Working 9 to 5: Hot Press meets Wild Beasts

Despite their moniker, UK indie rockers Wild Beasts obviously aren't serious party animals. Not all of the time, at least. When Tom Fleming, Hayden Thorpe, Ben Little and Chris Talbot began the writing sessions for their fifth album, they resolved to take a more orderly approach to their work. Most days the band arrived at their East London studio at 9am and clocked out at 5pm.

"Well, we did that where possible," Fleming recalls, speaking in that very same studio. "Put it this way, work/life balance is a phrase that makes me laugh every time I hear it because there is none for us. The war between who we are and what we do and the people around us is just completely all encompassing. So in the brief moment that we could, we wanted to have lives as well and live in a sane fashion because, for us, it's usually just not possible.

So in that sense, it was a case of going in and making sure that you did something every day, as opposed to going in there, sitting around all day and coming out with nothing. We had an attitude of "today, no matter how small it is, we're going to get something done". So that was how we approached it."

It's a working method that served them well. The follow-up to 2014's well-received Present Tense, the often intense, swaggering and testosterone-fuelled new album Boy King stands in stark sonic contrast to that more reflective, electro-influenced affair. Opener 'Big Cat' is a case in point - a dark and foreboding track with a strong sense of prowling aggression under the funky basslines and infectious lyrical hook, "Big cat, top of the food chain."

"Boy King is kind of our Sunset Strip record," he explains. "It's our rock 'n' roll record. It's something we've been thinking about a lot, the difficulty of gender performance and how men are expected to be strong and be hard and to have all these things to acquire, but essentially they're still like little children inside because you're never allowed to express yourself or talk about your weaknesses. A lot of the songs are swaggering performance pieces which suggest their opposites, the vulnerability underneath it. Also, we've been talking about it as a party record; we're very keen to shake off our clever image as it were."

While many of the songs are about sex, misogyny and modern masculinity, crass consumerism is also a theme. One of the stand-out tracks, the apocalyptic 'Get My Bang', was inspired by the orgy of naked commercialism that happens every Black Friday.

"Certainly there's that sense of gratification and greed," he says. "Greed and getting what you want at the expense of others is definitely a theme of the record and it plays into that immaturity. How adults are being vandalised by their desires and can't deal with the world."

With four successful albums already under their belt, was it difficult to keep the original creative urge alive?

"Well, I don't think so because we're not in the position where we can release any old thing and people will just buy it," he proffers. "Every record has to be better than the last, and every record has to offer something new. The band has changed, we've been through many guises. Even the line-up has changed. I joined the band as a bass-player and now I'm the guitar-player and co-vocalist, and now Hayden is the bassist. Certainly in Present Tense we really got involved in production. Now, we're back to the band set-up. We're more interested in making a racket this time round."

How do they write the songs?

"It usually starts with either with Hayden writing the verse and me writing the chorus, or we write lyrics for each other. The writing process is credited four ways - it's a band so it works four ways; it's not just Hayden and I. So even though songs begin with us they do pass through the filters, as it were, and while as a writer it can be frustrating because you don't get exactly what you want, it's much better for it because it belongs to a group."

Having spent the best part of a year writing the album, Wild Beasts flew to Dallas where they laid it down with producer John Congleton who has previously worked with the likes of Marilyn Manson, Blondie and St. Vincent.

"We had nothing to lose so we felt quite energised," he recalls. "Going over to America we knew we had to focus and do good. We went over there with a sense of togetherness and a single mind, which obviously you want to have on a record, but inevitably there can be clouds in the way so when it came together it was like a bright sunshine. We needed to go over there and just do it, not worry about it basically. It happened really quickly as a result. We had it mixed and recorded in three weeks. We were really meticulous and that's not the usual way of things for us."

The Wild Beasts' Picnic set will be one of their first gigs of 2016.

"Last year we took it easy. We did play shows, but only about 10, compared to our usual 130. So we had a bit of time to reflect. We've only played one show this year, in June. I can't wait to go back on tour. I get to live out my teenage fantasies every single night, truthfully. I feel like I live on stage, that I really leave something there.