Web is on the rise

It’s a sprawling and fascinating conversation that’s cut short by the arrival of Web’s other members, Kathryn Reed and Ben Roe, who hold a fleet of coffees, including one for me. The next hour spent with the experimental noise rock outfit goes to show how representative of the band that debate was – and their generous demeanour that extends from coffee runs to their see-what-sticks songwriting approach.

The quartet, whose name was by their own admission an “impossible task fraught with indecision,” released their single “News” earlier this year, showcasing a gloomy, noisy, and chaotic sound. “In some ways, every time we make a song, it’s kind of like a spider building a web, where it sort of knows what it’s doing but it’s constantly changing,” explains Lucas, semi-seriously, while Kristian continues, “and sort of in the same way we catch all of our inspirations in the web.” After a beat, the pretence breaks and they both admit with a laugh that “these are all retrospective thoughts – we just thought it was dark, edgy, and appealing in that way.”

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Even without the self-seriousness, their EP traverses genre like their arachnid muse, scuttling from noisy punk to proggy psychedelia, and distinguishing itself from their earlier recordings. This change in direction is not only attributed to the group’s increased interest in stranger, unorthodox sounds, but also the addition of Reed, whose flute provides an endlessly fascinating study in texture and juxtapositional pitch. “The band that we were in before was much more straightforward grunge and rock, so with ‘Intimidation & Shame’ [the group’s earlier released single] it was our first introduction of some more musically progressive ideas with an already formed song,” says Lucas. “Those ideas have now gotten more time to sit with us.”

The writhing guitars and unpredictable flute rhythms are partly a byproduct, though, they say. “A lot of the songs on this EP were conceived at the same time, but over time started to become a bit more ambitious,” Kristain explains, “because we were playing at these geezer pubs in Portsmouth without a setlist, and just trying different things, maybe doing a part in one song into another song and seeing how it felt.”

From there, the songs took on a life of their own, Roe tells me: “We were just grabbing ideas and exploring them through different iterations over time.” With those live shows in Portsmouth, they “didn’t really give a fuck what you think it sounds like; we were just going to explore our own music.” With a lack of external pressure, the brothers admit that their sibling dynamic allows them to be more tolerable to each other’s vetoes when shaping the songs. “These songs are like children that have had to grow up through the conflict of their parents,” Kristian jokes.

After beginning in Portsmouth as a trio – the Eveleigh brothers plus drummer Ben Roe – the band added Reed after she posted an Instagram story asking if there were any rock bands looking for some woodwinds. “I was always like, ‘Why can’t I be good at the guitar and be in a rock band?’ to my mum, but she just said, ‘Why can’t you be in a band?’” Reed recalls. From personal experience, the shrill pitch of the flute is often difficult to meld with the kind of low-end, chaotic, noisy music that Web makes. “It’s definitely a learning process with the flute, especially with everything the guys want to do,” she explains, “like sometimes we’ll have to tone it down for a flute section, but when they want the loud bits, I have to switch to playing ugly flute, not pretty flute, so that it comes through.”

The added high tones of a flute – both ugly and pretty – also add musical depth to their more conceptual ideas on the EP. “A lot of our ideas come from when instruments sound like specific things,” explains Lucas, “so on ‘Terminal’ for example, the flute is spacier while the guitars and bass are more mechanical, or in ‘Titanic’ where the flute now has a shrill, metallic intensity, but the drums more represent something more natural.” For Roe, the band wasn’t complete until Reed joined: “We were just laying down the foundation before that,” he says. The table agrees, while Reed accepts the compliment with grace and a blush.

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Their already improvisational style gets further amped up each time the brothers trade from guitar to bass, but this total-football approach also allows each instrument to get its due. “I think that’s where we get a lot of our intensity from,” says Roe, “because every instrument is leading. The drums at one point, or the guitar riff, or then the flute. They all take the stage at some point.” The crests and crashes of each section, then, also lead to specific moments where they can interlock and tease out even more conflict and resolution.

“On ‘Titanic’ specifically, the guitar is playing on a different time signature, and so there are certain points where all the instruments link up then fall out of step again,” Lucas explains, “but we’re much more intuitive of a band than overly precise when it comes to these things. We just work off of feeling and what works in the moment.” Kristian adds that it’s not really about the timings – “We just always have a referent point of where we want to get to, and what we play is just us trying to get there.” The group likens this process to climbing a mountain, where they might choose a different rock or path every time.

So how do they decide on the rock to choose when finally putting this sprawling project together in the studio? “We’ve always struggled in the studio – these songs have been with us for so long,” says Kristian, off the bat. “They were forged live.” Roe continues: “I think we pretty much always resort to doing a live recording – it’s just what we know – but it’s also what I’m most proud of.” With this approach, they had to work out how to record a song like ‘Improv’, whose lyrics poking fun at crowd work at live shows are different in every live performance, leaving some Dutch fans very confused at Left of the Dial when they settled on a humorous sketch about someone barging into their recording session. As with the rest of their philosophies, Web essentially keeps playing until they land on something they like, even in the studio.

The quartet admits that they will breathe a sigh of relief when their EP is finally out in the world and they can put these songs to rest. As a band with sprawling ambition and endless curiosity, they don’t want to be boxed in, and as such are already working on newer, fresher songs with “melodies that they are stress-testing,” as Roe puts it. If there’s anything the band knows how to do, it’s fiddle with segments of an idea until it becomes a song, and you best believe they’ll be playing it live over and over until they’ve scaled one new mountain cliff after another.