Track By Track: Palm Honey - Tucked Into The Electronic Wave EP

If you were around on 'the Facebooks' last night, you may have spotted Dork streaming Palm Honey’s new EP ‘Tucked Into The Electronic Wave’ via their fancy live streaming platform. It’s very good. So good, in fact - that today we’ve got Joe from the band to talk us through the entire release, track by track. And if you missed it streaming yesterday, you can also hear the EP in full below. Lovely.

PALACE

This is the first track we ever wrote together, so it's a suitable intro to Tucked Into the Electronic Wave. In some ways it's a very ‘young’ sounding song, despite having gone through a myriad of changes since we first put the demo up on SoundCloud two years ago. It's probably the most straightforward pop-structured song on the EP. The saxophone section in the middle was really a way for us to reenergise our passion for the track; we’ve played it for such a long time now, so we had to make sure it was just as fresh for us as it is the listener. There are some cool overdubs on it too; the whispered vocal in the second verse is a particular favourite.

STICK THE KNIFE IN

This song was kind of our ‘turning point’. It was the first time we experimented with improv sections live; we only really had the first two verses of the song officially written, everything else just took shape as we felt it on the night. It was all very ramshackle, but eventually it took form as you hear it here. The textures on this track are great, the dissonant piano chords and feedback in the outro are particular highlights. It really feels like it's out of control.

GOING NORMAL

Going Normal was probably the most difficult track to get right in the studio. There were a lot of parts that held it back we’d not really noticed playing it live. It was one of those songs that we had already rearranged numerous times; we had a real passion for it, but something just wasn't clicking. Our producer Chris McCrory really helped us out here. We stripped the whole song back to literally just the main melody while Chris threw together a beat on a drum machine, and it just worked. We were hugely inspired by the title track on Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets, basically nicking his guitar sound - or at least, we tried to.

I CAN TRY

The last track on the EP came together almost by chance. We were struggling to think of what song to close it with, and just decided to jam something that segued from the end of Going Normal. It totally came out of the blue, it was probably the least amount of time it's ever taken us to complete a song. There's a great balance of all the elements of music that we really love: a grooving rhythm, ethereal melodies and enormous noisy freakouts. It's probably the best song we’ve ever written, and a great signifier of the kind of music we’re going to pursue going forward. A fitting outro. (I was so excited about finishing this song that I ran into a glass door and broke said door and my nose after our final take.)