Track By Track: The Early Mornings walk us through their latest EP Ultra-Modern Rain
London-based post-punk outfit, The Early Mornings have recently released their second EP, Ultra-Modern Rain. In this exclusive track-by-track, the trio of Annie Leader (vocals/guitar), Danny Shannon (bass), and Rhys Davies (drums) walk us through each track on Ultra-Modern Rain and let us in on the process and motivation behind each song.
“We wanted to make a record where every song has a distinct personality and show that there’s still lots of interesting things to do with just a guitar, bass, and drums.”
1. ‘It’s Not What You Want’
We began the initial ideas for this song a while ago but I could never settle on what the singing should be. We left it alone for a few months before picking up the ideas again when we moved to London. By then Danny had written some lines down in a homage to The Hombres “Let It All Hang Out” which itself was a piss take of the way Dylan wrote his lyrics. Those lyrics worked to create the first half of the song.
2. ‘Love’s Not Hard’
This would be an instrumental song if it wasn’t for the smallest amount of singing we have in it. I added in the whistling just before we recorded it. Wish we could play the whistling live but we’ve not figured out how to whistle down a microphone properly.
3. ‘Ultra-Modern Rain’
It felt like this song wrote itself quickly. The tricky part was coming up with short words that fitted in with the singing I’d come up with. Me and Danny went out for a few pints with some books and tried opening pages and writing down a list of words we liked and then tried to form them into sentences.
4. ‘Refresher’
We use this song as a breather between songs in our live set. Hence why it’s called Refresher, but we also like the sweets. We recorded this one a lot faster than we used to play it live and I think we’ve now settled on this being the right pace for the song.
5. First Words
Probably our longest song. Maybe our slowest song. Maybe this is the ballad of the EP. There’s a lot of repetition that culminates with a sudden change into the final part of the song, which is completely different. Danny had a spare bass line and I think it was Rhys’ idea to stitch it on the end.
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