With their new album ‘No More Sound’ out now, we asked the four members of Sad Park to tell us everything we needed to know about the record.
→ Aidan
My favourite memory from recording this album was the very last day we had in the studio; pretty much everything was wrapped up, and in the last couple hours we had left, Sean (our producer) said that he wanted to run a couple vocal takes for the last song on the album.
The last song, ‘No More Sound’, had always meant a lot to me and had been one of the songs that I really connected to since we first wrote it. Sam and I were sitting at the computer, recording Sean doing these takes of this song, and it gave me chills; hearing someone like Sean, who I’ve looked up to and been inspired by for so long, sing one of my band’s songs was definitely one of the coolest moments I was lucky enough to be a part of.
To this day, listening to that song with Sean singing on it gives me chills.
→ Sam
We always knew the ending of ‘Carousel’ needed something… It wasn’t until Sean handed me his Boss Harmonist pedal at the end of a session and said, “Do something with this”, that we figured out what it was. In an unorganised “after hours” session with myself, Aidan and Erik Jimenez from Together Pangea, we chaotically wrote and pieced together a guitar solo. We all played a part in it, putting its pieces together like a musical Frankenstein. We halfway didn’t expect to use it… But once it was finished, we listened back, and I remember Erik saying, “Holy shit, this is actually good”. It ended up making the record and being the missing piece that the song always needed.
→ Grant
So we recorded all the drum tracks for no more sound during the first three days of our time in the studio. It was lots of drumming in a short amount of time, and I was also dealing with an old nerve injury that was flaring up, so I was just taking painkillers like they were candy. We still had to record the song ‘Money in the Bag’, which just has lots of really fast, demanding drum parts, and I was a little worried about recording it. But on the morning of the third day, I had just enough coffee and painkillers, and I remember coming in first thing in the morning and was like, “fuck it”, and ended up recording the song in just a couple of takes!
→ Graham
One of my favourite stories from making ‘No More Sound’ was that all the lyrics were written in the last three days of recording the album. I notoriously don’t write my lyrics down. When we were recording the album, Sean and I sat outside every day for the last three days, wrote lyrics, recorded them, went outside, wrote lyrics, came in and recorded them over and over.
Another of my favourite stories was when Sean came from his home in Tucson, Arizona, to my house in the San Fernando Valley, California, to work on the album with us. He drove for hours to stay with us for four days in my hot, un-air-conditioned garage and worked the songs out with us. We would all be in there for hours messing around and getting to know each other, and then afterwards, we got to show Sean the local food. It was fun watching him fall in love with classics I’ve grown up with.
Taken from the August 2023 issue of Upset. Sad Park’s album ‘No More Sound’ is out now.
