While they were at Clockenflap in Hong Kong on Friday night, I sat down with Justin Hayward-Young and Árni Árnason of English group The Vaccines, who made waves and received accolades with their records What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? and Come of Age in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Yes, there was a while there that it felt like you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing a Vaccines song. And on watching them perform in Hong Kong, it almost felt like a night of greatest hits! With a few new tracks thrown in for good measure (more on those in another article later…)
But for the last year, we haven’t heard a peep from the NME and triple j darlings, as they’ve locked themselves away to make their third, so-far-untitled, record. This past week, however, they’ve popped back from into view, playing their first shows in over a year, travelling around India, Vietnam and Hong Kong – playing to some new audiences for the first time, and revisiting some old ones.
We talked about the shows and “the well trodden route back to the road”. Justin detailed his first thoughts, “Obviously playing for the first time in over a year in places we’ve never been with new songs, new live member, it’s been really fun. I really missed the daily shot of adrenalin”. Árni agreed, “I wasn’t expecting to miss it as much as I ended up doing. I was dying to be back on the road for a while. It’s great to be back…”
Justin also reflected on their time away, “One of the reasons you want to stop after three and a half years of doing the same thing every night is that, it starts to become harder and harder to feel impassioned by the song. So it’s so fucking nice to be able to play new songs… and play the old songs for the first time in a while… I just think that taking a break is the best thing we ever did.”
You can watch the first part of our interview here:
In the second part of the video, the pair bring us up to date on album number three, which they expect to release in May 2015. Justin gave us a few hints as to what we might expect, “We worked pretty much all day every day for the last year (on the record), making a lot of mistakes, and coming back around to working out what we want to do and what we mean not only to ourselves but to other people. I think it definitely sounds like a Vaccines record, but for the first time ever we’ve embraced modernity.”
“I think we’ve always proudly told people that our records could have been made at any point in the last thirty years. And I think we’ve started to feel that maybe that wasn’t a good thing… We wanted to make an important sounding record. A record that in twenty years time people will pick up and go, this is 2015, this is what it sounded like to me. So to do that, we had to push ourselves and push the way we were making it. It’s a more production heavy record, it’s not a plug in a play record, and I think the songs really benefit from that. Because the stuff we’ve never allowed ourselves to do before, we’re allowing ourselves to do.”
Watch the second and final part of the interview here:
