Hold on to your hats, and your heart. The Xcerts are launching 2018 with their most ambitious album yet, and nothing will stand in their way. ‘Hold On To Your Heart’, the follow up to 2014’s wondrous ‘There Is Only You’, is, according to frontman and vocalist Murray Macleod, “about finding a pinhole of light in the dark and turning it into the sun. We really did shoot for the starts with this one.” Their eyes are set firmly skywards. When we chat, the trio, completed by Jordan Smith and Tom Heron, have recently played Scala in London, a gig that by all accounts felt monumental. “When we starting to play in London regularly we would play in a venue called The Water Rats,” he explains, “which was a few hundred yards down from Scala. Over the course of a few months we played there like five times, and every time we drove out of London we would pass Scala, and every time we would gaze up at it, thinking if we got to play there that would be it. It was just this romantic idea – every time we were in London with the big bright lights, there was a big artist there, and we always said, one day.”
“We no longer want to be looked at like a little Biffy”
Much like gazing adoringly at the venues they once could only dream of playing, they have lofty ambitions for the music to match, and their upcoming album is where they throw everything out there and stake their claim as real contenders. “It was kind of a feeling more than anything. With ‘There Is Only You’ there was a real hunger to prove ourselves and show everyone that we want to be a big band, and with this record, it was even more so. We were really fired up to make this widescreen pop record, so again it was that feeling of, ‘Okay, ‘There Is Only You’ brought us a step up the ladder, but this time we want to take like ten steps up the ladder’. It was that feeling of wanting to compete with the big dogs. We want to be on the main stage of festivals and playing very big rooms; we no longer want to be looked at like a little Biffy. We didn’t want that anymore we want to make a real statement.” Making that statement begins with how to follow the excellence of their previous album. When approaching the task, is it a case of looking at the album and saying, ‘How do we go on from here?’, or taking a clean slate approach? “That’s an interesting question,” he muses. “I guess the only reference that we look at is if we feel the songs are better. You want to create, you are basically a musician or artist constantly chasing the perfect song, or records, or perfect show, so we are just striving to become better writers really. Say if we wrote a batch of songs that we felt weren’t anywhere near as good as ‘There Is Only You’, then we’d be in trouble. We glance back, we don’t focus on it.” Glancing back but moving forward, ‘Hold On To Your Heart’ sees them delve into personal matters, enveloping them up in almost deceptively sweet wrappings. “‘Feels Like Falling In Love’ is a song about falling back in love with life. For a number of months, I was a pretty horrid version of myself, and I wasn’t really all here. I was just kind of drifting. I was like an empty shell, and I felt pretty soulless. I had to really work at it and find myself, regain myself again and living the life I want to live. So that song’s really about my friends and my family and the band and records and music. It’s a heavy topic for such a poppy song.