A lot is always made of how, with each record, Liars deliver something that’s totally unlike anything they’ve done before. Their new album, Drum’s Not Dead, is only their third, so it’s a point people shouldn’t get carried away with, but it’s still something worth celebrating. Their first, 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Mountain On Top, seemed a product of Brooklyn, where the band were living, as it was then. It’s a kind of punk funk thing, but it’s leagues more interesting than the music most other bands were producing, and it set their stall out as a band that had brave and sincere ambitions.
By the time the second album came around, the original rhythm section had been given the boot and Liars comprised of giant Aussie singer Angus Andrew, Aaron Hempill on guitar (originally from LA), and new member, drummer Julian Gross (also from LA). Angus had left New York City by then and moved to the New Jersey woods with his girlfriend of the time, Karen O of Yeah Yeahs Yeahs. The album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, was recorded there and it was spooky as hell: abrasive and sharp and drawn from, in the lyrics especially, the legend of the Brocken mountain witches in Germany. It was indeed nothing like their first album, and it was as shocking as it was exciting.
Drum’s Not Dead was recorded in Berlin, and it’s again a whole new experience for their fans. It’s a drum-led album, as the title suggests, but it also features songs that are more tender and introverted than anything Liars have released before. The different qualities of the album are given names: when it’s hard and vociferous, the song titles mention a character called Drum; when it’s lighter and more harmonious, Mt. Heart Attack emerges. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t, and it doesn’t really matter. Better to think of it as a record about atmospheres and emotions, and one that’s all-consuming and brilliant – suffocatingly-dark in places, but also full of hope and sweetness.
To accompany the music, a DVD featuring three different visual interpretations of the music (one by Angus, one by Julian, and one by German filmmaker Markus Wambsganss) is being sold with the record. They make for far more than just an extra incentive to cough up for the LP. There you see what you hear in the music: that Liars have got ideas in abundance. They’re a punk band like no other. If they carry on doing what they’re doing now, they’ll be remembered as one of this decade’s most original and best.

This album was recorded in Berlin. You moved there first, didn’t you, Angus?
Angus: That’s right. I went, then Julian moved over. Aaron was in LA, but came over to record.

Julian and Angus, are you going to stay in Berlin for a while longer?
Julian: I’m kind of in-between houses at the moment. I’m not sure what I’ll do.
Angus: We’re going on tour for a long time, so you don’t really need to live anywhere specific. Whether I stay in Europe will be determined by where we decide to make the next record. It’s possible that we might go to LA, but we’re not sure. It’s up in the air still.
Julian: I’m definitely feeling going back to the beach.

It seems that with your records, place is important. Your debut was very much a New York record, and specifically Brooklyn. Then you put out They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, which was a consequence of you, Angus, moving out to the New Jersey woods and finding a sound that suited that environment. And now Drum’s Not Dead – an album that, perhaps, evokes Berlin in some way. Would you agree?
Julian: This is a tricky one. I’m not sure that Berlin specifically played a huge part in the new record, other than it was cheap and there were great facilities for us to use. Aaron actually wrote a lot of the songs in Los Angeles and brought them over, although we expanded many of the ideas once we were in the studio, and we did that because of the studio we were using.
Angus: For me, Berlin was certainly a big creative influence. I moved from suburban New Jersey to this place that had been badly bombed not so long ago. The music I started making when I got there was very solitary, and it kind of fitted this ethereal kind of place that I was living in. It feels almost like an apocalypse in Berlin, and, in some ways, it’s a lonely wasteland. That resonated a lot with me. Parts of Berlin are like ruins. These were things that have never been part of my vernacular before. I’d never experienced living, or writing, in that kind of climate. Also, one of the main things that interested us about coming to Europe was the expansion of the EU. Suddenly, Estonia was open and it was just a couple of doors down. So moving there wasn’t only about Berlin – it was about being east and at a time when what being east meant was changing.

Were the videos you shot to accompany the music all filmed in the east?
Angus: Yes, apart from one section that we did in Brazil.
They provide an interesting context for the music. They help to place the songs, and they can’t help but affect the way you hear them. Did the idea to do the films come after the music, or was it a concurrent process?
Angus: We initially had some instrumental music that we’d made – noise basically – and we were thinking of releasing that. We thought that we would try and put something together with it to make it a bit more interesting. That idea then developed and got bigger and, as it did, so did the ideas for the music. So it became a process of trying to get them in-line with each other. Eventually we managed to finish the music and the films at about the same time.

Are you thinking of Drum’s Not Dead as a package in which the videos and the music are co-equal partners?
Angus: This whole idea of downloading and the death of the album is one thing that needs to be thought about. One thing we came up with was to invest more time and effort into producing something exciting that was more than a piece of music. So, yes, we do think of it as a package because we’re trying to give people a bit more for their money.

But isn’t that just record company bullshit? I’m sure some people who buy your album won’t even watch the films, and they would have bought the record regardless of whether there was a DVD included.
Angus: It’s the record companies that freak out first. They’re the ones that have been screaming about the problems of downloading for ages. It’s not really been an issue for us. We download music and we like to do that. You have to be careful because if you pay too much attention to what record labels says, you end up with bad ideas. It should be our job to work out how to make a record more interesting and, hopefully, that’s what we’ve done by including the films with the music. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t use all the mediums that are available to us, especially since making the films wasn’t very expensive and the package isn’t going to cost anymore than a regular LP.

It seems with Liars that you do a record, clean the slate, and then come up with something completely new. Is that a philosophy of the band?
Angus: We try and involve ourselves in the project as it is. With the Drowned record, it was very much an idea we had that we stuck to and, to be frank, when we finished it, we didn’t want to hear about another witch again. In that sense, we always want to move on and try something new.

There are two characters that feature, especially, in the titles of the songs on Drum’s Not Dead and they seem to represent different emotions. Drum is more commanding and primitive, and Mt. Heart Attack is more vulnerable and unsure. Is it crass to say you’ve come up with a kind of yin and yang idea; that those characters are two intentionally-opposing forces?
Aaron: The theme that runs throughout the record isn’t exactly literal, and it’s because the album is made up of songs collected together over a span of time. Our first two records are much more obvious collections of songs. This idea of the two characters is more to do with the inspiration behind the songs, rather than a through-line that weaves the album together. That’s because the environments in which the songs were written were very different, and the stories of each song are very different. That said, the characters are opposing and they are within the songs on the album. They allude to very broad ideas of what the motivation behind each song was.

They do, though, help the listener to find structure: They offer something to latch onto in what could otherwise be a quite-annoyingly abstract and conceptual album.
Aaron: Perhaps they’re a bit of a precautionary measure. At the risk of speaking for Angus and Julian, we were looking for a way to tie things together and make sure that the record is viewed as something fluid. We think it is anyway, but the characters do give the songs more of a reason to be together. It wouldn’t be possible to throw on a 13th song now because the songs included make sense together. The titles explain that. They helped organise our thoughts. Some of the titles are very technical explanations, others refer more to emotions.

Am I right in thinking that, in the process of making records, you often begin with the music and the lyrics and titles come later? That was the case with your second album, wasn’t it? The idea of the witch came after.
Angus: What’s clear is that we often start with the drums. Lyrics sometimes match an original idea, then the song is developed into something completely different, but the lyrics remain the same. It is, though, generally after we’ve established a proper sound for a song that the lyrics come.
Aaron: Sometimes we uncover a lyrical story and write the music around that. If that happens, we will always come up with something new. That’s kind of what happened with Drowned.

With that record, you seemed to have relied on luck a bit. You had musical ideas, but the lyrical narrative came about because you put some words into an internet search engine and something amazingly-fitting emerged, almost by coincidence – Walpurgisnacht, the date in German folklore when witches fly to the Brocken mountain, just as spring becomes winter. That day just happened to be the same day that you were searching for a context for the music.
Angus: We were aware of a mood but weren’t particularly solid on what we were trying to convey and then these elements came together in such a way that we were able to map out something resembling a story. The discovery on the internet actually happened quite early on. The real process of the record happened after. It gave us a parameter to work within, and that was perfect: with that record I didn’t feel comfortable with randomly looking for inspiration. It was really helpful that we came up with an idea that we all agreed on, and it especially helped me because it meant that I immediately knew where I wanted to go with it.

Did you worry, though, that the record would become less about you and more about an idea? Surely music is about conveying honesty and truth and it’s harder to do that through something that you, initially, knew nothing about.
Julian: I think that as long as there’s a healthy amount of self-inspection, writing a record about something that you didn’t know about previously can be just as relevant, and sometimes more so. Poking around in the dark is often when you are forced to think about things you haven’t thought about before, as long as you know why you were poking around in the first place.
Angus: It’s funny as hell that you say that because a consistent reaction to the Drowned record was that it was self-indulgent. I definitely think that it conveys us, and whatever music we make always will. We could make a record in a hot air balloon travelling across Africa and it would still be a Liars record.
Julian: It’s about how you interpret the idea that you are working on. If it’s sculpture you’re doing, it’s not about materials, but what you produce.

One of the things I thought was brilliant about that record was that it seemed to emphasise the sense of fear that people were feeling at the time, after 9/11 and all that. Was that intentional?
Aaron: It was acknowledged and inspected, but whether it was intentional is much harder to define. I guess it was investigated, but it may take many more years to work out quite how it fits into a period in time.
Angus: It definitely wasn’t meant to be about the war in Iraq or have a specific message in it. But we were definitely feeling fear at that time and it’s definitely an emotion of the record.

People have often accused you of taking yourself too seriously, but I’ve always thought your records were funny. They have a sense of humour and they sometimes make me laugh out loud.
Angus: It’s a really big issue. I’ve no idea why people think we take ourselves too seriously because we really don’t. But it’s almost impossible for us to convey that because no one seems prepared to believe us.

Tell us, then, in what ways you think humour is manifested in your records so far.
Angus: In the titles, for sure: they give us a chance to get our sense of humour across. With the new record, the videos help in a big way too. And in the artwork. We always try to do covers that undercut ideas of superiority. We hope that they suggest to people that it’s easy for them to do something that’s just as good or better.
Julian: Humour definitely breaks down walls. People are free to laugh at us, as well as with us.
Angus: Adding humour also allows you to take things very seriously if you want to, and then cut yourself off if you’re becoming too soap box.
Aaron: With this album, we put a lot of time into making a drum album – so much time that we reached a point when that became funny to us in itself.
Angus: But the process of making music is pretty serious. Until we’ve got something finished that we can stand back from and laugh at, it’s not funny.