Tobi Duncan invites Kerrang! into the studio to talk doing things the hip-hop way, keeping his lyrics raw, and if Trash Boat have been DMing anyone for collabs…
Trash Boat aren’t making an album ‒ the St Albans punks are making and releasing a load of songs that will eventually become an album. Frontman Tobi Duncan explains how they’re acting on impulse, doing what they want, and becoming the band they always wanted to be…
“I’m going to shake up the whole beehive right now: there isn’t a record. There’s music, which will most likely eventually become a record because that’s how things go. What we’re trying to do is something like the hip-hop industry, where it’s wonderfully incestuous, and they’re all doing songs with each other, and they’re constantly in the studio. They’re not releasing albums, they’re releasing music. That’s what we’re going to be doing for the foreseeable future: we’re going to write consistent music, piece by piece, release them as songs, maybe find some cool features, maybe some collaborations, something like that. And then eventually, once we’ve written however many songs, it will probably end up turning into an album.”
“We do our thing between our houses. We track a lot at Ryan’s [Hyslop, guitar] and Oakley’s [Moffatt, drums] houses, but we’ve been working a lot at Marshall Studios in Milton Keynes, the place where they make the amps. They’re super-cool studios, relatively freshly built, and all the staff are wonderful. They gave us a nice little tour of the amp factory. That’ll probably be where we record for the foreseeable future. They’ve got some crazy stuff in there as well, and they let us borrow whatever we wanted.”
“I spent our first records really intensely micro-managing everything. I wanted to make sure every lyric was sculpted so everyone thought I was the smartest lyricist in the world. But with the last album, Don’t You Feel Amazing?, everything was a lot more raw. We wrote four songs on that record in the studio. I wrote some lyrics in less than an hour, and they’re some of the best lyrics I’ve ever written, because I was thinking, ‘What do I really want to say without hiding it behind loads of cryptic metaphors and analogies and 50 layers of subtext?’ I’ll be continuing and refining that method for this. I want to keep that rawness, and develop it.”
“I feel like early on we were writing music to fit in. It was the music we wanted to write, and we didn’t change what we wanted to do to fit in, but we were writing music because we wanted to tour with specific bands, and we wanted to be in a certain scene. And we loved it. But now it’s like, ‘Let’s start our own party. Let’s do our own thing.’ We’re not trying to fit in, we’re literally just gonna write whatever we feel like. We’re going to start our own vibe and our own thing.”
“Can I tell you who? No, because we haven’t actually started working with them yet. It’s still in the DMs phase. It’s gonna happen. And if you can figure it out, it’s very obvious. Once it materialises, I’ll be a lot more confident in saying who we’re working with. If I tell you who it is now, the next email I get will be them saying they hate the song or something! But it’s really exciting. I can’t wait for it to happen and for people to hear what we’re thinking of.”
Trash Boat play Slam Dunk Festival in May. This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the magazine.
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