Delorentos: On reinvention, leaving a legacy, and their fantastic new album True Surrender

“In twenty years’ time, when we’re all in our fifties and all fat, this will be the album that we’ll be doing the legacy tour with.”

Kieran McGuinness, guitarist and vocalist with Delorentos, is talking to Hot Press in the upstairs dressing room in Whelan’s. Bassist Níal Conlan is sitting beside him, nodding at his words in plain agreement, as if his fellow band member had just stated what time it was, or told everyone the date (4.30pm on April 13 – if you’re asking).

Such is Delorentos’ love for their new album, it’s not a matter of speculating about this type of thing. They’ve speculated long enough about it, and written two albums’ worth of material along the way. They’re absolutely certain that they’ve now arrived at a winner.

And why shouldn’t they? True Surrender is most certainly their best album to date. Brimming, and sometimes bursting, with expertly-layered synth, sparring harmonies and some of their most rousing choruses to date, you’re absolutely hooked from the introductory song, ‘Stormy Weather’. Synthetic beats take precedence over guitar hooks, although when the guitars do finally take centre stage – on album closer ‘Just Like Everybody Else’ – the results are exquisite. The album is a stunningly original achievement.

But that achievement wasn’t a sure thing by any means. Much has happened between this record and 2014’s Night Becomes Light.

“You can never tell what happens after an album,” says Níal, shaking his head. “There’s always been something peculiar that happens after anything we do. With Night Becomes Light, we happened to play a very ordinary show that some Mexico blogger was at. He really liked our stuff and started playing our songs in his videos, then from that, next thing we know we’re sending bucketloads of t-shirts out to Mexico. We ended up going there twice in one year.”

This, coupled with a lengthy tour, led to a sense of geographical and musical dislocation for the band. When they initially went back to the drawing board to plan for Album No. 5, they did so without any idea how they were going to make it – a crucial factor for a group who’ve always prided themselves on their originality.

“I suppose with Night Becomes Light, we had an idea to start writing as soon as possible for the next one,” Níal continues. “We basically recorded an album in Spain and threw it all away again. We had a week off from touring and stayed at this winery in the Spanish countryside with a studio in it, and wrote so many songs that we thought we could base an album off it.

“But actually, we decided that it wasn’t quite different enough from what we’d done before,” he stresses. “One thing that we can say as a band is that we’ve always evolved with every album. We’ve always made music in new ways. So when we listened to what we’d made and decided it wasn’t new… Ah, we just had to have the guts to throw it away.”

Guts indeed. The band were effectively turning down a quick payday in search of something higher.

“There was an element of – with the likes of Universal or the labels – they wanted to hear new tunes, and we could’ve just gone down that route of releasing the songs we had, but I’m really glad we didn’t. We turned ourselves inside out for this, and that’s what it takes to make a good album.”

The band carried over only one song from those original recording sessions, ‘In Darkness We Feel Our Way’, for True Surrender. Not only had they decided that this first batch of songs wasn’t “new” enough, they also decided that they didn’t really reflect the band’s more grown-up sensibilities.

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“I guess it was almost accidental,” says Kieran, “but the songs we wrote to replace the original ‘vineyard songs’ were about the emergence of us into ‘responsible adulthood’. Like, since the writing of the last album, three of us have gotten married, three children have been born.

“So taking all that into account, you’re in a very different headspace to where you were writing the last album. The songs dealt with the anxiety, fear, joy and newness of it. It’s about the impending change in all of us – of becoming adults. And then when that change starts to happen, the development of the music starts to change with it. Every song that Ró was writing – there was a sense of him beginning to understand the fear and unknowable nature of the future. And I was writing songs about that as well. And so was Ross. So it was almost by accident, but it all made so much sense to each person.”

Another thing that made absolute sense for Delorentos was teaming up with Richie Egan (Jape) and Tommy McLaughlin (Villagers) to produce the album.

“Richie and Tommy gave us the confidence to go down routes that we wouldn’t normally have taken,” says Níal. “Tommy’s studio is this beautiful place in Donegal. And he’s been touring for so long, picking up pieces of kit from all over the world, that it’s like a playground. And we had a different approach to this album compared with any other album. It was like a blank slate. We also spent so much time away from each other – instead of banging out guitar music in a room – that we gave ourselves more space to experiment. It stands on its own because it sounds different to what we’ve done before. Which is sort of our job. We want to leave behind a legacy of great music. And part of the reason why it’s so difficult is because you end up questioning everything, every little detail.”

“True surrender”, for them, might have come from their desire to submit fully to their own creative instincts, rather than look for confirmation from outside producers or musicians.

“We’ve worked with producers before and they’ve all taught us a lot,” says Kieran, “but one thing about them was that we would maybe turn to them with something we’d done and say ‘Is this good?’ Then they’d say ‘Yep, that’s good’ and we’d say to each other, ‘OK, excellent’.

“But with this album, that wasn’t there. We had Tommy, who was our collaborator/producer, then Richie, then Emily Rose doing backing vocals, but we weren’t turning to anyone else for answers. We were turning to each other and it meant that we had to take chances. And what’s more important is that sometimes there weren’t answers for what we were doing. We didn’t have all the answers – and that’s reflected in the music. Sometimes these songs don’t have resolutions.”

“There’s a really good example of that on the album,” Níal picks up. “There’s a song that Kieran had written and Rowan and Kieran had arranged together called ‘Deep In The Heart Of Love’. They brought it to us and we completely changed it. Put on crazy effects. Changed the timing, pitched up the vocals. But what we did was work through it and create something that the four of us wouldn’t have done on our own, and as a result it’s one of the best songs on the album.”

“And it was hard for me,” Kieran explains. “It was hard because Ro and I were like, ‘This is a good song’. But we’ve done enough good songs on our last couple of albums. We wanted a great song. So as a band we deconstructed it and built it back up again, in a way we never would’ve done in the past, and now it’s better than it would’ve been.”

Time and money failed to put them up against the wall, and the band were never pushed by whatever anyone else in the Irish music world was doing. “We’ve always been on the fringes of every scene,” laughs Kieran. “That helped us do things differently. That idiosyncrasy is one of the good things about this band. I like the fact that we might try something a professionally trained guitarist or pianist would say you can’t do. Why can’t you? Those kinds of barriers that come with being a specialist or a professional, those are the kinds of things which make us want to innovate.”

Innovation and originality are one thing, but did the reality of having to make money ever kick in during the writing?

“You don’t start a band to make money,” Níal says straightforwardly.

“These are boy’s dreams,” Kieran expands. “You write the songs, okay? You put everything into the songs. Then you try to make sense of how you’re going to live your life afterwards. If you want to get deeper into it, it’s about testing yourself and getting the reward. That’s what would keep us doing this even if we were playing to under 50 people. I think we’d be doing this even if we weren’t playing any gigs at all.”

I’m absolutely convinced that this is the case. A few hours later, the band play in an intimate venue which can barely contain the sheer size of True Surrender once every fabric of the album is woven together.

Delorentos, whatever else is said about them, are a band that make you love music. They’re one of the few groups out there who you could imagine sidelining an album’s worth of songs in the fashion that they did and know – without even having to look at what they left on the cutting room floor – that it was absolutely the right thing to do. Anyone lucky enough to catch them on the festival circuit this summer is in for a serious treat.
True Surrender is out now. Delorentos will play at Sea Sessions and Indiependence this summer.