London-based grunge-rockers – and Dork regulars – King Nun tell us some interesting facts about their upcoming new album ‘Lamb’, out soon via Marshall Records.
Our drummer produced the record
Ever since we started as a band, Caius, our drummer, has been recording demos for us. We usually write our songs together in a rehearsal room, but we love building demos up to see what works, and it’s always been an integral part of the process. Everything else we’ve released we’ve done with someone else producing, but for ‘Lamb’, we realised that we had the best producer we could ask for already. It felt so organic, and it’s our best recording as a result.
We gained a band member from it
We spent the week before recording in our rehearsal room, during which time Caius’s brother Ethan offered to sit in and lend us some guitar pedals so we could try different sounds. One day, he started playing some drums on the song ‘Golden Age’, and also a bass VI we had on some other songs, and by the end of the week, we knew we had to bring him to the studio to record those parts. He’s on about half the album now, and it seemed inconceivable that he wouldn’t join us for everything going forward.
He painted the artwork
As well as being a brilliant musician, Ethan is also an amazing painter. For maybe a year before we ever went to the studio, Theo had always talked about calling the album ‘Lamb’, and had a really clear concept of what the name meant. We also had a painted cover for our first album ‘Mass’, done by our friend Kazland, so it seemed really natural for Ethan to paint a cover for this one. We really wanted to capture a sense of innocence, and Ethan did a beautiful job of it.
Some of it was recorded two years before we went to the studio
There were a couple of guitar solos which James and Theo recorded as demos years before the two weeks we spent recording Lamb. In both cases, when it came time to record them again, we realised we’d done something irreplaceable already, and kept what we’d already recorded. Everything else was recorded from scratch, but in those two moments, we couldn’t beat what we’d caught in the spur of the moment.
We recorded one track in about twenty minutes
There’s an instrumental on the album called ‘Escapism’, which is just two minutes of this riff we had played at maximum volume. It’s one of our favourite things to play live, so we pretty much did every part of it in one take. Originally we had our bassist Nathan shout as loud as he could over it, but all we used was an outtake of him arguing with Caius right before that.
We wrote the title-track three days before we finished recording
Originally, we had a different song planned for the album closer, but before we recorded it, Theo came up with these chords and a melody. It was one of those really inspired moments where once he showed the rest of us, it took about 20 minutes to flesh it. It fit so well, and now we couldn’t imagine the album ending any other way now. It serves as a perfect summation of all the themes we’d been trying to get across on the record.
Taken from the October 2023 edition of Dork. King Nun’s album ‘Lamb’ is out 29th September.
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