NEWS
fINdING INNEr pEacE Words: Sarah Jamieson photo:emma swann
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ith the release of their last album, Kids In Glass Houses faced a fork in the road. Despite having produced what was arguably their most creatively fulfilling record to date, it also seemed to confuse listeners, and saw them - to some extent - lose the momentum gained with their previous chart-bothering effort, ‘Dirt’. “We’re kind of like our own worst enemies sometimes,” starts frontman Aled Phillips. There’s an importance in their previous album that’s echoed in the life of their brand new full-length. “I don’t think we’d have been able to make a concise, poppy, accessible record unless we’d gone in the other direction, to refresh ourselves and remind ourselves that we’re good at that.” By the time the band came to make ‘In
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Gold Blood’, back in 2011, time on the pop circuit had taken its toll. With the release of ‘Dirt’, they’d been plunged in at the deep end. Frankie Sandford of The Saturdays featured on one track, and they were slowly being moulded as chart fodder of a more ‘alternative’ degree. “I think we were kind of sick of it,” he continues. “By the time we had released ‘Undercover Lover’ - which we didn’t really want to do – we’d gotten into the bracket. We did loads of weird stuff off the back of it like T4 On The Beach. They were cool experiences but we were just fish out of water. I think ‘In Gold Blood’ was a reaction to that, and us wanting to be considered as a band, rather than a throwaway pop band.” The next step, then, was obviously to make a concept album about the end of
the world, influenced by the artists who actually meant something to the band. The project was ambitious and, at times, difficult, but it was a set of muscles that they needed to flex. “It takes work and time to get in to ‘In Gold Blood’. I think it’s a really rewarding album if you give it the chance, but - and I don’t want to criticise the fans - a lot of the people that we had just picked up through radio, and having a song with ‘Frankie from The Saturdays’, are not into music in that kind of way. They don’t really pore over records and give a lot of time to them; they just listen and want instant gratification from them. That album was more a slow-burner.” It was, however, exactly the album they needed to make, in order to create their newest effort. “I think ‘Peace’ just sounds like the album we probably would