A brighter future

To judge by the buzz building about the band’s imminent second album, The Wombats Proudly Present: This Modern Glitch, Murphy and his bandmates — the drummer Dan Haggis and the bass player Tord Overland-Knudsen — need have no fear of queuing for unemployment benefit in the foreseeable future. A 10-track modern pop primer, bursting with potential hits, the new record is a chronicle of the period following the 2007 release of their debut, A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation (when, by their own admission, the band toured for far too long), and of the difficulties they subsequently encountered when they came to start recording its follow-up. The early fruits of these sessions were rejected by their record label. Murphy, living in London and failing utterly, he says, to adjust to life off the road, was writing darker and darker songs that bordered on grunge. Creatively, this may have been a necessary stage for him to go through. Commercially, for a band whose huge early singles, such as Kill the Director and Let’s Dance to Joy Division, had a catchiness so sugar-filled that their sound had been dismissed by detractors as cartoon-pop, it looked like suicide. To complicate matters further, Murphy was emerging from a long period where his intake of anti­depressants had escalated into dependency.

'Once we were touring, I was taking quite high dosages, and they just kept going up and up. I put on weight' To put it mildly, things weren’t looking good. “I would go to this studio I hired in Hackney for eight hours every day,” Murphy continues, “and just literally smack my head against the wall — until one idea, one lyric, one hook came. Some days, it just didn’t. And I was a mess.” He made the awful realisation that he missed being on tour, for all that it had cost the trio dear in terms of their mental health. At least on the road, he says, “there’s somebody telling you what time you’ve got to get up, where you’ve got to be — sound check, dinner, gig. Oh, and there’s an after-party if you want to go to that, as well. You get hammered, go to bed, then do it all again. And instead I was having to make my own fun, structure myself — and I couldn’t do it”.

For Murphy, being accused of trading in disposable, crowd-pleasing, happy-clappy pop held an inescapable irony. “It was always really funny to me,” he says, with a characteristically hangdog expression, “that we were seen as this happy, weird, funky, animated band, because I knew I wasn’t that kind of person.” He had, he says, been aware of his depressive tendencies for years. “I’d been to see doctors, and it was always ‘Sleep more, do some exercise’, all that kind of stuff. I started taking [the medication] just before our first single came out. And, suddenly, I was that kind of person, and I enjoyed that a little bit. In fact, I enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Then, once we were touring, I was taking quite high dosages, and they just kept going up and up, and I started putting on a lot of weight. It was that, actually — that was the main reason I wanted to come off them. I hated going on stage and feeling fat.”

The band’s new single, Anti-D, makes explicit reference to his dependency. “Still I’ve thrown away my Citalopram,” Murphy sings, as the music suddenly ascends and accelerates, and the string section soars. “I needed more than what was in those 40 milligrams, so cast away with the doctors’ plans.” That he sings this just after the moment, in the video for the song, when he has been kicked to the ground and beaten up by three white-coated medics tells you something about his attitude towards the profession. (The album sleeve, moreover, features an extended family picnicking on a beach, their faces obscured by photographs of a psychiatrist’s couch.)

Yet, ultimately, Murphy feels, both the dependency and the period when he was weaning himself off it were stages he needed to go through in order to emerge from the post-debut-album mayhem with any sort of clarity. Just as, he adds, those early, rejected songs were the building blocks for the tracks that make up This Modern Glitch.

“I think I almost deliberately kept myself in this constant state of turmoil,” he says of the period in question. “All I could think about was finding a means to a start of a song. Your first album comes together over such a long period of time that you’re not really even thinking about ‘being’ a songwriter — you know, we need to make music in order to put an album out, or in order to have a career. It just sort of comes. Then the record is released, it does well, you go on tour, and suddenly you think you’re a genius. Then it dawns on you — we not only have to produce that again, we have to try to better it.”

Eventually, thanks in part to their label’s mixture of intransigence and stubborn faith, the band managed just that. This Modern Glitch reminds you just how thrilling and sharp-edged narrative pop — which so often seems bland, becalmed and formulaic — can be. Textural complexity underlies new tracks such as Techno Fan, Last Night I Dreamt and the recent singles Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves) and Jump into the Fog, but at the same time they possess an almost brutal immediacy. And the lyrics manage the same one-two: the Wombats’ trademark declamatory, festival-ready choruses are all present and correct, but so, too, is a sardonic, self-knowing tone that, on Our Perfect Disease, finds Murphy asking “Who do I see about contracting it back?”, in reference to his love/hate relationship with creativity and intro­spection. There is a greater use of synthesizers, but there is also a new and far darker undercurrent, suggesting that not all of the spirit of those initial sessions was lost.

A bit of the Buggles, if you will, but with liberal doses of the Cure.

“I don’t know if I could write something that is not a pop song,” Murphy says. “I need to have that hook, or something that makes me want to go back to a song. I wouldn’t get that from, say, a seven-minute slow-builder, because it wouldn’t have that immediacy; and I need that to get my head into the song and figure out what I want it to be.” Even Anti-D is multi­coloured with bright pop hues.

That said, Murphy had grave doubts about the song in terms of presenting it to the wider world. “I suppose I thought, ‘This one is just for me.’ Plus, I did think, ‘This is immediately going to be rejected by absolutely everyone.’ Because, you know, we’re about Let’s Dance to Joy Division. The Inbetweeners play us. I just never, ever thought it would be on the album, let alone be thought of as a single, or receive the sort of praise it has been receiving.” The hangdog expression is still there — even when he smiles, Murphy’s eyes look mournful — but there is an audible sigh of relief as he says this.

When we meet, the band are still some weeks away from completing an album that was already well over deadline and budget months before. Surely it’s time to put this one to bed, I suggest. “Oh, it’s just a case of tweaking now,” Murphy responds, as if he’d never procrastinated or obsessively fine-tuned in his life. “We need to grab our balls, commit and just dance into the fire.”

Two months on, the album is finally ready, radio is on board, fans are blogging enthusiastically and the flames are licking round the band’s feet. One verdict is still awaited, however. What will the neighbours think?

The Wombats Proudly Present: This Modern Glitch is released on April 25 on Warner Music