Anavae recently released their debut album ‘45’ via A Wolf At Your Door Records and celebrated with a sold out headline show at St Pancras Old Church, as well as live dates with Deaf Havana and Band of Skulls. Now they’ve released a music video for ‘California’, which features on the record, evoking West coast imagery within a melancholic aesthetic. “This is one of the most important songs we’ll ever write,” says Jamie Finch (guitar / production) of the song. “We were in a label deal we couldn’t get out of – and they sent us to LA to write an album. We were carted around different studios with writers that had never heard our music before, and were given no direction for what we wanted to sound like. It felt really disconnected from what we wanted to achieve with our music. Seann Bowe was the first co-writer we worked with who sat us down, before even picking up a guitar, or sitting at the production desk and said “So…tell me your story…”. We explained to him how we didn’t want to be in California. The song is about how we didn’t want to go to California in the first place and this ended up being the only song we used from the trip.”
Adds vocalist Becca Need-Menear: “Seann Bowe was the only writer who put such emphasis on writing songs that really meant something to the writer. The process wasn’t about trying to do something mainstream, or write something in the aim of trying to get sync deals, or high pay cuts. It was the first time on the trip we had really felt seen. I’ve also always been quite precious with my lyrics, so this was a really interesting exercise in opening up that process, and spit balling with two other people in the room. The lyrics were written by the three of us. It feels like such a beautiful collaboration during such a difficult time.”
‘45’ is a truly genreless collection of innovative yet supremely catchy tracks that meld searing riffs and electronic nuance with arena-sized hooks. Recorded over a prolonged period of short sessions with producer Peter Miles, and as evidenced by the process that led to ‘California’, the making of ‘45’ was a journey to say the least. Jamie and Becca came into the process with rather different ideas and approaches, clashing on occasion but ultimately creating an other-worldly collection of tracks that’s both introspective and relatable.