After making waves with 2006’s wiry Replica Replica, Sydney quartet Red Riders have returned with Drown In Colour, a more expansive effort that doesn’t sacrifice enthusiasm. Thanks in part to new recruit Brad Heald from the Vines, there’s a propulsive interplay of guitars worthy of the Strokes, not to mention some Smiths, Cure, and other British staples informing the band’s ever-sharpening palate. After six years together and with a tour of Australia supporting Franz Ferdinand on their CV, Red Riders have chimed in with an old-fashioned ‘guitar album’ that sounds effortless. But as frontman Alexander Grigg explains, the new album didn’t come out the way the band had envisioned it. Which isn’t a bad thing.

What did you want to do differently on Drown In Colour? I know you worked with producer Woody Annison again.

[Replica Replica is] such a lean and straightforward album. It’s really a document of us live. The songs were just honed at shows, and we’d been playing the songs for ages, so that was the vibe. With this record we all wanted to push it more sonically and not be so strapped into hugely naturalistic sounds. Just create more of a mood. I’ve been using this analogy a fair bit, but y’know how The Wizard Of Oz goes from black-and-white to Technicolor? That kind of thing. It’s the same band but just more colourful and more interesting.

Is that where the title came from?

To a degree. I really liked the idea – this sounds a little bit pretentious, but whatever – of the sublime, where you’re overcome by something beautiful.

I read that your original vision of the album was something like “pastoral post-punk,” but only the song ‘Ordinary’ survived from that stage. Why did you keep it in the end?

It’s funny, because the album we all thought we were making changed so much. ‘Ordinary’ was something we were just going to try because the producer was really into it, and the label and our management loved it. I always loved that song, but I just couldn’t see how it would fit. I was a bit hesitant, but as we started recording, it just stood out. I’m really glad it got on there and stayed on. It’s the sunny side of a lot of the other songs, I guess. In terms of the chiming guitar sounds, it still fits into the record, but it’s the lighter side of everything.


Red Riders - 'Ordinary'

By the same token, you also weren’t going to include what became the lead single.

Yeah, ‘You’ve Got A Lot Of Nerve’. When you play in a band, it’s really hard to see your work objectively. I definitely had disappeared too much into this idea of what I thought we could and couldn’t do. It was too limited in my mind. I thought, ‘How can we do something like ‘Ordinary’ or ‘You’ve Got A Lot Of Nerve’? They’re so different to everything else we’ve got.’ Everyone was like, ‘No, it sounds like you guys to me’. In the end, it’s not that different. Good different.

How did Brad Heald from the Vines come to join the band on lead guitar?

Adrian [Deutsch], the original guitarist, left almost 18 months ago. It was just when we had really started to knuckle down and get songs together for the second album. The songs that he was bringing to the band were in a very different vein. [The rest of the band] were very much on the same page. It really became a thing of pulling in two directions. He wanted to pursue a solo thing, so he left to do that. It’s no hard feelings or anything. Then we tried a bunch of people out and nothing really came of that. We got really sick of hanging out with each other, just the three of us in a stupid rehearsal space, knowing that something was missing but not being able to solve the problem.

You didn’t consider going on as a trio?

We kind of did, and when we finally booked studio time, I just thought, ‘I’ll make up and play [the extra parts]. And if I can’t do anything, we’ll get some friends to come in and play.’ We’ve got so many friends in bands. We were planning on doing it as the three of us, and it was maybe two months before we started recording the album that Brad joined the band. It worked out really well. We just got lucky that he showed up at the right time. And the way that he plays just suits the direction we wanted to take.”

Yeah, it’s a real guitar album.

I’m happy you said that.

Do you think that’s sort of a relic these days?

Totally. It’s funny. I was listening to Triple J and I heard our song come on right after this Lost Valentinos song. I was like, ‘We’re an anachronism. We sound like from another time’. (Laughs) And happily so. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just funny. I think the things that we’ve always valued in music, like songwriting and middle eights, are really old-fashioned. All of my favorite bands, like Pavement and the Replacements and the Smiths, they’re guitar bands. And I love that. We were like, ‘Instead of having synths and stuff on the record, let’s just make the guitars sound like that’. That interests me so much more.

Even though there aren’t synths, there’s still an ’80s vibe to the album. I don’t know if it’s that straight-ahead guitar-pop thing, but certain songs do sound like the Cure and the Smiths a bit.

It’s one of those things I’ve become really resigned to. I love the Smiths and I love the Cure. I grew up listening to that stuff. I just feel like it’s going to be in there. It’s part of me. So as much as I’m wary of being one of those bands that sounds like the Cure, I can’t help it in a way. It’s not even that conscious a thing. It just comes out of me.

Other than Brad, had you guys been in bands before this one?

Not really, no. I’d been in a couple of garage bands, just hanging out with my friends and not really doing anything. But this was the first proper band we were all seriously in. When I think about it now, I feel lucky to have found people I feel so comfortable making music with. That’s such a hard thing to find and keep. It’s easy to find anyone that just wants to dabble in stuff, but not people that actually want to make it a big part of their lives.

Yeah, it takes a real commitment.

We’ve just been lucky. It’s sweet.

Doug Wallen


Red Riders Drown In Colour is out July 3rd. (Edit: As opposed to "now". We got jumpy.)
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