"Throughout this album there was a lot of personal growth" - Rob Costello gives us the lowdown on the new Sounds of System Breakdown album

Sounds of System Breakdown are an Irish dance pop group that began "as a response to passive, head-in-laptop electronica - an attempt to bring live instruments to bear on the flow and structure of dance music."

Now based in the London suburb of Catford, frontman for the trio alongside Ed Costello and Richy Kelly, Rob Costello tells Hot Press about their long awaited new record Desperate Creatures, the creative process behind their songs and his anticipation of playing live again.

How long have you been living in London for?

I've been here about 10 years now. Some of the band are still in Ireland but we're still keeping this thing going.

I noticed it was your first album in a while, what was the writing process for this one like?

I'm the primary songwriter on it. Usually, I come up with some ideas, a verse, a chorus or something like that and then send it over to the guys and get their feedback on it. Ed, my brother who's the drummer, takes it away and works out the drum parts and records them. He's also a sound engineer as well, which is great because he can send me pre-mixed parts. Richy then adds some extra bass and vocals. We sent these ideas backwards and forwards to each other over Facebook Messenger for a while and it all came together.

How do you find that experience of writing and collaborating digitally?

I quite like it. Personally, I like to do all of the weird embarrassing things on my own in the studio. If I'm playing around with falsetto vocals, I don't necessarily want there to be people in the room with me. I probably look like a bit of a dork. It's nice having that slow personal time to work these things out and then share it later to get feedback.

It allows me to have a bit more self examination on what I'm doing - starting an idea and then coming back to it the next day and then deciding whether it's worth sharing or if it's one for the outtakes bin. I like that idea of slowly building up a body of work to then sharing it with the guys because it means we're not going off on mad tangents. I felt like with this album, this process has kept us on a focused path and on what type of music that we want to create.

I really enjoyed the song 'Grand', what was the genesis behind that one?

My studio is in the centre of Catford, a fairly built up suburb of Southeast London, just above the Catford Broadway [theatre] on the main street and there's always lots of different stuff going on outside my window.

You never quite know what's going to happen from day to day. There's a record shop that sells lots of dancehall music, there's conversations going on in the street and also lots preachers there. You'll hear preachers mentioned on the track.

It was a mixture of these little vignettes mixed with whatever was going on in my own head at the time.

Another song I was wondering about was 'Rust'. It's more of a slower paced number.

A lot what ended up on the album stemmed from demos. Usually, bands make a demo and then they go to a recording studio where they do the whole thing over again. With Sounds of System Breakdown, it's never really been like that.

Those first couple of lines, they were just an idea but we decided to keep them in because it was an interesting contrast with the rest of the song. 'Rust' was one of those ones where at first it was just a little idea, but it was one that I felt gave more context to the album and brought something a little different.

Throughout this record there was a lot of personal growth and 'Rust' reflects that. It's very 'demoy'. It was recorded in the living room of my shared house at the time on a cheap acoustic guitar and just a few synths. I might have even used my Macbook's microphone for it.

The song is also a part of the DIY ethos of what we do, where things don't have to be of a certain audio quality - they can be lo-fi or half constructed.

You and the band have talked before about how your intention with the project is to make dance music, but with conventional, 'real' instruments. Is this still part of your mission statement?

Well that's where the idea for the band began. It's always great to have those kind of starting points, but you don't necessarily need to stick with them.

Obviously, we've got synths and drum machines, so it's not always about live instruments especially in our recorded work.

But we've always tried to think about how we could play songs live when we record them - how can we construct a song that can then be played by the three of us in a live situation where we're not relying too much on a backing track?

That forces us to keep things minimal and not to focus too much on fancy production techniques. It's to keep things simple enough so that we can say, "We can play all of the songs on the album and make it a good live show," and knowing that is a really important part of how we write and record music.

Do you have any live shows coming up?

We're still kind of regrouping post- COVID. The next shows we're probably going to be doing will be in London and then hopefully we'll get home in Ireland together in the Summer or Autumn to do some more.

We're in a place at the moment where we're focusing more on recording and other projects that we can do while we work and raise children, but definitely with a view to getting back to rehearsing and playing live again very soon.

What songs are you most excited to playing live again?

'Paige' and actually, it's one that I don't know whether we have ever played live not, but it's certainly something we've really enjoyed playing a number of times in rehearsals. Another one that we have played a lot live before we recorded it properly, is 'If You Feel Love'. That break-down towards the end where we get to rock out for a bit - that's always a lot of fun.

Desperate Creatures from Sounds of System Breakdown is out now.