The thought of releasing a new album less than a year after its predecessor would be a daunting task for any band, but Los Campesinos! aren't your average band. They released We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed just seven months after their well-received debut Hold On Now, Youngster…
"As soon as we finish a record we want to record another one. We're in a situation where we realize how lucky we are and how we're not going to be able to be in a band forever so we want to do as much as we can in whatever amount of time we have. A lot of bands really pace how quickly they release things," says singer and lyricist Gareth Campesino! (all members of the band share the unifying last name). "I think a lot of bands would've thought, 'We can hold on to these songs and flesh it out a bit and release it in 18 months time,' but that kind of feels like a dishonest way of doing it. The way we write, we feel that we're constantly improving as a band and as musicians, and if we didn't release something as soon as we wrote it, it would seem stale to us six months down the line."
True to form, the band recently entered the studio between the two legs of their North American tour to begin recording the follow-up to Doomed. "We're about seven or eight tracks through the next album," says Gareth. "The stuff that we're writing now is the most ambitious stuff we've ever written and it's going to be very, very difficult to pull it off with just seven of us. We're either going to have to bring in extra bodies or learn how to use computers. If anybody ever had to come into this group of seven it would be a horrible thing. It'll probably be the latter."
The band is again working with John Goodmanson, who also produced Doomed. "He's so easygoing and knows where we're coming from musically," says Gareth. "We don't always know how to realize the sound that we want to get whereas he can point us in the right direction. Especially on this record, Tom and I have been working more closely with him and as a result the songwriting and the songs are going to be stronger than ever."
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