FEATURE: Spotlight: bdrmm — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

bdrmm

__________

THERE are going to be…

lots of positives in this feature, so I have to start by putting in a negative. As much as I love their music, I really do not like the name bdrmm. Although it is distinct, it is one of those names that you have to spell or pronounce – and I am not sure how that would come out. In spite of the name, the music made by this incredible band is worth spotlighting! I am going to get to some interviews with bdrmm. The band - Ryan Smith (vocals, guitar, synthesizer), Jordan Smith (vocals, bass, synthesizer), Joe Vickers (guitar, bass) and Conor Murray (drums) – released their third studio album, Microtonic, in February. This feature is about spotlighting brand-new artists and also ones that have been around for a while but are not known to all. Five years after bdrmm’s debut album was released, there are still people that are not aware of their brilliance. I am going to end with a review for Microtonic. First, a few interviews. Starting out with one from 2024. The band have some great dates coming up. I guess there will be festival bookings announced fairly soon. Let’s start out with an interview from The Quietus. They note how many fans were surprised by the Dance move and direction on their new record. How Mictrotonic is more upbeat or positive than their previous albums:

“If you listen to Microtonic, much of its music doesn’t sound nearly as tormented as a nightmarish pandemic record should. In fact, there’s a lot of instrumental beauty to lose yourself in, set against the intensity of its lyrics; the contemplative arpeggios in the title track, the acidic, dancefloor-ready melodies in ‘Clarkycat’ and Ryan’s soaring vocals on lead single ‘John On The Ceiling’, for instance. It was David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the singer says, which inspired this odd tonal juxtaposition: “That film is full of unease, but there is such beauty in it. The story is beautiful, but the way it goes about itself makes you feel uneasy, it really did something to me.” Microtonic, then, was written with plenty of “off-kilter moments: like you don’t really know what’s coming next, it can go from beauty to fucking dread.”

That approach is best demonstrated on ‘Infinity Peaking’, which was written at Ryan’s girlfriends’ house in Malaga whilst listening to Four Tet’s ‘Unspoken’. It was an unusually idyllic setting.“The first place I’d ever written a track that wasn’t in a dingy bedroom,” he laughs. “I was sat looking at the mountains in Malaga where the sun was shining. Like… what the fuck? I was in a really good place, but what came out obviously was quite the juxtaposition of being in such a beautiful environment but feeling these uncomfortable feelings.”

Perhaps it’s the openness and emotional safety that dance music afforded Ryan which allowed him to expose more of his vulnerabilities on Microtonic. Ryan’s written about his mental health struggles before on the last two records – in ways that were sometimes misinterpreted by listeners: “People thought ‘Be Careful’ was a political record, I was literally just talking about me nearly sniffing too much”. But there’s an unmistakable assuredness on Microtonic, one which sees Ryan not only adopt a more commanding tone throughout, but also a straightforward honesty about his mental health struggles: “Forgiving myself one more time, again,” he sings on ‘Infinity Peaking’. “Staring out at the world I have created. So lost, so lost…”

“The first two records were very much me talking about my mental health, but that’s completely masked [on those albums] by the amount of horror that seems to be going on in the world,” he says. “It’s inescapable because it just kind of goes into your head, so that’s the confidence to be able to talk about those more important, deeper values and the confidence within the songwriting.”

Lockdown split the band apart, as it did many. After spending days on end with each other, they found themselves living in different places, and the change in lifestyle was difficult to adjust to: “I think I can say for all of us that it impacted us in many different ways,” Jordan asserts.

When I ask Ryan what lockdown was like for him, he grimaces. “Fucking hell,” he begins. “Well, I was living in a basement in Leeds. I feel like a lot of people took that time to get sober, and I definitely went the opposite way. Being able to stay at home and do whatever you wanted to do – which was unfortunately for me, a lot of drugs and a lot of drink – I feel like I’ve come out of that a different person just because of the impact that’s had on me.

“I do feel like I come back to that lockdown quite a bit, but it’s just because it’s tattooed on my memory,” he continues. “I don’t think the world is the same – anxiety is fucking air now. It seems like it’s on edge. I don’t know if that’s just me because I’ve come out of this lockdown with a mental disorder or the world has shifted because everyone was in their own heads for two years.”

That paranoia has inspired the urgency palpable in Microtonic, whether in its lyrics or the stark sprechgesang Ryan adopts on tracks like ‘Snares’: “When you want to address something which is more or less the fucking nightmare world that we live in, you want to tell people that it’s alright. It’s fucking bleak, but within these little pockets of your own people, you can find that happiness within this bleakness.”

Really, that’s the most intriguing aspect about Microtonic. It might be slightly corny to say, but the record is imbued with an affirmation of friendship; of mates reconnecting through music after being separated by the pandemic. I bring up how much I enjoy the lyrical directness on ‘Snares’, and Jordan chimes in: “It’s interesting, because it’s one of the tunes where we’ve all listened to it and thought it was great, and then when we’ve talked to each other about what we liked about it, it’s completely different,” he says”.

I am going to move on to an interesting interview from The Line of Best Fit from February. Even though there is gloom and something heavier in Microtonic, there is still a lot of fun and light. The band seem more settled, even though it is a turbulent and horrible time. I know they are played on a few radio stations, though I feel they warrant wider appreciation and investigation:

“On Microtonic, bdrmm have used the endless possibilities of electronica to rework the quintessential yearning that has always underpinned their sound. “Lake Disappointment” is a more rave-friendly track with distorting, whirling bass that would sit snugly on a Joy Division album, and album opener “goit” starts out in the dance realm too before it spirals into acidy undertones accompanied by a searing sense of dread, with these more expansive textures of ambient and IDM pervading most of the album. Syd Minskey-Sargeant of Working Men’s Club offers grim lyrics of “mortality / spasms / terror / death / there’s nothing left” to bring the topic of dystopia into sharp focus immediately – something that never relents.

Standout tracks “John on the Ceiling” and “Snares” both use harsher, industrial sounds to emphasise the dreariness of Smith’s conscience. On the former, synth gushes filter through his fixations on “thinking of the / ways to escape / what’s said and done,” and on the latter, he uses spoken word to understand “the jarred clarity of our identities” post-pandemic.

But Smith and Vickers both feel “The Noose” best captures the album’s message: that the world we live in isn’t real anymore. “That was written from insomnia,” Smith explains, sharing how he used a loop pedal to produce the song’s intense mechanical whirring sound. “That’s how we are nowadays: anything that sounds fucking rubbish, we’re like, ‘let’s get that on the album!’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Stewart Baxter

To get into the songwriting zone, Smith dedicated himself to an unusual routine of waking at 5am to watch a different David Lynch film every morning, something he said did the album a world of good. The late director’s film Eraserhead inspired “Clarkycat”, for example, and Smith quips, “obviously that did well for my mental health!” He adds: “It was kind of like Aphex Twin doing his acid dreams, waking up and just writing straight away – I just thought it would be a good way to get into the mindset of all the themes.”

Despite all the pessimism, dystopia, and rooster-call alarm clocks, Microtonic found the band happier than they had ever been while making an album. “Surrounding the doom of the lyricism, the recording process was the best we’ve ever had,” Smith says. “It was so much fun and everything went quite easy. There was no negative energy, no pressure, and it was such a happy time – but just ironic that it came out as quite dark.”

Sticking with long-time producer Alex Greaves contributed to this comfort, too, with Smith calling him a fifth member, while Vickers appreciates his honesty throughout the process: “He was never afraid to tell us when something was shit and sucked, which was quite difficult to hear sometimes, but it’s really healthy and pushes you to be better.” Smith looks back to their origin story with Greaves, when “he’d come over to mine and Jordan’s, just listen to music, write demos, get twatted, and our tastes have developed as his have too.”

That last point is apparent as you move through their music over time, too, with obvious touchpoints such as Ride and Radiohead giving way to Floating Points, Portishead, and Massive Attack. It was gigging with electronic producer Daniel Avery that helped bdrmm understand how to expand their shoegaze sound; working with him and having him remix a track was on their pie-in-the-sky wishlist as big fans of the British DJ’s album Drone Logic.

“And then when it happened [on “Port”], it was like, fucking hell, we must be onto something!” Smith says. “He’s got a big interest in shoegaze, and looking through his playlists you’d have some obscure IDM track followed by Cocteau Twins. That was where the electronic shoegaze melded over. If you can listen to both, you can write both.”

Despite steadily establishing themselves over the past five years, bdrmm are still deeply grounded to their northern roots in Hull, with Smith sharing how he feels it’s the “biggest respect” to be associated with their beloved New Adelphi Club, a storied 200-cap venue where they still play, joining alumni such as Green Day, Oasis, and Radiohead. Similarly, Vickers says that starting out on the Sonic Cathedral before moving to independent label Rock Action “suits our character, being from Hull.”

“Being on a major label would be lovely and I don’t think anyone needs more money than we do,” Smith jokes, “but I wouldn’t change it for the world because you get to do what you want and work with like-minded people.” He notes, by way of example, how this has helped his brother and fellow bandmate Jordan Smith use his creative vision for the band’s overall aesthetic. “He is fucking unbelievable. To see his artistic talent grow and match the vibe – that first album cover is a packet of quavers on a scanner, so he’s a genius.” It’s this freedom and space to grow that has helped bdrmm build their confidence to evolve their music quite early on into their existence. “The biggest thing is just the confidence within us to feel like we can try new things,” says Smith.

“Just as a collective, we’re all much more comfortable in each other. We’ve all grown up and can tell each other how we feel, rather than getting absolutely fucked and fighting each other. We all appreciate the fact we get to do it as none of us are in it for the money, so we all purely do it for the love of actually making music and getting to play it live.”

We can take comfort from the fact that bdrmm still know how to find their niche and spread joy through their music to both themselves and to everyone else – even while its doom-and-gloom overtones echo the terrifyingly satirical world we’re all living in”.

Before getting to a review of Microtonic – an album that could be in the frame for a Mercury Prize this year -, I want to come to another interview. Another from February, CLASH spoke with bdrmm about their sonic evolution and what their latest album delivers. Maybe I should have led with this interview, but I did want to quote from the start of CLASH’s spotlight. It caught my eye:

“Less than five years ago, bdrmm stood at the forefront of a shoegaze renaissance. Drenching their strums in distortion, the Yorkshire-born band took influence from 1980s goths and 1990s alt-rockers to create their own sound, equal parts dark and dreamy. They put out their debut record with Sonic Cathedral and entranced audiences in bedrooms and festival fields alike with hypnotic melodies and pedalboards packed tight. But there was always something else brewing beneath the shoegaze-tinted surface.

bdrmm were never quite content with being a straight-forward guitar band. It’s a classification that they began to kick away from on their sophomore record, 2023’s ‘I Don’t Know’. Those moody guitars and distinctive vocals that characterised their debut still remained, as did those continual nods to Thom Yorke – both as Radiohead frontman and solo producer – but the group looked to broaden the scope of shoegaze with atmospheric electronica and pulsing beats. ‘I Don’t Know’ acted as a bridging point between the band’s fuzzy, bedroom-borne roots and something more synth-driven.

In the words of their trusted producer Alex Greaves, bdrmm are now on the verge of releasing the album that they’ve always been threatening to make. ‘Microtonic’, the group’s third full-length offering, is the purest execution of their sonic vision so far. Through spoken word segments, skittish drum beats, and dreary dystopian lyrics, Bdrmm foray into more cinematic territory, expanding their ‘90s influences to include the likes of Massive Attack, Portishead and Trent Reznor. And although ‘Microtonic’ sits in a completely new realm, perhaps more suited to drip down walls of an underground club than The New Adelphi, it’s no less dense or mesmerising than the band’s early work.

“This record feels like what you guys have been building to,” Greaves comments as we settle into Studio 2 at The Nave, cuppas in hand but soon to be forgotten in favour of conversation, “but I don’t think it’s as much of a departure from what you’ve done before as some people might think. To me, it still has all the hallmarks of a bdrmm record. It’s headphone music. It’s immersive.”

He’s addressing brothers-turned-bandmates Ryan and Jordan Smith, who have been familiar faces around The Nave for years now. Bdrmm have recorded all of their records so far in this converted church situated on the outskirts of Leeds, and Greaves has been present for each one. As a result, their relationship is far closer than you might usually expect for a band and producer, and, fortunately, their tastes have grown in alignment too.

“We were into the same music when we made album one, and we’re still into the same music now,” Greaves explains, “the idea of making a much more electronic record with these guys was something that I thought they would do and should do.” Although Greaves and the band were on the same page about the idea of pushing into more electronic territory, the vision for ‘Microtonic’ wasn’t always quite so concrete.

bdrmm came to The Nave with just a trio of ideas, but enough confidence that they were a solid base to spawn a full album. “The last record,” Jordan explains, “everyone’s influences and ideas were so scattered. It came together well in the end, but it felt unfocused. When we started this record, it felt like everyone was on the same page with what we were listening to and what we wanted the record to sound like. It felt that there was less hesitance.”

This newfound confidence to experiment seems to have stemmed from a few places: the coherence of the band’s increasingly electronic influences, the quality of their at- home recording, and the liberating return to writing in bedrooms. “The way that we’ve started working more recently has become so divorced from the way that we’re used to working,” Jordan continues. “We used to just get into a practice room and write with guitars. Now, we all live in different cities, it’s going more electronic and we have the opportunity to work at home with decent gear.”

“Nobody had played it in a room together before it came here,” Greaves adds, “no songs on the record were made that way.”

As bdrmm shrugged off their concerns about how tracks might translate to a live setting, ‘Microtonic’ would become their most experimental endeavour yet. “There was so much restriction from album one to album two,” Ryan comments, “Now, we can just do whatever we want and then we can learn how to do it live.” “Worry about that later,” Greaves reassures him, “And also it’s not my problem”.

I am finishing off with a review of Microtonic. It did get a load of reviews. There were one or two mixed ones. Though there were a load of really positive ones. However, it is clearly one of the best albums of the year. One that takes bdrmm’s music to new places and connects with a different audience. It is also one that their loyal fans love. God Is in the TV Zine provided their say in a glowing review of Microtonic:

“bdrmm are a fine example of what can happen to a band over a few albums. With their early singles and (almost) self-titled debut Bedroom, they were a fine example of shoegaze, dreampop…call it what you will. By the time of their second album, I Don’t Know, they were signed to Mogwai’s own Rock Action label, and they’d brought in both ambient and electronica elements to their sound. The album reached no.51 in the UK album charts; I believe, in time to come, this will actually be a rather lowly placing for this fine band.

Meanwhile, here we are, two years later and the trajectory is still very much on the up. Within the first thirty seconds of opening track ‘goit’ (yes, all lower case!) with its beautifully gloomy European dance sounds, it’s clear that bdrmm have definitely shifted up a gear or two in making records. This is a track for both the feet and the head, and ‘John On The Ceiling’ takes over almost before ‘goit‘ finished. In fact, it’s only on the third track ‘Infinity Peaking’ that there’s a sense of the shoegaze bdrmm of old, and this crops up again on the explosive title track and ‘Sat In The Heat.’

Yet cleverly, this all feels like a rather smooth flow, rather than being too much of a jump to take in just in the place of one listen. By the time the album reaches the excellent closer, the magnificent melancholia of ‘The Noose,’ it’s clear that this is an album to be played again. There’s always been a risk (possibly beginning in the CD era, and exacerbated as downloading and streaming came in) of people cherry-picking from albums; this is Exhibit A in way this practice should be avoided if at all possible.

Microtonic is not only the best album the band have made but is also likely to be the band’s commercial breakthrough. It certainly deserves to be. (The band and public should expect greater press coverage, bigger venues and higher spots in festival bills from now on.) While in some ways it takes the very different early 1990s rave and shoegazing scenes as starting points, (think both of the first two Orbital and Slowdive albums) this end result feels fresh and exciting. The opportunity for remixers to take these tracks to new places is also there for the taking. It will be interesting to see where bdrmm go next”.

Many will already be avid fans of bdrmm. Some might not know who they are or have heard a song or two. In any case, go and connect with the great Northern band. Antony Szmierek recently waxed lyrical about this band and their new album when he was on BBC Radio 6 Music last weekend. I love how bdrmm have sort of led a bit of a Shoegaze revival. A sound that I love and think is being revived and adapted by artists at the moment. Few do it as well as bdrmm. They are well worth investing in. It is clear that they have a really…