An interview with bdrmm

Jordan Smith talks about the band's transformative third album, 'Microtonic', avoiding the shoegaze tag, why being from Hull is good for them, and what it's like to have Mogwai as your boss.

One of the albums I associate with most when I think back to 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was changing everything, is the debut album by Hull (UK not QC) band bdrmm. Simply titled bedroom, it felt like an album fans of UK indie music had long waited for: an exciting new guitar band that chose delay, chorus, reverb and flanger pedals over straight up riffs, echoing the best moments of their (assumed) influences like Radiohead, Ride and DIIV.

After spending their first few years morphing from vocalist/guitarist Ryan Smith’s bedroom project (where the name comes from) into a full band - now Jordan Smith, Joe Vickers and Conor Murray - bedroom sure felt like newcomers that were arriving confident and developed. With Sonic Cathedral as their label, bdrmm were at the forefront of a possible shoegaze revival. They definitely had the album to initiate one. But then something happened. When they returned as a four-piece three years later with their second album, I Don’t Know, released by Mogwai’s Rock Action label, bdrmm let it be known that they weren’t interested in being called shoegaze at all - just as shoegaze was undergoing a full-on revival. Instead, the album revealed a band that was still developing, one that was far more ambitious and complex than their debut inferred. While they hadn’t fully ceased shoegazing, their interest in expanding their music beyond guitar noise was immediately noticeable, integrating more electronic programming into their songwriting.

Not to get too Radiohead with the analogies, but if bedroom was The Bends and I Don’t Know was OK Computer, the band’s third album, Microtonic, could easily be construed as their Kid A. Just like how Radiohead shocked their fans by “going electronic” in 2000 with an album that expressed anxieties and existential fear of what was to come from the Y2K era, bdrmm are facing similar struggles in their own current day dystopia. From the first track alone, “Goit,” they jump right into it, with guest vocalist Syd Minsky-Sargeant of Working Man’s Club reflecting on his consternation over a droning crescendo, singing, “Mortality, spasms, terror, death… there’s nothing left.”

As Microtonic unfolds it becomes clear that bdrmm were never planning to make music that anyone could forecast. With the exception of Ryan Smith’s voice, there is very minimal linearity to the band’s prior shoegaze era. The guitars are now mostly blending in with the synthesizers to produce rippling, ambient textures that suggest their steady diet while making this album consisted of the Warp and Mute catalogues. Thrusting tracks like “Snares” and “John on the Ceiling” balance chiming synth lines with 4/4 garage (that’s UK gare-edge, not Sonics-style gah-raage) kick patterns fit for a sketchy warehouse rave. It’s not all directed to the dance floor, however, the ambient rock of “In the Electric Field” (featuring Olivesque of Nightbus) recalls moments from Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest, and the ‘gazey “Infinity Peaking” indicate the tendencies to play like a rock band have not been completely vanquished.

I’m not gonna lie: the first time I heard Microtonic I wasn’t quite sure what to think and I immediately pined for bdrmm’s debut, which was back in the public’s consciousness thanks to a long overdue vinyl repress and a one-off performance of the album in full for Sonic Cathedral’s 20th anniversary. But the more I listened to Microtonic, the more I began to appreciate and understand the band’s metamorphosis and why they weren’t content to remain just a “shoegaze” act. And we’re better off for it, because right now we have so many of those acts at our disposal, but there’s only one bdrmm.

When I discovered your band back in 2020, you were considered this fresh new face of the shoegaze scene. What led you to move on from that sound?

Jordan Smith: It's a weird one really. Looking back, I think as a band we were had not really realized what we were as a band at the beginning. We had lots of different interests and ideas early on, even before we started releasing the singles that you hear now. There were two EPs before that [2016’s CRIKE and 2017’s Yucky] and the style was very different. Then it was more akin to a band like Homeshake, like R&B-pop, that sort of vibe. That was just the music that Ryan was writing at that time. It was our love of atmosphere and texture that was an overriding force and informed the first record. I remember I’d listened to Slowdive for the first time, and then I showed Ryan and he became completely enamoured with that sound. We both loved Pygmalion first, like that was the first record of theirs that we loved, and then obviously following that we got into the self-titled record when that came out in 2017.

But yeah, it's a strange one. Really it was our relationship with Sonic Cathedral that gave us the shoegaze tag. When we signed with Nat [Cramp] after we released the single “C: U,” which was sort of the first tune that we were doing at the time that you could say was shoegaze, because the singles we'd done before that were pretty different. I think it was just the people that we ventured towards early in our career, and then people just labeled us that. We would never have said, “Oh we are a shoegaze band.” We always said to each other that we don't really know what we are as a band, and it's only more recently on the second and third records where we had time to grow, both as people and as musicians.

We were figuring out what we wanted to achieve with the band long-term, where we sit in this realm, where it's a bit more electronic but does have these elements of shoegaze. The love of atmosphere and texture you hear in shoegaze but also can see in electronic music, I think that's where we sit at the moment, where we feel most comfortable.

It's funny because that first album of yours was ahead of the curve and now shoegaze is one of the biggest trends happening in indie music. I interviewed Nat Cramp of Sonic Cathedral last year, and we discussed the label’s 20th anniversary. One of the gigs he organized was bdrmm performing the first album, bedroom, in its entirety. Having moved on from the sound of that album and with Microtonic complete and ready to go, what was it like revisiting Bedroom?

Yeah, it was interesting and very strange because obviously bedroom was a lockdown record. It came out in the summer of 2020 when we couldn't tour, so we were all saying to each other how nice it was to play that gig. It was nice to spend some time with that album because it felt like we were given it as flowers in a way because it never felt like we got the time to perform it live. Obviously, we’ve played a lot of the songs in our set after COVID, but we were already considering the second record and interested in electronic music, which was already seeping into our sound during that point. So I don't think we ever actually got to be able to do the full album properly with two guitars, a bass and some drums, before we introduced synths into our set up. It was really nice to take a step back - especially considering how electronic the new record is to play live - and forget about computers for a little bit. Just getting back to playing guitars felt really special.

Did the band have to rehearse a lot to play that one gig?

Not really. There were the songs that we play a lot, like I don't think we’ve ever done a show and not played “Happy,” so that's a song that we don't even have to practice. But stuff like “Momo,” we didn't really play that much, same with “(The Silence),” which we had never figured out how to do live. That song was more of a studio experiment that we did at the time, and it was mainly Alex and Ryan that recorded it. We didn't even play it after we finished the record. We were like, “Well, how the hell are we going to do this live?” Because it does this big descending pitch shift where the whole arrangement descends at once, and we just couldn't figure out how to do it live. So having taken the time to become more in tune with the instruments that we play and also spend a lot of time in the studio and out of the studio figuring out how to get sounds right. And it was really nice to put a new spin on the old record, even though it did sound exactly like how it does on the record. It was nice to figure out those moments and do it properly, rather than just miss out on it entirely like we did when we were younger.

In your bio, you say, “I think we've gone from people saying that we sound like other bands to hopefully people saying: this is what bdrmm sound like. It’s a true expression of who we are.” How important was it to reach a point where people weren’t comparing you to other bands because you had found a sound of your own?

Absolutely important. As a musician, I found that when we first started out it's so incredible to be compared to bands that you really love. Like I just always thought if you get compared to Radiohead, that's just a good thing. But I think there's a time where as musicians we all start to think, “I don’t want us to sound like this band or that band.” It's much more important for us to take on our own identity, regardless of our contemporaries and peers, no matter how much we love them and are influenced by them. I think it was much more important for us to think about what we want to say as musicians, not regurgitate as musicians.

“John on the Ceiling” is one of your oldest songs. How much influence did having that song lying around have on dictating the sound of the album?

Yeah, it's one of those songs that's been knocking about for years. I wrote it when I was 18, so that was even before the first album was recorded and it sat around for a long time. It was in early demo form but a lot of the stuff on the new record is music that we have been working on in the background for years. There are so many demos that myself, Ryan and Joe have created, and Conor as well, but it's just a completely different sound to what bdrmm is. I think we got to a certain point after we did the second record where we started to take a bit of a departure from the first record’s sound. I think there are still moments on that record that could have easily fit onto the first record, and us having that sort of public reaction to the second record, people really enjoying the differences of the two records really encouraged us to explore the music that we had lying around that we sort of wouldn't have considered for bdrmm before.

“John on the Ceiling” was one of those tunes where it was like, “Well, maybe this is a bdrmm song. If we get Ryan to sing, Conor to add some drums and Joe gets some guitar going over it…” And the that was the first single that we recorded off the album, and it's sort of set a precedent for the way that we thought about the rest of the record. Having these polarizing sounds that we maybe considered not to be bdrmm could be bdrmm. I think that was really important for us in order to trust that we could draw from every facet of our musical love, rather than trying to fit into a specific genre. I don't think that's anything we ever set out to do when we create music.

There are still guitars on Microtonic, but they aren’t quite as obvious than the other two albums. How has the band’s relationship with the guitar changed with this album?

I think it's one of those things where Ryan writes a lot of the hooky lines that you hear, but Joe is a lot more of a textural guitarist. His love of pedals is sort of evident in the fucking size of his pedal board. It's ridiculous. Just the way he approaches the sound on his guitar, it isn't too dissimilar to how I would approach synthesizers. There's a lot more dialing the reverb up to 11, but then putting it through the Granulator to bring this world of synthesis that we're trying to create with synthesizers, but in a more analogue-sounding way, rather than digital. Bringing these elements of textures through melody and through pedals, rather than just jamming through the same four chords. I think it's something that he takes a lot of pride in, like weaving his way into the tunes rather than coming up with something that we base around the full tune.

I think people's idea or understanding of what a guitar can do in music is very limited compared to what a musician thinks they can do. One of the things I always think about is In Rainbows, hearing it for the first time and not really knowing anything theoretical about music. You hear this music where anything could be making those sounds. Those are the best times of music, where you completely forget the process and you’re transfixed by what you're hearing, rather than how we think it was made.

I read that Daniel Avery played a part in how you evolved your sound. What exactly did you see from him that helped you push yourselves as musicians?

We supported him when he played a place called HERE in London, which is quite a new venue. It was so strange because I feel like the worlds of electronic music and traditional bands are quite separate sometimes, and when we went to Field Day, it was such an inspiring thing to see those worlds fully cross. Meeting Daniel and seeing him work and play live, it it just made the whole process feel achievable because we'd seen it firsthand. We were spending time with a person that we were really inspired by and we really appreciated his work as a musician. But also just being able to peak behind the curtain and see what was happening on stage and seeing how the fuck he makes those sounds, and then applying that to what we do now was really helpful. To see those blueprints from an artist that you admire, it can really benefit you as a musician.

How have you found trying to adapt what you did in the studio for playing live on stage?

It's been a big learning curve. I’m not gonna lie. At the beginning of January we were very stressed because this feels like such a mountain to climb in terms of how we're gonna figure it out. It's just it's one of those things you just have to break down, bit by bit, especially with the way that we write music. The way that we go into the studio is sometimes with half-arranged or half-formed ideas, and then we start working in the studio rather than go to a practice room, to hammer it out. It's definitely a case of working backwards to figure out how to do it. With the introduction of samples, it's been really crucial to figuring out how to how to make this sound live, but also how to make it look interesting live. I think that's something that we've all been very apprehensive about.

I didn’t want to fucking play with a backing track, it feels like cheating. I think it was when we played with Mogwai, when we saw how they played and knowing that they had a backing track, just seeing the way they were set up made it okay. As for practicing for the record, it has been quite an eye-opening experience really, because Conor especially has had to take on quite a new role. In a song like “Snares,” which just doesn't have live kit on at all, it's all drum sequences. So we've had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how we can get him on a sampler and make that look interesting.

There has been a lot of deliberation and a lot of chin scratching, but yeah, it's come together really nicely. I think we have figured out how to play the record, and now we're just practicing a set alongside the old music. It is so beautiful to see how nicely it sits in the lineage of the music that we have created. I was always quite worried that it would feel quite jarring, that there would be these moments that were really electronic and these moments that are more band-based, but it's such a nice juxtaposition. I think it's sort of a testament to who we are as musicians and what we love. We have that electronic side, but we do like to make a ridiculous amount of noise.

You’ve said the theme of the record is kind of dystopian and that the COVID lockdown really changed your lives. Is it hard to write music that isn’t dystopian?

Yeah, absolutely. There's this interview that Chris Morris did on Channel Four about the death of satire and this idea that something like Brass Eye couldn't exist in the modern world because it's so far out, but now you could turn on the actual news and it'd be just like an episode of Brass Eye. Life is just becoming more and more Brass Eye every day now. And I think Ryan would completely agree with me about this as well. It's so hard to sit down and actually think, “Right, I'm going to write a happy song” because there's just so much you know strife in the world at the moment. Unfortunately I think that's just what comes out sometimes when you're thinking and feeling so much all the time. And I think we are quite jovial people!

Having the guys in Mogwai as your label bosses must be kinda cool. What is it like having them run your label, Rock Action? Do they give you any input or advice?

The direct input actually came before we were signed with them. We talked with them in 2022 and that's when they said, “You should come sign with our label and release the second record with us.” And we thought, “Yeah, right.” And then, you know, we actually thought, “Fucking hell, they are actually offering us this. They weren’t taking the piss?” I could go on so much about how incredible they are as people, but I think their actions and their role in the music industry speaks for itself. They're so highly regarded as musicians because of the care and attention to the way they operate on and off the stage. It’s just so unbelievably admirable and they gave us that sort of big brother role of showing us what we were doing right at a specific time to help grow the band. I think all four of us had started sleepwalking with regards to management and stuff like that, and they took us aside and told us about the things that have been so instrumental to them being successful.

At the end of the day, they're the guys in charge and I think that was really helpful to us, to sort of reclaim the idea that this is our band and it is important for us to have a deciding role in absolutely everything from the top down - from management to what the T-shirts look like, and who publishes the music. And also I think it made us reclaim our sound a bit, in terms of what we wanted to sound like. I think especially after the first record we were struggling with what we wanted to sound like and they gave us confidence and backed us. I think they’re musicians very similar to us, in terms of being from a city – us from Hull, them from Glasgow - where music isn't necessarily regarded as highly as other cities. I think having a band that has become synonymous with a city the way they are has been really helpful to us in growing as artists as well as musicians.

I can’t think of many bands from Hull to be honest, aside from Everything But The Girl, The Housemartins and The Beautiful South.

Yeah, Housemartins and there's band called Fila Brazillia, an electronic act that was bigger in the ‘90s. But yeah, I can't really think of anyone else. It's quite nice though because it’s like having a blank canvas. I think that's been so helpful to us in changing our sound or choosing a sound and then moving on from. I was talking to my friend and he was saying that Hull compared to other English cities like Manchester, which has this defining sound of Oasis and Stone Roses, whereas Hull we’re not so indebted to anything like that. I don't think we're ever gonna want to stop thinking or making new ideas, and I think that is directly related to the place that we are from.

I've just finished a 12-hour shift of work, cooking loads of people food, so waxing lyrical about music is a very nice change. Hopefully I was coherent!