INTERVIEW: BEST FRIENDS

The Best Friends debut 'Hot.Reckless.Totally Insane' is half an hour of messy-grunge pleasure.
Tracks can contrast taking you from melancholic Summer weeknights sitting on your mates doorstep listening to some 90's punk band talking about your futures, straight to feelings of lost inhibitions and freeing of teenage angst. It's a far out sound, intuitively written. Here's a Q and A with Ed from the band to talk about it!

Who are Best Friends? 

 "We are Lewis, Tom, Ed and Jonny, we formed in Sheffield in 2011 after meeting at university and started practising in our basement. We put out an EP of our first few tracks later that year, and the rest as they say is history!"

How would you describe your sound to new listeners?

"We'd probably try and describe ourselves as garage/pop but there are a number of different bands/genres etc that influence us individually."

So the album was released to the world on Friday, it's been a long time coming and a lot of hard work how would you say the band have evolved over the years, particularly in terms of the production process?

 "Other than getting older, probably uglier, slightly more cynical and definitely poorer, I wouldn't say too much has changed. The album was the first time we worked with anyone to properly 'produce' the sound and create something that was as close as possible to what we wanted to achieve. Adam and Zeb did an amazing job on the album and we couldn't be happier with how it came out, they really understood where we were coming from and were really excited about it, so it was amazing to be in that kind of environment." 

You have quite an unplaceable sound, who/what are your influences and where do you get your inspiration?

 "We all listen to quite a broad range of different music, some of which we all agree on and some that we don't, but there's plenty of common ground, including bands like Thee Oh See's, Deerhunter, Black Lips, Bob Marley... It's hard to say what specifically informs the songwriting, but i think people can probably hear those elements in there."

Favourite song off the album?

 "We've just started playing Orange Juice live on this tour and i'm really enjoying it. It was one of the last songs that we wrote for the album and i never really expected it to be a live track, but it's really good fun to play and people have been going mad."

Lastly, here at 'The Candid Mixtape' I'm always interested in seeing what the artist's themselves like to listen to, so what would be on the band's ideal mix?

 "Craig David - 7 Days

Blink 182 - I miss you

The Proclaimers - 500 miles

Bob Marley - Could you be Loved

Goat - Goathead"

The band are playing gigs UK wide as part of their album release and not to be missed!

@BestFrienddss
http://bestfriendspartyhard.bandcamp.com/