British alt. rock group, Crawlers, just wrapped a 3-leg American tour in preparation for their debut album, The Mess we Seem to Make, which is slated to release in February. Last Tuesday, they played to an excited crowd at Elsewhere in Brooklyn, NY. Earlier in the day, lead singer, Holly Minto, made time to sit and chat with The Knockturnal, some excerpts from which are below:
Settling into the couch in Elsewhere’s green room, Holly regales me with last night’s action. The band celebrated bassist Liv Kettle’s birthday with drinks on the Lower East Side, finding some $4 pints, a price point hard to come by in New York City, but one that felt like home to the Liverpool natives. The night ended, naturally, with cheap slices of pizza, though not cheap enough…
…You used to be able to get them for just a dollar, they’ve bumped it up.
What the f*ck. It’s ruined…New York, step your game up. Jokes. I love it here, it’s definitely one of my favorite cities…
…last time I was here, I got really sick it was like my first year touring so it was all just bedbound which was sh*t, I’m much better now…I get touring now, I get all my b12 injections stuff like that but yeah I love it here I think it’s got such a culture, especially the outskirts, like I love the east side, I love manhattan, seeing all the townhouses, I’m like that’s a dream isn’t it? I don’t even wanna imagine the price on those bastards…
And y’all were just in Toronto, right?
Love Toronto. I think with Toronto it’s mainly about the people that are so nice. I don’t know, they’re all just so funny like I’ve never met such nonchalant people ever. I remember, I was joking with the support band just chatting to them before the show, and I was like ‘I wanna show you guys some British culture…I wanna show you Blackpool grime, there’s some quite naughty stuff in it,’ and they were like ‘Oh no, I say bad stuff all the time’ and the bad stuff he was referring to was the word ‘fuck’! And I was like you guys are ridiculous…I don’t know, people there are just so funny…I love it there.
I saw another interview where you said part of what makes Liverpool so cool is it’s so insular, everyone supports each other…Is there another city’s scene you’ve been attracted to from afar?
I’ve lived there since I was really young, and even when I lived on the outskirts, Liverpool was the big place I’d always go to, I think the music scene’s always been amazing there, like obviously you’ve got The Beatles from the 60’s, but then the 80’s have an amazing scene with like Echo And The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, and then obviously now the music scene there is so great…I remember that when we went to Austin, finding out that Brockhampton first performed there was really exciting because I’m such a big Brockhampton fan…they were the first kind of project to be more than a band, they were very insular…and it’s something that we really look at now, like our tour manager, our photographer, Jess, we all kind of create the brand together, definitely take inspiration, not really musically but from how they run things.
Your new album, The Mess we Seem to Make comes out in February. You all have said you’re ‘not in a box’ on this one, can you speak to that and what the process has been like recording the new record?
I know, what the f*ck…Not one song on the album sounds the same…and I think we had a really weird process where we went from playing to fifty people in our local basement and maybe like fifty in London, couldn’t sell tickets anywhere else, just like word of mouth vibe and then when we released ‘Come Over’ it blew up and it sorta rushed us to be like ‘Sh*t, we need to keep momentum, keep music releasing, need to tour.’ But we also thought, ‘I don’t wanna get the album out, I kinda wanna sit, ’like we’ve been working on the album for 3 years –‘Come Over’ is a part of that moment– and we could’ve hidden away but we probably would’ve been forgotten about so it was nice to get a mixtape out where we got the rest of our feelings out and a lot of that noise was about exactly that, about this new adjustment and reflection on that period while getting together ideas for the album.
It was also funny, we started working with different producers like when you get with a major label, it’s like ‘Oh my gosh, everyone wants to work with us,’ like big producers that I’d looked up to since I knew what a producer was wanted to work with us…it’s sick but then i was like ‘Oh wait, this doesn’t work,’ like you realize that Pete [Robertson] who produced ‘Come Over’ –and he took such a risk with us, he’d just done Beabadoobee’s first record and he was doing such amazing things– and I think from there we were like we wanna do everything in house, the mixing production, writing, occasionally just doing some Zoom sessions working on structure bits, it’s all been very in-house developing from the original kind of sound. I think that’s what’s made the album so special, like ‘Come Over’ isn’t even the oldest song on the record, there’s like 2 or three songs that have been worked on for ages…and we’ve been playing them secretly at gigs and instagram lives..I think fans are gonna be like ‘Oh, I remember that song! I know that one!’
Minto and Crawlers at Elsewhere in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 10/17
Minto steps out for a second but soon comes skipping back in. On the wall is a 8×11 black and white printout of Charli XCX.
Did y’all put that Charli picture up?
It’s on our rider…we’ve got like really annoying allergies and stuff in the band but then we just love Charli XCX
I was just listening to How I’m Feeling Now the other day…
‘Forever’ is one of the best songs ever written. That whole album is so good. And ‘Pop 2’ oh my god, that song with Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Backseat’…She’s such a good performer. I think she’s taken everyone by surprise, like imagine having a hit like ‘Call Me Maybe’ and then coming back as kinda like an underground pop sensation, it’s badass…
…But so, the writing…We’ve all been really growing our craft. I remember after we formed the band and lockdown happened, I just sat and taught myself guitar, because I couldn’t play before, I used to play ukulele so I kinda taught myself from that, I had an ex-boyfriend at the time who taught me the basic kinds of chords and then told me I was shitty at writing so when we broke up I was like ‘Ok, now I need to write a hit…and I did, so RIP him…’
But I’ve always had music theory, I grew up around classical music and used my fingers, played piano, guitar. I just try and write poetry about subjects I’m thinking about. I’ll stay up at night and be like ‘Oh that’s something that could be in a song’ and then I got voice notes and guitar parts and then it really depends on where we’ll go from there…Amy, our guitarist, just started becoming such an amazing producer. Out of nowhere. It was such a jumpscare. She’s always been just one of the best guitarists I know, she has no idea what chord she’s playing but she’s a genius. She suddenly started learning, sitting every day and watching producers. I remember one of the first things: we’re all really into MUNA, and watching them kinda analyze their stems is something that really just made Amy come out of nowhere. A lot of the songs just started out as piano ballads and then Amy would say ‘Well, I’ve been listening to a lot of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, what about just throwing some mad shit on the wall?’ and I’m like ‘Ok, yeah let’s do it.’
I think obviously, from a legal perspective songs are about the chords, the melody, the lyrics but I think some of the best songs I’ve ever heard are the ones that just give you that weird emotional tug in your chest and that always comes from production and arrangement, which the band always provides. I always say that ‘Come Over’ wouldn’t have blown up if it wasn’t for the drum part that Harry [Breen] and Pete arranged. Against the lyrics, against the melody, the way Harry plays drums is so melodic and so interesting…
…And sometimes we kinda jam some stuff out or sometimes Amy will come up with a sick rhythm idea. There’s a song on the album called ‘Better if I Just Pretend’ which has changed so much, I think it’s the heaviest song we’ve ever written which is so much fun, the bass part, it would make Tool fans shake…Amy came up with this synth melody and we kinda tried different shouty things and megaphone and just wrote it…They all come together in different ways but the overall sound and overarching story stays the same it’s just told by the amazing instrumentals written by everyone else.
Having someone who has developed such a knack for production and growing that vocabulary, who’s there at the conception of the song but is also able to convey more technical things to other producers you’re working with is such an important dynamic…
It’s amazing. I remember when we first worked with different producers, they didn’t understand what we were saying because we’d developed such a terminology with our mixing engineer Tom and our producer Pete like they knew exactly what we were doing. Me and Amy both just would sit and listen to different podcasts and develop things and we always had different buzzwords when we were writing the album, one of which was “sidechain compression.” Oh my god, I just became obsessed. I would hear a sound and be like ‘I feel like that needs to be a beat, let’s sidechain compress it!’
…Being able to communicate that was amazing and I think we’ve kinda developed with that terminology because Pete talks it through and is kinda a teacher that way and Amy going off and do
ing independent learning is great. Amy’s actually got co-production credits on three songs, which makes me so happy.
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Switching gears, a quick game of Name that Tune: 90’s Alt Rock edition: check out how she did here.
We wrapped things up with a set of rapid fire questions:
Who are you listening to right now?
I’m loving Rina Sawayama’s first album a lot, I think she’s so cool, I don’t think theres a better pop song than ‘XS’…Also, obviously Boygenius, ‘The Record’ is just amazing and I think some of the best lyrics, I also think there’s something hot about rock stars who don’t have the rockstar mentality like let’s stop romanticizing that. Like MUNA and Boygenius it’s all about this friendship and morale and enjoyment and for the arts with your friends and I feel like sometimes people can get lost in the sauce a little bit of like looking hot, designer brands, getting drunk, cocaine and all this stuff and kinda doing it for weird reasons and I think there’s a lot of musicians coming up right now who are trying to abandon that, do it just for the music…
I really like the new Holly Humberstone album. Brockhampton’s ‘The Ending’ as well. And you know what, this is why critics are wrong because the critics slated that album…like why? It’s so good…Oh and the new Mitski album, holy shit…she’s a beast. I remember the first Mitski song I heard, ‘Two Slow Dancers,’ was the first song I’d actually cried to, music had never brought me to tears and I was like ‘what is it about this song?’
Halloween’s right around the corner, favorite horror movie?
We love Halloween, Liv is the biggest halloweenie, it’s her birthday today so we went to a Halloween shop and got loads of decorations for her birthday, which was iconic. I actually fucking hate scary films, but I love horror games, which is weird, I feel like horror films I don’t understand it, it doesn’t seem like theres a goal like you’re just sitting there to develop anxiety like I have such bad anxiety anyway…so why would I put myself through a horror? Whereas I grew up on games like Resident Evil. Fucking love Resident Evil. My dad got Resident Evil 4 when I was 7 which was definitely too young but I remember playing it on the Wii, I was obsessed with that game, I used to speed run it. But then I saw a chainsaw guy at the Halloween store and I was like “I play too much Resident Evil, this is giving me heart palpitations.
Earliest Music Memory?
You know what’s crazy, I didn’t go to an actual concert until I was like 17…I grew up in kinda a broke household. I was always around music, my parents sacrificed a lot for me to do music. Probably one of my earliest was I never got to play an instrument in primary school…It was just because I had ADHD, they thought I’d break it even though I applied for every instrument and they didn’t give me any. And then when I went to high school in my first music class the teacher said, would anyone like to learn an instrument and I put my hand up so quick that I fell out of my chair…So I got free trumpet lessons. I just think every child deserves free music lessons because you never know which artists you’re gonna be missing out on…
Crawlers’ debut album, The Mess we Seem to Make, comes out in February. Follow the band on Instagram or their website.
