2 weeks ago
17
The phone rings a few times before Harvey O’Toole, lead guitarist of Pyncher, picks up. “We’re in Manchester and the sun’s out so everyone’s gone mad,” he tells BEST FIT. O’Toole is swiftly joined by Sam Blakely, frontman, rhythm guitarist and the songwriter behind latest single “One Day”, a frenzied reintroduction to a band finding their voice.
The track isn’t a passive member of a playlist to be listened to sporadically, but instead insists on being played loud and being played often. So it is surprising to discover from Blakely the song began life rather differently: “The idea was on the acoustic guitar like a year ago and it was really slow, like a ballad basically, and then from there I brought it to the band and it was quite quick to build the bare parts.”
Perhaps the lyrics still reveal the fact the song started life at a slower pace. “One day / It’ll be okay / If you’re tired of the new ways / They’ll still be old” cries Blakely over the wall of sounds created by the rest of the band. “I was listening to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel, their use of a lot of compression was a big part of it. The Strokes are an obvious thing too.”
Listeners are free to draw their own comparisons but for the band, influences are drawn osmotically rather than as deliberate attempts at imitation. “We’re all quite good at sharing new music with each other but we never try to write a song like someone,” says O’Toole. “You can obviously listen to our song and think, ‘oh it sounds like this,’ but we’ve never set out to make a song that sounds like something else. We just like making stuff that sounds good and fun, and we’ll play through it and it will land through natural selection. It’s just what we enjoy playing.”
It took a little while for “One Day” to come together, part of the joy of playing in pyncher is that their sound is constantly developing. The band are yet to play the song live and are still getting used to frontman Blakely taking up rhythm guitar duties, freeing up O’Toole to play more adventurous lines. This is obviously displayed during the solo that acts, in part, as a chorus a couple of times throughout the song.
The introduction of Blakely on guitar has changed the dynamics of the band, plus their writing and recording process too. The rehearsal room and the studio are now more the focus of development, rather than just honing their sound playing from gig to gig: “Anything we’ve released before we’d just record how we played it live, but with this new stuff we’ve done it the other way round. We record and then we work out how we can play it live in the best possible way. Live, we’re limited to the four of us. I guess it’s more about energy, and a bit more chaotic.”
Signing to Heist or Hit, a new EP due 19 June sees the band further explore these new dynamics. “Definitely in terms of process and themes they’re all fairly similar,” O’Toole says of the new material. “They’re all different songs with their own things going on but they all follow the same idea. It’s quite joyful, at least from our side, this stuff to play.” Both O’Toole and Blakely are keen to stress the developments pyncher have made, that can be expected in the wake of the release of “One Day”: “All the songs we used to play are really different to the new stuff, and so we’re still getting used to that. It’s been pretty tricky but we’re starting to feel really confident about how it’s sounding, which is really exciting.”
If their new single is an indication of the direction of travel, then it is a really exciting one. Pyncher are a band still growing and developing, but “One Day” is a brilliant song to mark where they stand at the moment.
English (US) · 