Glasgow quartet Toy Mountains are due to release their new EP I Swore I’d Never Speak of This Again on 25thNovember 2016 via Crooked Noise Records. Old Friends, the first cut from the record and their new single, will be premiered by Daniel P Carter on the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show on 16th October 2016. The band recently hit the road on a UK tour with I Cried Wolf later including a performance at Manchester’s A Carefully Planned Festival. They will perform at Glasgow’s Audio on 29th October.
A progressive alternative rock band with strong math-rock and post-hardcore influences, this four-piece exist solely to create music without boundaries. The epicentre of the band’s creative direction has one purpose: to evoke emotion. Whether it be happiness, sadness or blackout rage, Toy Mountains ruthlessly ensure that any audience is fully engaged and will leave having gained something memorable from the experience. You can check out Old Friends below!
Radio 1 Rock Show: (48:28)
We managed to catch an interview with Toy Mountains as they talk about their upcoming EP, writing new music, fans and more!
Are you looking forward to the release of ‘I Swore I’d Never Speak of This Again’ ?
Very much so. With all the work that goes into writing and pre-production, and then behind the scenes in preparation for release, it feels a little like we’ve been sitting on these songs for years. At this point I think we’re all just desperate to have other people hear what we’ve been working on.
What inspired you guys to write this EP?
This EP is generally just a culmination of where we all are in our lives at the moment – just being 20-somethings attempting to make a living doing something we love whilst all our friends have moved on, bought houses and are having kids. How that affects your sense of self-worth, financial security and your relationships with your friends and family is ultimately what inspired us to write this record. I think it’s a pretty relatable subject matter for most people our age taking a risk by doing what they love. It’s deeply personal to us.
What is your favourite song from the record?
I’m going to say the final track on the record ‘Sight-Reading’ is our favourite. Mostly because we wrote it two weeks before we were set to record the EP whereas we worked on the others for months in pre-production, meaning it’s the freshest feeling to us, and largely because it seemed to just fall into place. Some songs take months of work to feel complete and polished, and some just feel right from the get-go.
Would you say this is different from your previous releases?
I think it’s very different from our last releases. The first collection of songs we recorded – 2014’s For a Few Seconds, Came Harmony – we did so after only 4 months of rehearsing together and without ever playing a show. They feel raw in terms of songwriting and sound raw in terms of production value. (We recorded them in the back room of my house). This time around we worked a multitude of talented individuals production-wise to come up with the finished product. I also feel like we’ve matured drastically in terms of crafting and structuring songs, and work together more efficiently when writing. To put it in context, it took us almost 7 months to come up with the finished version of our first single ‘I Could Care Less’, I think it took us half of that time to complete this whole EP.
How proud are you guys when you hear yourself on BBC Radio 1?
Immensely proud. At the time of writing our first single from the EP, ‘Old Friends’, has been spun twice this week on BBC Radio 1, once by Phil Taggart and once by Daniel P. Carter. The Rock Show is go-to listening for me on Sunday night drives and to hear us played alongside some of the other bands on the show like Bring Me The Horizon, Avenged Sevenfold, Deftones etc. is just incredibly humbling. Trying to find your feet as a band is a real balancing act of highs and lows sometimes, so when people like Dan Carter take an interest or get on board with what you’re doing, you just have to enjoy it.
How has the tour gone with I Cried Wolf?
The tour with I Cried Wolf was great actually. The turnouts we had for some of the shows were a real surprise too, especially in places like London and Manchester where we’d never actually been to before. I Cried Wolf are a lovely bunch as well, so they helped make it our most enjoyable tour yet.
How much do your fans mean to you guys?
To anyone who takes any kind of interest in anything we do, we just say thank you so much for being involved. Whether that is parting with money for merch or our music, coming down to shows, letting us crash with you in strange cities on tour – it’s incredibly humbling and your support means the world to us. If no one cared, then none of this would be worth doing.
If you could work with any band who you would it be and why?
That entirely depends what’s meant by the term ‘work with’. If we’re talking about touring then there’s a multitude of bands we’d love to hit the road with, both at local level and in “dream tour” scenarios. If it was like, a production role we’d love to have someone like Kurt Balou of Converge work on our record with Lewis, those guys could make a sick record together. But if it were like guest vocals or somebody featuring on our music I’d have to say maybe Jordan Dreyer of La Dispute reading some poetry over a track or having Jeremy Bolm of Touche Amore lay down some bridge or hook vocals on a song. That’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Looking ahead to the future, is the plan to bring out a full length album?
We’ve actually already started the writing process for our next release, but we do plan on touring this EP heavily, so we’ll just have to wait and see what we come up with and how much time we can invest given our upcoming touring plans. We do like to work on new songs for a while to make sure we’ve developed the ideas to their maximum potential, and there are a few more behind-the-scenes roles I think we’d like to fill before we can release a full-length record. We don’t plan on stopping any time soon.