Badd Energy will release their sophomore album of psychedelic punk, Underwater Pyramids this Friday 15th March on Flying Nun. UTR caught up with Trixie Darko to discuss the forthcoming album, what she's got going on outside of the group and what the pyrmaids with googly eyes on the cover actually mean.
Hey Trixie, what are you up to at the moment?
Just dropping off some flyers for an event I’m putting on this weekend.
Cool, what event is that?
It’s called Homiesexual.
Tell us a little bit about it.
We put on events for the queer community and we do it to fundraise for certain groups to help the community. This time we’re fundraising for the Samoan relief group.
What does the event involve?
We’ve got some hip hop artists playing and we’ve got some DJs and stuff playing. The theme is urban hip hop and people can come and hang out and there are prizes. The last one we did had a punk theme and we had punk bands playing.
All of the members of Badd Energy have so many projects: is this the main thing you do outside of the band?
Yeah well Badd Energy played the last event because I organised it, but yeah, it’s the main thing I focus on doing outside of the band.
So speaking of the band, the album is about to come out which is exciting because it’s been a while since some of those songs were written and recorded right?
It was recorded two years ago and then we signed to Flying Nun. But then the label had a bit of a reshuffle and now the album’s finally in the country and ready to be released.
Tell us a little bit about writing and recording the tracks that make up the album.
Well, Jess (Hansell / Coco Solid) and Sam (Moore) were still Badd Energy and they asked me and Jeremy Sauvao if we wanted to get involved and be on a couple of tracks, so I wrote a couple of songs with Jess - I wrote about four songs on the album. We started recording at Sam’s house and he had all the engineering and technical stuff sorted. Then they asked if I wanted to do live shows and then we finally did a show and we’ve been playing ever since. We’ve just had a bit of a reshuffle and Thom Burton (Moppy, Wilberforces) has now joined the band.
What is it about the band that made you want to be a part of it?
I’ve always been a big fan of Coco Solid for years and I really liked the first Badd Energy album. I liked the fusion between grunge and punk and how it’s quite different live as well. We’ve all got really different musical interests but at the same time we have quite a lot of common as well and in Badd Energy we can bring all of those things together.
You're different again live: it's quite chaotic compared to on record.
Totally, playing live is my favourite thing: if I could play a show every week that would be amazing. And it’s completely different from the recording as well: it’s a completely different dynamic.
Even though you weren’t involved in writing all of the songs album, now that it’s a finished product and you can reflect on it a bit what would you say about it – are there any themes?
Yeah I think there are real cerebral undertones. The title ‘Underwater Pyramids’ is based on the pyramids that were discovered off the coast of Japan that pre-date the Egyptian pyramids. It’s taking that piece of information and making it more abstract. There are quite a lot of political messages on the album and also just stuff about relationships with people and cool people and not cool people and being real and having fun.
You guys are all pretty involved in social-political things right, it’s fair to say you embue that into Badd Energy right?
Yeah, totally, that’s really important to us.
The artwork for the album is really cool too, who did you get on board to do that?
I’m pretty sure the concept was “go as buzzy as you want”. We wanted it to be really trippy with lots of animals and mystical things and stuff like that, just to support the concept of the album. So this guy Eli Orzessek did it all including the inlay poster and it’s worked out real well. I like it because it’s calming to look at.
It’s also quite naïve in an appropriate way, right?
Yeah totally. The drawing is really nice and simple but I think you can definitely see that there’s more to it.
