1 month ago
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Welcome to Music City brings together the best of guitar music from the past 50 years, but it has taken time for Conor Lumsden, drummer, singer and songwriter of Dublin's The Number Ones, to pull the project together: “The Number Ones is a perfect band in the sense that every member is so important. The sound that we make can only be made by us four, and if anything changes it still comes out sounding the exact same, which I love.”
After a long recording process Lumsden is starting anew. “The album has in total taken about six years,” he says. “The main tracking was done with Daniel Fox in Dublin. Overdubs were recorded in New York, London, and we had a few days in Konk which was amazing, the Kinks Studio. In the amount of time it took to record this album I learned to engineer, so I did a good few bits myself.”
It is an exciting moment for Lumsden and for his project: “I got my partner a digital radio for Christmas. She was listening to BBC Radio 6 whilst I was jiggling the baby to sleep when I heard her scream ‘Oh my God’! I ran in and she had tears in her eyes screaming ‘It's on the radio!’ Huw Stephens played it yesterday and we had no idea that was going to happen. I’ve wanted that moment for a while.” After The Number Ones were praised by Iggy Pop, it must’ve been a gratifying feeling to have, in the words of Conor, “the legend” Huw Stephens support his new work.
Music City's full length album, which is due to be released on February 6, follows in the wake of the 2018 cult-hit lead single “Pretty Feelings”. The chorus is an instant earworm, with Lumsden singing: “Pretty feelings washing all over me / Like I was in love / Bits of glitter falling from the light / Like I was in love”. The lyrics are simple, concise, and marry with the tight groove nicely, creating something easily engageable for the listener. Despite re-recording the loved-up song for the album, sonically the project doesn’t stray from what made that track so popular.
The follow up single “Common Sense” (featuring Tina Halladay) evokes T. Rex from the outset, with jagged riffs quickly breaking into a chanted vocal. A 60s psychedelia-style breakdown plays out, launching into a Bolan-inflected, solo-laden outro. The desire to indulge in this style is one reason for striking out with this project: a concise rock album for 2026 full of the 60s, 70s and beyond. “A lot of my stuff is a bit too dad rock or a bit too poppy that it didn’t come out sounding right in The Number Ones.”
But the concision of the album should not be mistaken for contrivance. Creating a live and fresh sound was an important part of the recording process. Of his Music City band, Lumsden adds “The musicians were learning just a few minutes before the takes in an effort to get in sounding fresh. Take one is rarely the best one, but in between one and take five you usually get the best take, and then after that it becomes a bit stiff and everyone's paying a bit too much attention.” However the vocal takes were allowed to adhere to a different set of rules: “Some of them, I’m not lying here, have over 300 vocal takes. I really wanted to have the performance style in tact, so not using Auto-Tune or Melodyne.”
With gigs lined up later this month, Lumsden is itching to get going. But the makeup of the lineup for the live shows is still uncertain: “It’s down to the wire. With this band there’s been, like, 50 members at this point. The bass player we had for the tour is now working with Biffy Clyro, so she’s going on a stadium tour which is a slightly more alluring one than our one!” Given the scope and density of the recordings, it will be a challenge to translate that live, however, it is a challenge Lumsden is up for. “The trickiest part of the band is the harmonies, there are three-part harmonies in basically every song. Every song basically has two female vocals on it, too, so it would be tricky to get everyone on stage for the venues that would book us at the moment!”
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