Colour Me Wednesday’s much-anticipated second album, Counting Pennies in the Afterlife, is due for release this month, and follows a split release with Spoonboy,and their equally well-received last EP ‘Anyone and Everyone’. In the five years since acclaimed debut album I Thought It Was Morning, the proudly-DIY indie/punk fourpiece have completed successful European and American tours, released records in seven countries, toured with musical heroes Lemuria and consolidated their own Dovetown record label, all while remaining just slightly under the radar of the mainstream.
In fact, Colour Me Wednesday might be England’s best-kept musical secret. Drawing from a wide range of inspiration, Colour Me Wednesday blend the twenty-tens pop-punk sound of their contemporaries (Doe, Muncie Girls, Personal Best) with an English indiepop pedigree, enriching skilful songwriting with a harmonic musicality reminiscent of older bands like The Sundays, and a trace of the plaintive inflections and subtly ironic politics of legendary groups McCarthy and The Housemartins. Counting Pennies in the Afterlife also showcases the band’s evolving alternative rock style, with increasingly-layered guitar and bass melodies now shared between mainstay Harriet Doveton and new additionLaura Coles, supported by the adept, intricate drumming of percussionist Jaca Freer. Front woman Jen Doveton’s folk-esque vocals soar above this newly-broadened soundscape, across 11 tracks of heartfelt, engaging, spiky pop. Album lyrics touch on the power politics of employment, personal relationships, DIY creativity and intersectional feminism. Boyfriend’s Car gilds an apocalyptic analogy of late capitalism fuelled by ‘unpaid labour’ with deceptively-poppy overlapping harmonies, while ‘Take What You Want (And Then Leave)’ introduces elements of electronica into the mix, while targeting the Robin-Hood-in-reverse economics of privatisation and austerity. Sunriser, Exposure and Tinfoil tackle aspects of male privilege, and Edge of Everything is the band’s psychogeographic tribute to life just inside the London Orbital, influenced ‘by country music and The Lemonheads.’ Colour Me Wednesday’s new record is no archetypal ‘difficult second album’ but instead the assured and confident sound of a group continually improving with every release while refusing to be pigeonholed with thematic or genre limitations. Do you want to hear a secret? Counting Pennies in the Afterlife is out May 15th on Krod Records(EU) and Dovetown(UK). For now check out the band’s full EP Anyone & Everyone below!
We managed to catch up with the band as they talked about their upcoming release and more!
How pleased were initially signing to Krod Records?
Harriet: We’ve been working with KROD for a couple of years now, we love Jordan’s enthusiasm
and his work ethic and when he swears in French.
Jen: WE DIDN’T SIGN A GODDAMN THING.
Harriet: We signed his body in permanent ink. He has a CMW tattoo.
So how pumped are you for your upcoming album Counting Pennies in the Afterlife?
Laura: So much that I have stolen an actual pump from Uxbridge reservoir.
Harriet: I’m so excited because it’s the best album of 2018, but I want everyone to listen to it as a
whole collection from track one to track eleven-and-a-half.
Jaca: YES SO PUMPED.
Can you tell us anything about this album? What is your favourite track from the upcoming
release?
Harriet: Edge Of Everything has my favourite chord in it and the chorus makes me want to levitate.
It has a lot of country vibes and I always want to put that into songs.
Jen: My favourite is Disown. It’s short and sweet and has three part harmonies at the end, what
more do you want?! It’s about having social anxiety and being shut in and people only being nice to
each other because they want to be liked, so it’s like a constant feedback loop.
Laura: I love playing Heather’s Left For Dead because me and Hat get to do a sick harmonised
twin guitar solo and I play in drop D, which is all I wanted to do when I was a teenager learning
Billy Talent covers in my bedroom.
Jaca: I love Sad Bride because it has so many different elements in it. It starts off as a pop banger
and goes through heavy rock, has a jazz solo then returns to being a pop banger by the end all in
the space of two minutes!
Can you tell us something about the album no one else knows?
Harriet: There’s loads of rude words. Jen says “cunt” four or five times.
Jen: At one point I refer to a whole tree, made of cunts. Harriet talks about lube and wee bursting
out.
Laura: Harriet’s dog recorded some of my guitar parts.
Do you think sexism is getting better in the UK alternative scene or is there still a lot to do?
Laura: I mean it is slowly getting better, but I think in terms of the more “mainstream” alternative (as
much as that is an oxymoron) there’s still a lot of work to do. A load of festivals have just pledged to make their line-ups equal by 2022 in terms of women and men, no idea what this means in terms of non-binary people though. It seems a bit daft to leave it that long; why not just do it now? Lots of the smaller festivals are a lot better in terms of this, although not perfect either.
If you could work with any band on a new song, who would it be and why?
Jaca: CHVRCHES, I would love to see what kind of direction that would take us in.
Harriet: I’d love to write a song with Charlie XCX, I feel like we’d be buzzing off each other!
Jen: REM because I’d be interested to see what their writing process would be like, because their songs are very unusual.
Laura: I would say Hop Along but I’d probably be too captivated by seeing how they write to contribute!
What do you get up to in your spare time when not working on music?
Laura: We don’t haha!
Harriet: Toby Carvery. Most things we do are music related, but I do like sorting out a drawer. Or going to Thorpe Park once a year.
Jen: I have nearly watched every show on Netflix. I love cooking. And watching vines.
Laura: Really I’m kinda bohemian, just like drinking coffee, reading comics and listening to records. I went to the opera for the first time the other day. It was an adaptation of Coraline. It was fine.
Will you be touring in 2018 at all or any festivals lined up?
Laura: We’re doing a ten date tour of Europe in May, gonna go to Switzerland for the first time which is exciting! We’ll be doing UK dates in the summer, returning to Indietracks festival for the first time in a few years and there’s some other stuff we’re trying to sort which we can’t really say anything about yet but will be exciting!