Psych No More: The Return of TOY

TOY are the type of band that inspire their critics and fans to conjure up perpetual comparisons. There are so many different layers to the Brighton band's music that it becomes a fascinating game to sit and try to pinpoint what they were obviously listening to when they wrote an arpeggio, bridge, or melody. But if you think you've hit the nail on the head with one of your evaluations, well, you're probably way off. "Yeah, people don't get it right very often," says bassist/guitarist Maxim "Panda" Barron with a laugh.

It doesn't help that the bio for the band's third album, Clear Shot, is rife with them: The Byrds, Captain Beefheart, The Beach Boys, Pale Saints, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and The Stranglers doing Dionne Warwick, to name some of the many. But even more than the comparisons to artists it's being labeled one thing that bothers them the most. "I think it's more genres than to other bands," Panda explains. "Generally it's psychedelic. But we listen to a lot of different music. I think most bands that are called psychedelic don't want to be called psychedelic. It's very confusing. We don't really compare ourselves to anything. We all have wide tastes and all of it gets thrown into the songwriting process. I think most bands do that. Tame Impala is a good example. There are a lot of different elements to the music. But it's great when people don't try and make comparisons, so we don't get pigeonholed into whatever."

Comparison makers might find Clear Shot a little harder to classify than its predecessors. The best way to look at it is an amorphous rock 'n' roll album in the same tradition as—watch out, comparison coming up—My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Clear Shot likes to baffle the listener by using novel recording techniques to produce some truly otherworldly melodic sounds. There are a few reasons for this newly broken ground. The band recorded the album fresh off last year's collaboration with Bat For Lashes' Natasha Khan as Sexwitch, and did so in the kind of nocturnal setting they weren't able to create previously.

Noisey called up Panda to talk about how switching producers allowed them to discover a new side to their music, why they couldn't stick to their album-a-year plan, and how it's not so easy to sound like Prince.

Noisey: The first thing I want to ask you about is the album cover. It looks like it was specifically designed for cassette. Is that an accurate assumption?
Panda: That's very perceptive, actually. The inspiration for it came from a Chris & Cosey cassette, a weird bootleg with a couple of songs on it. I can't remember which one. Originally we got someone to give us some ideas, and a lot of them were from industrial artists from the 70s and 80s, and we just love that sort of DIY design. We didn't end up using what they gave us, and designed the cover ourselves to make it look like some DIY cassette cover.

So this album took three years. Originally the band said that you were going to release an album annually? What happened with 2014?
Well, we toured the second record, Join the Dots, for two years. We were also building a studio and trying to start work on the third record. There was just a lot going on, really. Things happened personally too. Dom and Alejandro were together for a number of years and then split up last year, and then she left the band. So that affected it also. So yeah, people wanted us to tour for two years instead of making another record the next year. A lot of people hadn't heard our second record too, so we wanted to go out and play it for them.

I guess once you get into writing, recording and touring, releasing an album annually just becomes impossible.
Yeah, it's tricky. Saying that, I think you can do it. We just go together in November of last year and went into the studio together. We put the album together rather quickly. Sometimes it can happen.

You guys also recorded an album as Sexwitch with Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes), so I guess you can be forgiven.
Yeah, that took us a bit of time. We were doing that while we were writing this album. We did a few small gigs for that too. It was a fun project to do. We got on with Natasha really well. We met at a party at our old producer Dan Carey's house. We talked about just doing this track for a label Dan has called Speedy Wunderground. So we did this track where we recorded it, mixed it and finished it, then sent it off to be mastered the next day. So it was done in a couple of days, and then he put it on a compilation [Speedy Wunderground Year 1 Compilation] with a few different artists collaborating in a record amount of time. I think we liked the idea of doing this because sometimes we take ages to make a record.

So we did this track with her called "The Bride," and then enjoyed the process so much that we decided to get together again on a different night. We had been listening to some different types of music and put together six tracks. We had finished tracking and she just came in and laid down vocals over them. It was an interesting project.

And that song eventually led to her naming the album, The Bride?
We found that song, which is an Iranian song, and she took the idea and ran with it. [Laughs.] Originally it was just a track we collaborated on and covered for Dan's label though.

Dan Carey had produced the first two TOY records. Why switch to David Wrench for this new album?
I think we just wanted to try a different way to work. Dan has an amazing studio in his house, and he's really great, but we wanted to try a studio outside of London. And he's used to doing daytime sessions, so he ended them early because he has a family and gigs. If we wanted to go on into the night, he would try and recreate that in the day—so he'd close up the studio so it would seem like nighttime. I think that can really affect the way you make music, depending on what kind of atmosphere you're working with. Eve Studios is just outside of Manchester, and there's not a lot going on really. It was just us in this house, so we were able to stay up all night at this studio, not have any restrictions and make it ourselves, which was interesting. David worked late hours, so we got to be in a different environment in this weird old house with lots of great equipment and a loose schedule.

So you just like to sleep in late?
No. [Laughs.] I think it's just because we get going at nighttime. It takes a bit of time and coffee to create a mood at night.

You guys sound like nocturnal creatures.
For this record, definitely. But I think we are in general. It definitely works when it comes to recording sessions.

The album was recorded at your home and Dom's, which sounded like a crazy set-up according to the bio: "At Dom's, in something of an homage to the experiments of the Manson family, early Disney and Bowie's Beckenham Arts Lab, they routed cables through each room to a bank of recording equipment."
Yeah, basically the amount of equipment we had accumulated in the house meant that we could do a lot of the recording there in the house. Some of those home recordings are coming out on the EP, which is out the same day as the album, and we produced and mixed those ourselves at the two houses. It was quite cool doing it that way. We really enjoying doing that and might try it with the next stuff.

So why release that as an EP instead of making the album longer? Was it that much different from what you did with David?
It was too much material really. We'd made two double albums already, and with this one we wanted something that was more immediate—I wouldn't say punk-y—but just more of an immediate record. The EP is something we didn't expect when we first started doing it. We had 12 tracks for the record, and then we had another record's worth of material, so we suggested doing an EP as well. It kind of just came like another album without doing much work. And so the EP will come as a download with the record, and then there will also be a limited vinyl edition of the EP.

Chris Coady mixed the record. He has a pretty impressive résumé: Cold Cave, Beach House, TV On the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cass McCombs.
Yeah, David got pneumonia just after we finished. I don't know if we drove him to it with the late nights, but he got ill, so there was a little bit of time, and we eventually went to his house in Wales, but weren't sure about those mixes. I was listening to Beach House's Depression Cherry quite a bit, I really liked that, and we were told that Chris could do it at Sunset Sound in LA, plus we liked the records he had done. But this was very different and a bit difficult because the mixing process for the first two records we quite hands on, but this one was taken out of our hands. He did a great job, I think. And he really dug the record, so it was quite a fun process.

I read that he got his hands on some gear used by Prince on Purple Rain?
Yeah, he had the vocal processors that Prince used for effects on his voice and he used those on our voices to make it sound like Purple Rain. But it doesn't actually sound like Purple Rain. [Laughs.] He had loads of cool stuff.

Clear Shot is out on October 28 via Heavenly Recordings.

Cam Lindsay is a writer. He lives up in Canada. Follow him on Twitter.