Rolo Tomassi have spoken about the recent departure of their guitarist and bassist and have said that their replacements have breathed new life into their music.
Speaking to NME at Sunday’s (April 22) Hit The Deck festival, the band’s keyboardist James Spence said that, before the departure of bassist Joseph Thorpe and guitarist Joe Nicholson, the band had become “too set in their ways”.
Speaking about new members, No Coast‘s Chris Cayford and Brontide’s Nathan Fairweather, Spence commented: “They’ve been great, they’ve brought a lot to the table creatively and it’s been nice getting into a practice space with different people. Playing live with them has really brought the old stuff to life, too.”
Asked if they’d kept in touch with Thorpe and Nicholson, Spence replied:
There’s not been too much contact, they’re doing their own thing. That’s fine.
Spence and sister Eva (vocals) also spoke about their progress in writing the band’s third album, with the keyboardist saying of their progress: “We’ve nearly finished writing it. The plan is to go into the studio at the start of June and start recording then. We’re 70 per cent of the way there, we’ve got a few weeks left though, so there’s no big rush.”
Then asked how it was sounding, Spence replied: “It’s a more straight-up, heavy sounding and much more direct. You can get your teeth into it much quicker, people who didn’t have patience before with our music before will be into this record. It’s still technical, but we’re using the mathy bits more sparingly.”
He also spoke about their choice of producer for their third album and why they’d opted for Jason Sanderson. The band had previously worked with Major Lazer’s Diplo on second album ‘Cosmology’ and Spence said that he and his bandmates were glad not to have the attention taken away from the record by the presence of a big-name producer.
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He said of this: “We didn’t go in search of someone like Diplo. He approached us. If that hadn’t happened we’d have done the second album with Jason as well. We’ll happier this time round letting the record do the talking, rather than have a side-story about who’s recording it.”
Eva Spence also spoke about the band’s recent UK tour with Architects, which they finished last week. She said of this: “It went amazingly well, it was best start to the year we could have hoped for. All the songs went over really well, all the crowd really seemed to go for it.”
To read a review of Architects and Rolo Tomassi’s UK tour, pick up the new issue of NME which is on UK newsstands from tomorrow (April 25) and available digitally.
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