Creeper don’t do anything by halves; their new EP is just as grand as you’d expect from rock’s most interesting band.
Words: Josh Williams.
It’s been a funny old year, but for some, the unexpected turmoil has offered up the opportunity to see out some unfinished business. Creeper’s new EP ‘American Noir’ sees the band revisit their 2020 album, ‘Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void’.
“We had a load of music that was leftover,” Will Gould explains. “When I was trying to work out where we went from our last album [2017’s ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’] to this one musically, it was a real nightmare of a transition because I didn’t quite know how to write the songs I wanted to write. Towards the end of ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’, we were playing with a bit more theatrical style of music and listened to loads of different music, so we were like, how do we write this stuff? How do we start? How we do get good at this?”
“It’s a different set of skills that goes into writing a Bruce Springsteen song as opposed to an Alkaline Trio song. They’re both challenging, but we’re much more trained in how to write punk songs. We wrote so many songs; there are so many more that aren’t on this EP. We were lucky enough to have about 60 songs we wrote for the album because we were trying to write something really nuanced, and that took a lot of trial and error.
“There were some we couldn’t lose. We ended up with a bunch of really good songs that my girlfriend said were some of our best ones, but they never made the record! They’ve been sat in a folder on my phone like a graveyard where files live forever, never to see the light of day like some sort of purgatory. With our line-up change, coming out of a pandemic, and the relaunching of touring and hopefully the return to normal life, I felt like it was a good time to re-explore some of these and put out something to the world that serves a plan as well as our record coming out a year ago and we haven’t had the chance to tour it.
