Pulled Apart By Horses' new album is done

If it seems like Pulled Apart By Horses have been gone a long time, it’s because they have. They’ve been off in their Horse Cave, getting acquainted wit...

If it seems like Pulled Apart By Horses have been gone a long time, it’s because they have. They’ve been off in their Horse Cave, getting acquainted with their new drummer Tommy and writing some new music but this weekend, they broke cover at Reading & Leeds Festival. We snagged James Brown and Tom Hudson for a chat to find out if this was a fleeting visit, or a more serious return.

“This is a really good way to get back into it, coming back to Leeds & Reading,” starts James before Tom adds, “in at the fucking deep end. We were talking about doing some warm up shows but we’ve been so busy. We’ve had to go in dry.” With the exception of a show supporting The Cribs and Thurston Moore at Millennium Square in Leeds, These shows are the first live dates PABH have played since October. They’ve been busy though. They’ve finished their fourth album.

Following a bunch of smaller shows and festivals to break in their new drummer, the band “definitely knew what direction they wanted to go in.”

“One thing was to make sure we didn’t put any labels to it,” continues Tom. “But since Tommy joined, it’s obviously going to sound different because he brings something new to it. We just let it happen in a really natural way. We did a lot of experimentation with Fuzz pedals and getting nasty, interesting sounds. We wanted to do that with the last album but that took on a different journey. It was pretty slick and at the time, it made sense. After having some time away and being stuck in a sweaty little practice room, we just got stuck in. Chucking anything in without really thinking.” Album four reminds Pulled Apart By Horses of their first record, “not sound wise but vibe wise,” explains James. “There was no pressure to make this record this time. We needed to make a record for ourselves. It just happened, we wrote some songs and recorded them.”

Making sure they weren’t creating in the shadow of their past, the band didn’t compare it to anything they’d done before. “No one's looking over your shoulder. You’re writing what you want to write, you’re not thinking anything except 'this sounds cool.' It’s freely done. There’s no one dictating or saying ‘make sure you sing on some of the songs’ or ‘make sure there’s a poppy one and a slow one’.”

The band felt a little bit of the pressure and expectation surrounding their third album, 2014’s ‘Blood’. “We did something we were really proud of but at the same time, we were in a different place then,” offers James. “It’s all naturally unfolded.”

“Since Bowie, we’ve ben backtracking through his catalogue and we got heavily into Iggy Pop and his new album,” adds Tom. “I spent months listening to ‘The Idiot’, ‘Lust For Life’ and The Stooges’ ‘Raw Power’. There’s a vibe of that sort of thing running through our new album. Just going back to the good ol’ stuff that’s done really well, back when it was simpler but was coming from the heart.”

Using the past weekend as a deadline, the band are busy sorting out their plans to launch. The used their Reading & Leeds sets to deploy the ear worms and there’s a view to the band “putting out some new stuff in the next couple of months, all going to plan.”

Plenty of time to prepare yourselves, right?

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