn’t easy. I think it speaks a lot about doubt and fear and anxiety.”

Those traits have been constants throughout the band’s history – most explicitly on their second album They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (2003) a truly weird, abrasive record written about German witch trials. They were also a feature of their last outing, 2010’s Sisterworld, which lifted the log of their adopted town Los Angeles to reveal the dark underworld scuttling beneath. This time, rather than exposing the fears of others, the band have changed tack and shone their flashlights on themselves.
“Usually we come up with this subject matter to study,” says Andrew, “and in a way I feel we project feelings onto these ideas so it’s not necessarily a direct relation of what we’re feeling inside. This record is the first time we really left that space blank and allowed the lyrics and the idea to be informed by personal feelings. I found it frightening.”
A new working method was adopted. Rather than writing songs individually and bringing them together at the end, Andrew and co-songwriter Aaron Hermphill – plus third member Julian Gross – holed up together in a wood cabin, deep in the Californian countryside, to thrash out the record as one. It turned out to be an uncomfortable experience, but it has resulted in the most cohesive project of the band’s career.
“This idea of collaborating more is pretty frightening,” Andrew admits. “In the past, we’ve felt more comfortable developing ideas to their furthest extent when we’re on our own, and then being able to establish the confidence to bring it to the other members of the band. In this scenario, it wasn’t like that. It was like, ‘I’ve got this idea and I’m not so sure about it’, and you open yourself up to criticism – which is not easy to deal with.”
WIXIW is not the first Liars record to be suffused with a clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere, Angus Andrew intoning menacingly over the top. However, the rough edges have been sanded down, with pounding drums replaced by programmed beats, and distorted guitars by icy synths. They have made a genuinely electronic record that locates the band in the company of Mute labelmates past and present: Moby, Fad Gadget and especially Depeche Mode. It doesn’t sound like anyone but Liars though. WIXIW definitely represents evolution over revolution. It wasn’t an easy transition to make.
“We took on this whole new world of electronic-based computer music, and that’s pretty frightening,” Angus proffers. “You think you can write a song. Actually you’ve got to read a manual for a long time. And this is a whole genre of music that a lot of people know more about than we do.”
Angus admits the band are novices in the field, and so they enlisted label boss Daniel Miller as co-producer.
“He’s an electronic pioneer and a guru in that world. It was important to have his opinion,” Andrew resumes. “I want to know if I’m stepping into someone else’s shoes, so it was really great to play stuff to Daniel early on and see if he was like, ‘Ooh, I don’t know – that’s Daft Punk’s kick drum!’ or whatever.”
Fear of collaboration, fear of feelings, fear of drum machine presets… The last couple of years may have been traumatic for Liars, but WIXIW is just reward. Long may the fear reign.

WIXIW is out now on Mute Records.