Interview: Liars

In 2001 Liars released their debut album They Threw Us In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top and were excitedly grouped into New York’s indie rock revival, alongside The Strokes, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and into the city’s electronic, post punk renaissance led by the likes of !!!, The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. They proceeded to release six studio albums, and absolutely obliterate genre categorisation with each. The only thing that’s remained constant in Liars’ work over the past decade is that they write concept albums: grand, meaty things with narratives about How We Live, supported by artwork and videos and internet presence. There was the one about witch-hunts (They Were Wrong, So We Drowned in 2004), and the one about the insidiousness of the American Dream (Sisterworld in 2010). The band’s sonic about-turns weren’t random at all: they were chosen to support the album’s story.

More recently, the album’s story has been chosen to support the band’s sonic about-turns. Liars’ 2012 album WIXIW was an experimentation with new, electronic equipment; an excruciating, challenging recording process that made the band turn inward, as Angus Andrews noted in an interview with UTR at the time: “This time it was more about letting ourselves talk about ourselves, really. In the past we’ve decided on a subject matter, like the last record was about Los Angeles. In that way you study something and avoid having to talk about yourself too much, and on this record I think we just left that space open. So we inevitably started to discuss our inner feelings a bit”. A song off of that album, ‘Brats’ – a pulsing, onslaught of a thing – was obviously the kicking-off point for Mess, which finds Liars continuing to explore, well, themselves, albeit in a much more “immediate” way - according to Aaron Hemphill (pictured centre), via Skype from Los Angeles.

Click here to read the full interview with Liars' Aaron Hemphill...