BV Interview: The Cribs talk ‘Selling a Vibe,’ surviving, brotherly love & more

“I feel like we were a different band than we were pre-pandemic,” says Ryan Jarman, who along with his brothers Gary and Ross lead long-running UK band The Cribs, who just released their ninth album, Selling a Vibe. “It’s been like six years since we recorded a record. We weren’t sure what we were going to do. We weren’t entirely sure how the band was going to move forward. I feel like going into making this record, because again we had quite a lot of time off because of the pandemic. It’s not something that we could put our finger on, but we had a defined idea of what we wanted this record to be too.”

Gary adds, “We really got the chance to design it. Like, you know, when you’re on the road constantly and you’re on that treadmill, you don’t design your record. You just kind of roll into another one. We don’t really feel that sort of pressure that we used to have in that way. Where it’s like you’re on the road and you’re expected to deliver. So now we can just deliver a record when we want. So we spent a lot of time designing how we wanted…As brothers, we have our own language to a degree, where we can describe something and all three of us know what we’re referring to.”

“We’ve always tried to write strong hooks,” Ryan says. “Then at the last minute, you’ve kind of been hit with some kind of punk rock guilt and kind of like tried to drench it all in more noise so that you feel somewhat better. I feel like we’ve left a lot of those complexes at the door and really kind of I tried to focus on amplifying our strength but in a tasteful way.”

Selling a Vibe is a terrific record, and if you haven’t checked it out, you can listen below. I talked to Ryan and Gary for the latest episode of the BV Interviews podcast, and topics of conversation included the new album, working with Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift as producer, and how having a long pause between records actually made it better. We also talked about the band’s recent US tour with The Rapture, the mid-’00s scene that birthed them, some of their earliest New York shows, the CMJ festival, how both Ryan and Gary live in the US now — New York and Portland respectively — plus Johnny Marr, Janet Weiss, reality television and more.

You can listen to the whole BV Interviews The Cribs episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Cribs will be touring North America this spring.