ALASKALASKA put personal and societal challenges under a microscope: "The record is like a bunch of diary entries"

ALASKALASKA put personal and societal challenges under a microscope of off-kilter pop for a charming debut. Lucinda Duarte-Holman and Fraser Rieley tell us more.

Congrats on finishing your debut album, has it been a long time in the works? Lucinda: Thank you! It depends, the writing period has been spread over the last year or so - workshopping and playing some of the tracks live, but the actual recording process was quite short. Fraser did a couple of weeks pre-production at home before heading to the studio. After that, we spent two and a half weeks actually recording everything, so it was a pretty quick turn over actually. I’m amazed we managed to get it all done and still sounding the way we wanted it to.

How did you go about lining up a record deal? Was there lots of ‘meetings’ and ‘networking’ involved? Fraser: Lots of things fell in to place. Not loads of networking, fortunately, but that’s a part of trying to get into any industry I suppose. When we started out we spent a long time playing together and just enjoying our music for ourselves, so when we started gigging we felt good about what we were doing, and our live shows helped draw people’s attention I think. Then we gathered a good team of people around us who helped push us and make things happen.