Adult Jazz Make Music That's Extraordinary and Strange

Adult Jazz—that's Harry Burgess, Tim Slater, Tom Howe, and Steven Wells—announced themselves to the world in January with a double A-side which included a strange, five-minute long song called "Springful." (Watch the video above.) The song was the perfect musical companion for those icy early months of 2014. Its warmly intimate vocals and weird genre-hopping sections appeared, without warning, just like Spring itself. Just like the season we were willing to break to release us all from our frigid torpor.

With its seasonal title it seemed to herald the arrival, not just of Easter and grass and stuff, (give me one more sentence and then this analogy is over, promise), but also of a surprising new talent. The quartet were that rarest of artists—appearing from nowhere with a cohesive, fully realized set of songs and not just a handful of hopeful demos destined to not to meet their potential until a label throws money at them. Probably because they labored over their music for a full four years before allowing the public a peep. Now, eight months later, the band have returned (like SUMMER!) with their first full length, Gist Is, a collection of unclassifiable, brittle pop that's probably one of the most unique and special records you'll hear this year. [(Listen to the whole thing here.)](http:// http://www.npr.org/2014/07/27/333716267/first-listen-adult-jazz-gist-is?utmsource=facebook.com&utmmedium=social&utmcampaign=nprmusic&utmterm=music&utm_content=20140727)

I Skyped Harry and Steve to do that thing that writers do and try and force them to classify their music. And to find out what type of ice cream they enjoy (cookie dough). And how smart they are (really smart). We also discussed another unusual biographical fact: they're from Guildford—which is a town in the South of England best known for providing the toilet for Cheryl Cole's allegedly racist assault in 2003. (She was cleared of the racist bit by the way, but the British popstar was still convicted for being a brawler.)

Of course we talked about the record too, which was made at a £25-a-day studio. It must have been tough making the daily decision between five tubs of Ben & Jerry's or one day of recording, but it seems they pulled through.

Modern communication: Emma and Adult Jazz.

Noisey: Hey, where are you guys?
Harry: At my parents' house in Guildford.

Congratulations on the album. I hear you made it in a studio in Edinburgh that cost a £25 a day?
Harry: Was it that much? Probably. That and a bit of human labor. It was an old farm building, we used to go up at the end of every summer, having done rough recordings in Leeds. In the first few summers we were doing a lot of building.

Steve: It was a friend's dad's studio. [English folk singer] Eliza Carthy used to record her albums with him up there. In the first year we would record in the cottage house, but the longterm aim was to build a studio in the barn.

Harry: So we had to lift 400 year old cobbles from the floor. Steve's technique was rubbish: I took loads of little cobbles and Steve went for the big slabs, so I covered the most ground.

How long did the album take to make?
Harry: It has to be four years. We started a proper recording project late 2010, early 2011. We were studying. We embarked on a record thinking that we wanted the studio to intervene with what we came up. Lots of ideas would be birthed in a year in Leeds, and we would record certain parts but we had limited equipment in Leeds so we would just consolidate at the end of every year, then in the fourth year we came up to finish it and mix it. Tom in the band mixed it.

Does the new studio have a name? Are you the first people to record a full album there?
Harry: The Black Byre. Yeah, it's still a work in progress, all the old equipment was relocated from loads of places. It was a bit of a mish mash, but it was pretty cool equipment. Not all of it very reliable, but that upped the jeopardy.

I'm going to have to ask you how you met. Sorry.
Harry: Me, Tim, and Steve all grew up together. Tim and I did drama club together, we were in a play about all the Roman myths, and I was Theseus and he was Perseus. We weren't proper friends then—we started hanging out when we were 15 or 16.

Steve: We were in rubbish silly bands for a while. We jammed a bit before we went to university.

Harry: I first got recording software and I'd written some insular stuff all tethered to a drum machine, but we got frustrated with not writing to a live rhythm. Then we all went to univeristy together, and met Tom through Kyle, whose dad's studio we used.

Steve: It was a web of inter-meetings.

Harry: We're just really good friends. We have trust in each others' taste. Everyone's trying to sustain some kind of uniqueness, as well as not being too confrontational.

It's exciting that you get to self-release, does that mean you didn't have to wait for a label's approval?
Steve: We've been working on the album so long, we didn't want to just sit around, and put an odd song out and drag it out.

Are you signing any other bands?
Harry: We've decided to sign a hot band called Jack Fuck & the Jocks. [Laughs.] No, they're a hypothetical band we've been talking about.

Steve: We're thinking of coming up with fake names of people who work for our label but it's us.

I've spent some time in Guildford—time that I'll probably never get back. How do you feel being one of the only bands who can cite that as a hometown?
Steve: Ha, we don't really feel like a Guildford band. We've all sort of moved back for money and stuff. Guildford is not really a place to start a band for various reasons.

Harry: There's one venue, but it's more of a pay-to-play type situation, and there's a music college here and they've tried to create more of a music scene, but it's hard to get bands flourishing,

Steve: It feels more like a training ground for session musicians, not really a community. We feel more like we're from Leeds, where we've had such great opportunities.

So will there be any triumphant Guildford homecoming shows?
Harry: I don't know. We played a couple years ago with this band Get The Blessing, with guys from Portishead. And that felt like a thing. it was one of the only shows you'd want to go to in Guildford.

Steve: Yeah we got paid £12.

Wow, half a day's recording budget. Have you read any of the comparisons being thrown at you? NPR compared you to Zappa, which is quite cool. And a lot of people have mentioned Dirty Projectors, how do you feel about them?
Harry: That Rise Above record was a really big thing for me. That was just bass and drums, but you could tell the structure and arrangements were really unique. Only one review brought up Wildbirds and Peacedrums, who I like a lot. They used classical acoustic instruments, but they use it such a broad, modern way. Comparisons can be exciting.

Steve: But when we think about [comparisons], we feel more comfortable with songwriters, people who aren't necessarily comparable through sound, but through approach to songs. We're interested in people who have an interesting way to write pop music.

Harry: The record's really varied, there's a lot of nods. You said earlier that we are genre defying, but I think that is implicit in good pop music, it shouldn't be formal in the way it reflects or pastiches other genres. The people we talk about in interviews and stuff are like Joanna Newsom, Arthur Russell… Van Morrison is a big one. When you listen to a lot of his album tracks, so much of that is super expressive singing, it's primal and unformed. And he has so many different voices… like the singer in "Crazy Love" versus some of his more new age stuff. It's nice to have these influences, but not tread on their toes. On the other hand, you can mention modern proggy bands with kooky singers till forever, but I like it when people bring up musicians who have the same intention as us, rather than sounding a little bit similar, but coming from a different place. It's tough when people compare us to alt-J, who have a similarly interrupted pop vibe. I think it's because they're British and they have a uniqueness.

Which is ironic that the uniqueness makes people want to compare you. How soon do you think you'll be working on the next record?
Harry: We'll be a bit quicker, but the length of the last recording was an important part of it being what it is.

I think patience is an underrated virtue in making records. The beauty of not having someone breathing down your neck, label-wise, it's that you can cherish your ideas a bit more.
Steve: It was really nice not to just put a few demos up, get some attention and then make the album based on that. For us, we had such a long time to make a debut, I can't think of many bands who had four years to make a first record, and I think you can hear that in there. It was interesting to have that time, and no expectations externally. We've had people who have really loved it, and really hated it too. There was this one guys who had a local magazine, and he hated it so much I was kind of intrigued.

Harry: When we put our first tracks out in January, we couldn't make the response affect anything we did, because the album was already done.

Steve: We know people who didn't get to finish their degrees cause of being in bands and touring and it's nice to be on the other side of this time, now, opening up the record to people.

What did you guys get for your degrees?
Harry: I got a 2:1 in English and Philosophy, and Steve got a First in Mathematics.

[For people who are not from the UK, the university system over there grades a First as the top grade for a degree, followed by a 2:1, 2:2 and Third—which basically means you spent three years smoking a lot of pot.]

Wow. So now you get to concentrate on the record.
Steve: I never feel like I'm into a band till they've done an album. It's quite nice to feel like people can be proper fans now cause they can have something to dive into.

Harry: If you give everyone everything, people can make a more impassioned decision. They don't have to worry that they'll be proved wrong by the next blog post.

Gist Is is out in the UK now and in the US on August 5 via the band's own label, Spare Thought. [Get it.](http://adultjazz.bandcamp.com/ or http://smarturl.it/gistis)

Londoners can catch their headline show at Electrowerkz on 8.12.

Emma-Lee is a British musician living in LA who records music under the name Emmy The Great. She's a regular at Noisey. Read her stuff below and harass her with emojis on Twitter - @emmy_the_great.

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More stuff by Emma and more weird pop from the UK:

We Mostly Talked to Wild Beasts about Sex

Emmy the Great Tried to Buy Every Label in A$AP Rocky's "Fashion Killa"

Caroline Polachek Explains her High Concept DIY Project Ramona Lisa