As a band you formed in 2014 and your output to date has been a phenomenal one. If you follow the progression that has followed since your debut single ‘C.A.t.L.Y’ (Can’t Afford to Lose You’) it has all been linear. That was released within a month of the band getting together. You followed that up with a video for ‘It’s The Kind Of Lie’ in September. While in 2015 you released ‘Keep Your Tongue’ as the lead single of the EP in April before releasing the EP itself if May through Julia Julia Records. The real icing on the cake has been the release of your debut album ‘Keep Bleeding, Keep Breathing’ in February this year which we also fell in love with and gave 10/10 in our March issue.
as an early reference but the sound of BLØSH really has a lot of modern influences such as Oh Land, the DØ, Dirty Projectors and St. Vincent.
To accomplish that in under two years is an incredible achievement. Before you started off was that always your intention? If so, how much of the groundwork had you already done and put in place or did the release of your debut single give you a sense of focus that you followed through?
That's great to hear, thank you so much. The last song we recorded on the EP was the title track ‘Keep Your Tongue’ and this really kick started the idea of the album and how this was going to sound. In many ways the EP was the bridge between what we had been and where we wanted to go, and the album felt like achieving that goal. We worked with producer Øyvind Gundersen on both so the studio and recording process was very similar, but the outcome in our opinion is quite different.
Thanks a lot guys. We are very happy to hear that. We always had high ambitions but yes we are overwhelmed about the support we've received from all over the world. All the musicians involved were already playing professionally and Teresa and Jørgen who are the core of BLØSH had some success with previous projects so there is definitely a lot of experience in the group and a good amount of groundwork. Still the whole album was written in 2015 so it's developed a lot over a short period of time. Call it serendipity if you will, but when you look back on it now and following it all the way up to the release of your album, it has all been achieved in under a two year period. Do you think that this could be a band that is a little bit special for all of you? It definitely feels special to us. We hope it feels special to the listeners as well. How do the band dynamics work when it comes to the creative process musically? As far as the creative process goes everything is written by Teresa and Jørgen, both in the lyrics and music. This process is very much a duo process, while the live-setup with Jonas Barsten on drums, Sjur Husom Vonen on bass and Simen Sandbæk Skari on synth gives BLØSH the opportunity to take that recorded sound on the road. Given that it has a certified Scandinavian signature about your music, some people have described the sound as indie dream-pop. But how would you describe your sound? To be honest we've always liked to just call it ‘pop’, because if we were to incorporate everything we've been called we'd probably be Alternative-Indie-Electro-Dream-Rock-FolkPop. In the end we feel like no matter what genre you put a band in you won't really know what it sounds like until you listen to it. Indie Dream-Pop sounds pretty good though so you can stick to that if you fancy. You have cited another Norwegian artist who we are familiar with, Thea & The Wild, as one artist you really admire. She is currently working on her second album so we are eagerly awaiting its release. But there is a rich vein of new artists emerging on the Norwegian music scene who we would be familiar with – Anna Of The North, Party At The Pharmacy, West Bank Robbers , to name a few – and there is an enormous wealth of artists we could name. In your opinion why is the emerging music scene in Norway currently thriving? Like you're saying Thea is one of many great artists breaking waves in Norway. We are sure her follow up is gonna be great. There has always been an interesting Nordic scene with Sweden and Iceland at the forefront, but lately it's true that the world has really opened its eyes to Norwegian music as well. Personally we think one of the reasons is that it's a very high level on the bands and musicians, but also through success Norway has gained more respect as a music nation. We are taken more seriously when releasing new music. Who would be the new artists you have seen who have left a lasting impression on you? If you haven't already, you should check out Aurora, Anna of the North & Ary. We also just realised when writing that all of those are women, which is pretty cool! For every musician there is always that moment in life where music speaks to them in a way that nothing else ever has. Who would have been the influences on you musically growing up who would have drawn you to music as a vocation? We all come from different musical backgrounds but for example Teresa's father and his love for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones definitely formed her. Jørgen sites Paul Simon
Your album as well is something that we keep returning to here in the U&I office and it gets played regularly. It is a damn fine effort in fact and when we first heard it we just couldn’t put it down. Having released your EP ‘Keep Your Tongue’ in May last year there was a nine month gap between that and the album. Did any of the album come about during the writing/recording process for the EP or was it an entirely different creative process exclusively?
In terms of the length of time it took from writing to recording and all the way through to it being mastered how long was the process itself overall? It felt like a lifetime but it was probably more like 12 months. Who was involved with you behind the scenes to help you get the record made? There are so many, but Øyvind (producer) and Eduardo (mixer) were the key people in the process who worked extremely hard. Also our musicians Jonas, Sjur & Simen and mastering engineer George Tanderø did a fantastic job. We were lucky enough to also get renowned Norwegian artists Siri Nilsen and Hanne Kolstø to perform on some of the tracks so that was fantastic. Given how fast you can turn out great music over and over, do you have you any plans to follow the album up? Right now we are focusing on touring and filming some new videos but we always write music so there will be something in the future for sure. First we just want to spend a bit of time digesting this first release. What also stands out as something of an accomplishment for you was the album launch gig at Internajonalen. In terms of recognising a gig as being important for a band that one was certainly one that was up there for you all. Now that the dust has settled on the gig how do you look back on that gig? That was really the best gig we've ever done and it came at such a good time for us. We'd been working very hard on the album release so it had been a while since the last show but everything just really came together at Internasjonalen which made for a very special evening. We slept well that night. Are you a band who are more comfortable in a studio setting or do you truly come into your own playing before a live crowd? We really love both because they are very different, but nothing beats playing a great live show. Also nothing is worse then playing a bad live show. Another thing we also like about you guys is your artwork. Every one of your record sleeves always seems to get it right time after time. Do you design those yourself or is it something that comes from somebody outside the band? We are heavily involved in every aspect of the band and do make a lot of the artworks ourselves, in fact all the single covers have been made entirely by us! The album artwork was designed by Simen Sandbæk Skari and centred around a portrait made by a fantastic painter called Roald Sivertsen, but we are always part of the process giving our strong opinions and thoughts. On the subject of the art side of what you guys have going on, it leads u nicely onto our next question. In our eyes being an artist today is a trinity – music, performing live and the third element is video. As the song goes ‘video killed the radio star’…but it was the internet that has truly made it king. How important do you see the music video in the modern age? It's different from country to country. In Norway the music video seems to be less important than in for example the UK, but of course a viral hit can do great things for you and a good video is always gonna help your promotion.
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You have released a few videos to date and two of them have really caught our eye. We picked ‘Keep Your Tongue’ as an editor’s pick for our July 2015 4x4. We were truly blown away by the innovation of the video. So let’s talk about that first. How did the concept for that video all come about? It all started with the fact that we had no money so we spoke to some directors and said; how cheap could we make a video? Haha. They said if we don't have actors, no location rent and no fancy cameras then it can be done very cheaply so we just filmed a lot on the trams in Oslo, however, you can't film people's faces on the tram so we had to animate them in stead. That way no major laws were broken. It was incredibly detailed as well, and there were a significant number of animated characters created for the video. You even released a snap shot of it to showcase the number of characters involved. In terms of the concept, was animation the direction you had originally intended for the video? Yes they did a mental job! We worked very closely with a great animator from Bergen called Daniel Bansal Dahn but he also got a bunch of other animators involved working to make all the charismatic characters. So we were incredible lucky. The animation was always meant to be there but we didn't know it would be so extensive. The video itself retains an explicit DIY flair that falls rather favourably into place when you watch it. Yet it does marry quite well to the sophisticated touches in your sound. When you saw the end product was it something you were expecting or was it a case of being wowed completely? We had absolutely no idea how it would look because the animators lived on the other side of Norway. So that was a bit nerve wrecking. In the end we we're very happy with how it turned out though, definitely some wowing involved. Who directed the video for you? The directors were Yrjan Sundfør Rodrigues & Ole-T.Skomsøy from Friksjon Film. In terms of all the characters in the video having their own identities, can you remember what your characters were all called? I don't think they had any names? But they were all suppose to reflect the person who was filmed. Again you allowed the magic work for your music by getting the video right with ‘Give It Away’. That is a video that has drawn all of these Wes Anderson comparisons. That sense of modernity worked very well with the track and carried the same signature style of the band across. Where you involved in the creative process for this video or did you leave it entirely in the hands of the director? We were heavily involved in this video working a lot with directors Simen Sandbæk Skari & Jørgen Nordby. Wes Anderson was a big influence and this video took a lot of man hours to make, but looking back at it now we are glad we made it happen. Both of those videos are somewhat removed from ‘It’s The Kind Of Lie’. Are you more inclined to allow the director to get the artistic representation right and do their thing or do you like to have some level of input in the making of your videos? Yes 'It's the Kind of Lie' was a live video so that was always meant to be different, and with the exception of the animation in the Keep Your Tongue video we are always very much part of the artistic forming. We don't feel comfortable giving people total creative freedom because they can't know what we want unless we are part of the process. Now that you have released the album are you planning any more video releases? We have some ideas for a video for When Love Is Alive, and there are definitely some new live videos in the making. You have also been getting a great deal of airplay on UK radio stations. So much so that you could say that it has become something of a full blown love affair. Do you have any plans to tour the UK or Ireland in the near future? Since we lived in Liverpool for 4-5 years UK has always been a second home to us. We'll definitely be coming over in the near future, we don't want that love affair to ever end!