This interview was conducted and formatted by user Slex

After a ten year hiatus in which the band remained hard at work, beloved (at least on Sput) alternative rock band There Will Be Fireworks have finally returned with a follow-up to the cult classic The Dark Dark Bright. Ahead of the impending release of Summer Moon on November 3rd I was able to correspond with Nicholas McManus (vocals, synths, guitar) and Adam Ketterer (drums).

The first question I have is, did you guys ever feel burdened by the legacy of The Dark Dark Bright? At least on Sput it was hailed by many as an instant classic, did that shadow ever loom as you guys worked on Summer Moon?

NM: I think it’s all relative. We’re aware that there are these amazing little pockets online that still love The Dark, Dark Bright – and we’re really appreciative of that and humbled by it – but we’re equally aware that in the grand scheme of things we’re a little DIY band self-releasing records to a small audience. To be honest, we kind of thought everyone would have forgotten about us anyway. It wasn’t until we re-released The Dark, Dark Bright on vinyl earlier this year that we realised how many people still cared. There’s a certain freedom that comes from all that. Also, we don’t do this for a living, we’re not actively involved in any scene and we’ve not been playing shows, so for most of the last ten years we’ve really just been in our own little world, tinkering away at songs. We’re genuinely doing this because we love writing and recording music with each other, so it’s a very insular thing really.

But we do put pressure on ourselves – we take our music seriously and we want to make the best records we can. We’re all still really proud of The Dark, Dark Bright, and I think it probably did subconsciously act as a benchmark for us within the band, but I wouldn’t say there is a sense of needing to live up to any idea of “legacy”. It’s really just a sense of trying to make the best record we can in the moment.

AK: Where our debut album was all heart and not a huge amount of (deliberate) finesse in terms of both songwriting and production, TDDB struck a nice balance (for me, anyway). It still has loads of that vaguely emo power to it, but we’re quite proud of how the songs were crafted and produced. The burden comes in when you start to fear that maybe TDDB was as far as we could push that development. Maybe if we get too much into our heads, or we mature out of that early raw energy, we lose what was best about our music. That possibility played on my mind a little. But then when we were about three-quarters of the way through Summer Moon, and the songs started to come together, I think we realised we had something special again. Something that takes us another leap forward. We didn’t set out to create a more sophisticated record, but I think we got there just with the passage of time and the labour of love it became. And while it sounds less raw in places, it’s the most emotional album we’ve made.

Summer Moon seems to be more than anything about the passage of time. I know it was worked on over a long period of time as opposed to just recently, but was that something that came about in response to the band’s hiatus or was it just a natural extension of where you guys were at in your lives?

NM: It’s probably a bit of both. There’s definitely an element of nostalgia which comes naturally with the passage of time, and for us the formative years of our young adulthood were bound up with the band; playing gigs and drinking and going to clubs with the people we met in the Glasgow underground music scene at that time. There’s definitely a sense of looking back on that phase of our lives, and I guess indirectly at the band as a part of that.

But by far the biggest thing is that it’s just a natural extension of where we are in our own lives. The lyrics weren’t written over a ten year period – all of that comes much later, over the last few years – and ultimately I’m a guy in his mid-30s with a wife and a family and a job and everything that goes along with all that. And that’s a good thing! But, yeah, that’s the context in which I’m writing lyrics, so it’s inevitable that there is an element of “taking stock”.

One thing I find interesting is that while TDDB had a lot of cathartic sing-along moments, most of those moments on Summer Moon seem to be deliberately hazy and buried in the mix, what was the thought process behind this? Was it more a thematic choice or an aesthetic one?

NM: For the most part, we were just doing what came naturally to us and what felt right in the studio. So for instance there’s a really distorted and discordant section in Dream Song where aesthetically it just worked better for that to be a little hazy and disorienting, and it makes sense thematically too. There are also a few cathartic screams (courtesy of Gibran) slightly buried in the mix, again particularly on Dream Song, and that was just an aesthetic mixing choice. I think we found new ways of being cathartic without me screaming my head off quite so much.

I feel like Classic Movies is the song most reminiscent of TDDB in terms of dynamics and tone, was it chosen as the first single for this reason?

NM: It’s funny because that feels like quite an odd song for us. I think the dynamics are similar to some of the songs on The Dark, Dark Bright in the sense that it has that real quiet-LOUD moment. But for most of the song, the parts are not like anything we’ve done before. The bass part is really weird – we always thought it sounded a bit like Tubular Bells – and the rhythmic syncopation between the bass, drums and guitar is unlike anything else we’ve done. So, yeah, we thought it would be a good introduction for people: still fundamentally us, but a little bit different.

AK: Classic Movies was always the most powerful and weird song for me, from the very early writing stages. Nicky’s part sounds simple but then Gibran comes in, at what feels like the halfway point of a repetition, with a creepy guitar line that flips the verse backwards. I never quite knew where the first beat of anyone’s part was – even my own – and I really enjoyed that. I think it makes for quite an uneasy, uncanny listening experience because it was such a disorientating experience writing it.

Overall, Summer Moon is much more up-tempo than TDDB; was this a conscious choice or something that happened naturally as work progressed on the album?

NM: It’s honestly not something I’ve ever really noticed, so it will just have happened naturally!

AK: I think it’s in part a reflection of some of the more driving, punky, rocky kinda indie we’ve enjoyed listening to in recent years. Once or twice we’d have a few mid-tempo songs we were working on, or placing in the track order, and I think it made us pay attention to the dynamics and feel of the songs, creating distinction in new ways – rather than just throwing in a change of speed or a quiet-loud section like we might have done in the past. “Feel” was a word that came up a lot in the mixing process with Andy Miller at Gargleblast. He has a magic capacity to find it and help it flourish.

If you had to describe the main difference between Summer Moon and TDDB, whether that be musically or thematically or emotionally, what would you tell listeners?

NM: It’s hard to give one main difference because it wasn’t as if we set out to do something in reaction to The Dark, Dark Bright. It’s really just an accumulation of small choices that felt right to us.

Musically, we made some instrumentation choices which are different. Stuart played a lot more guitar on this album than before, and that’s where some of the more abrasive and spiky guitar parts have come from. His guitar instincts are very different to mine and Gibran’s, and I think that brought an interesting tension to the songs. I’ve also gotten pretty big into analogue synths in the last ten years and we’ve used them a lot more than in the past, mostly in a textural way rather than being a melodic lead part. The other big difference for me is in the rhythm section. Some of this is in the mixing and some of it is in the writing and having more time to finesse individual parts, but I think Adam’s and David’s parts are just really inventive and beautiful on this album.

More fundamentally, we recorded in a different studio with a different engineer. Plus different gear, different guitars, different drums etc, so that’s had an overarching effect too.

I think the thematic and emotional elements kind of go hand in hand. I don’t like to get super specific on lyrics or themes in case I ruin anyone’s interpretation of the songs! But The Dark, Dark Bright was an album on the cusp of adulthood, and I think it has a certain anger or impatience in it because of that. Summer Moon is a little older, a little more forgiving, a little darker in places but I think ultimately more hopeful, although I think you maybe need to listen to it the whole way through to get that!

Considering the long hiatus, what song was written first and which was written last, and what song would you say was the toughest to nail down into its final form?

NM: The thing is, for us there wasn’t really a hiatus. We’ve been (slowly) writing and working pretty much for the entirety of that ten year period. It’s just been a case of trying to find the time to get ourselves together and record, which was made difficult by general life. And then we lost a lot of time to the pandemic, which came along just as we were really hitting our stride in the studio.

We had a bunch of songs from the few years after The Dark, Dark Bright that fell by the wayside. In 2016/17 we went away together for a couple of weekends to a residential studio near Loch Fyne in Scotland. We wrote some fragments which ultimately became Smoke Machines (Summer Moon), Our Lady of Sorrows and Dream Song in those sessions, but they were just little ideas at that point, with no lyrics or structure. I think those were the first ones from the batch which made the album, so it was really six or seven years of working on the songs that would become Summer Moon.

Bloody Mary was written last, right at the end of the recording sessions.

The toughest one to nail down was probably Our Lady of Sorrows. There’s quite a few components to be balanced in that song and I think it’s the one we spent the most time mixing.

What song on Summer Moon would you say you’re most proud of both individually and as a band?

NM: It’s a difficult one because I’m really proud of them all! It changes as you go through the recording process, and then mixing and mastering. I think for me, right now, it’s probably Something Borrowed. It’s a really simple song in its constituent parts but I think it comes together nicely and has a real feeling of romance about it. But it was something different last week and it will be something different again next week. I think we’re probably all in that golden period of having just enough distance to enjoy the songs.

AK: We have a few songs that we’ve all liked at various stages of production, but I think the single choices reflect the general consensus: Classic Movies is very much ‘us’, but with a sharper edge. Something Borrowed is cathartic and emotional in that more ‘grown-up’ way, and it’s probably our most anthemic tune. And Love Comes Around, which we will release as a little follow-up around the time of the album launch, is a beautiful thing with a pretty unusual rhythm and dynamic for us. I think most or all of our songs are love songs, in simpler or more complicated ways, and this one gave me a haunting, kinda hymnal vibe when I first heard Nicky’s vocal.

What are some influences, musical or otherwise, that inspired Summer Moon? Considering the 10 year wait, were there any newer bands that inspired you guys?

NM: We actually haven’t had too many deliberate direct sonic influences on this one. We’ll probably always have that vaguely post-rock adjacent guitar thing going on, but our biggest inspiration over the period of writing and recording this album has probably – improbably! – been the Blue Nile. We adore them, although we don’t sound much like them. Meadowlands by the Wrens has also been a very big influence for us. It’s a perfect album.

And there other artists that we would take some inspiration from for particular elements. Maybe Joy Division and New Order on some of the synths, and Brian Eno. I remember us talking about the drum sound on Hounds of Love by Kate Bush too.

More generally, there are bands like the Cure, the Replacements and Guided by Voices that I listen to constantly, and that probably seeps in somehow, but I don’t think it affects how we sound too much.

In terms of newer stuff, I’m woefully out of touch to be honest! The Hotelier, Modern Baseball and the Menzingers have all been on heavy rotation with most of us for the last decade. I appreciate none of them are particularly new anymore and also that Modern Baseball no longer exist!

Now that you guys are back, what’s the current status of There Will Be Fireworks? Are you able to make any kind of statement on the future of the band?

NM: We’re still together and still writing and hopefully we’ll manage to play a few shows in the next couple of years. After that, we’ll just see what happens.

Lastly, I always like to ask artists what their favorite releases of the year have been, and considering the decade between TDDB and Summer Moon, I’ll do a two-parter: what are some of your favorite releases of the past decade, and what are some of your favorite releases of 2023?

NM: Tough question! I think I probably mostly listen to older stuff these days. That said, I’ve got two favourite releases from 2023: Slowdive’s Everything Is Alive and Hamish Hawk’s Angel Numbers.

From the last ten years, I’m going to say Observatory by Aeon Station, Home Like Noplace Is There by the Hotelier, You Can’t Stay Here by Iron Chic, IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME by the Twilight Sad and As The Love Continues by Mogwai.

Summer Moon releases on November 3rd