The follow up to their well received 2013 E.P Creepy, Reasons Not To Sleep sees Southampton’s Miss Vincent switching it from creepy to gloomy. Playing their self-styled ‘moody punk rock’, paying homage to the likes of Alkaline Trio and AFI, RNTS see them take their craft to the next level. “The songs we wrote for this record have a much darker, aggressive, and unhinged feel to them,” says Alex Marshall, lead vocalist and guitarist. Here they give us an insight into the recording process…
Creating Reasons Not To Sleep was long. Really Long. We started playing some of the songs before our last EP even came out, and had a load of things demoed well over 6 months before recording anything for release, so it was a process. We took a lot longer than we planned writing and refining the songs, and also deciding where to record. The songs were taking a much darker direction, but we wanted to spend a bit of time figuring out what we had before heading into the studio.
The Ranch in Southampton seemed like a great fit for what we wanted. Neil Kennedy has been really there and done that and recorded a seemingly endless list of amazing bands, and Daly (from Drones, who recorded our first EP, Creepy) was working there as his engineer, so there was a natural connection there too. It was really good for us to have Daly around because he knew exactly how we worked, and we’d even demoed a few of the songs with him. Having Neil producing it added so much too. He’s got a great ear for things that you’d never think of, and he’s really to the point which helped focus us and get the most out of our time there.
We recorded 6 tracks in 6 days, and had a few hours the day after for wrapping up tracking and going through things, adding some final extra stuff, as well as some time to talk to Neil about mixing. The natural, roomy sound of the Ranch was something that really resonated with us when we were thinking of where to go, and we were keen to keep that rather than trying to lay down a million tracks of everything and lose all the grit and crackle, which gives the songs a bit more personality.
There were some really cool parts to putting everything together – we used some super nice gear to get guitars and bass down that I could go on forever about, and there were hours of entertainment (and a few moments that made my ears bleed) when Lawrie and Neil were on their knees twiddling knobs on pedals searching for the perfect sound. When we’d been demoing, we were really getting into layering things to add atmosphere – trying to combine different sounds and effects to create a bigger end result. There’s all sorts of stuff lurking around in the tracks – even an eBow makes an appearance. It was a balance between getting the moodiness and the layers sounding big, without losing the simple, four-guys-in-a-room feel, but we’re so happy with it.
The whole process was enjoyable, cathartic and exciting in equal measure, and we’re so stoked to finally be getting it out there.
Set for release on 11th May via Engineer Records, you can get a taste with lead single ‘How Much Further’ now: