U.K. rock act Maximo Park is recording the follow-up to its 2005 Warp debut, “A Certain Trigger,” in London. The group is eyeing 13 tracks for the as-yet-untitled set, which was whittled down after producer Gil Norton paid a visit to Maximo Park’s Newcastle hometown.
“Basically we can’t afford to jam away in the studio and I don’t like the word jam either. It’s an assault on my ears,” frontman Paul Smith tells Billboard.com. “We had about 20 songs and a three-week period with [Norton] where we went into a studio in Newcastle and played the songs over again and made some adjustments. You need an extra pair of ears because on the first album we played those songs for a year and a half before we even recorded it and you could go, ‘Oh that’s no good, I’m sick of that.’ [This time around] we just don’t have that.”
However, some cuts date back to writing sessions for “A Certain Trigger,” including “Girls Who Play Guitars” and “Nosebleed.” Says Smith, “We kind of realized they were a bit different to the songs on ‘A Certain Trigger.’ [That album] had this concise, emotional pop and these two songs seemed to take it to another level.”
“Nosebleed,” in fact, has already been road-tested. “We played it on our album launch, that’s kind of how old it is,” Smith laughs. “Lukas [Wooler] probably didn’t have a keyboard part at that point. He probably just played along with it and now we feel like this song has a structure and an amazing build to it and it works.”
Smith says though the sound will be bigger, newer material, like “Russian Literature,” harkens to themes he initially began exploring on the debut. “I don’t feel like I’ve changed particularly,” he admits. “I’ve seen more things. I’ve seen more places. I’m more educated about the world, [but] it’s that same person who wrote the first lyrics,” he says. “The other day I wrote a song about a girl and that’s the things that really grab me. I think on the new record, one song could be about war or it could be about a girl. I like to have this sort of dual element.”
