Warpaint: Heads up!

"Cool, let’s try it,” says the vocal sample at the very start of ‘The Stall’, capturing a moment in the studio and the spirit of Warpaint’s third album, ‘Heads Up’. After the dark, delicate beauty of 2014’s self-titled album, the band has come back with a rainbow confidence.

Sitting on the finished record since May, Emily is getting impatient for people to hear it. “At this point I’m ready to make another album,” she says, and despite the surprising direction the band have taken, there are no worries - only excitement. “I’ve been in this band since 2004 so to be able to still have so much room to try new things, for the band to have new places to go and to not be retreading the same ground, is what makes it exciting.

“There was something to this process that was really unknown, it was more spontaneous and we didn’t really fall into old patterns or old roles. It almost made it feel like a different band. It was a different approach and it ended up being a lot faster for us. It was a lot of fun to make and I know a lot of albums that I love, they weren’t fun to make for the artists necessarily, so I don’t think that’s a pre-requisite. There was this spirit of making the album that really come through in the final product.”

The plan was to hit the studio immediately after the intense touring for ‘Warpaint’ finished but at the last minute the band decided they needed a proper break. Out of that came solo albums, collaborations with the likes of Kurt Ville, SBTRKT and Jamie xx, as well as a space to let individual ideas grow. “Everyone had gotten a lot of their own music out of their system. When we came into the studio to start working, we had ‘So Good’ and a couple of demos that we had made together and then this list of songs, ideas and things that people had been doing in the break. That was a really new process for us.”