West Midlands' four-piece The Novus recently dropped new single 'Frosty', out on Join The Noise/Vallance. Produced by Gavin Monaghan (Editors, The Blinders, The Sherlocks) at Magic Garden Studios in Wolverhampton, they once again are to be heard channelling their fusion of psychedelic punk and scuzzy grunge.
Who are you?
My name is Tyla Challenger and I play bass guitar in The Novus. On guitar is Tom Rhodes, on drums is Euan Woodman, and Connor Hill is out front on vocals.
Tell us something about yourself and how you came to be where you are today.
We have all been surrounded by music from the day we were born, it’s been imbedded into our lives. Both my parents were big rockers, they’d tell me stories of Donnington back in the day, encouraged and supported my older brother in playing guitar, and inevitably led to me picking one up myself. Tom’s family had always been pretty mod-esque and loved ska music - again massively supporting him in wanting to play guitar. Euan’s grand-dad is his big inspiration for drum playing, and Connor had always sang, being bought up by a mother who did the same.
Three of us (bar Euan) were born in the same hospital in Wordsley, Stourbridge. We met in 2011 starting high school, would always be in the music department together when everyone else was out smoking in the trees or playing footy. We’ve always been involved in musical projects together at that very young age, but things really gelled when we met euan a few years back at a show and eventually about 18 months ago asked him to be a part of what is now known as The Novus.
Where we’re based changes constantly, technically we’re from Stourbridge, but we’re Birmingham-based as a band and that is our musical home. With Connor having lived in London for uni and me in Liverpool for the same reason, we cover a fair few bases!
Give us an idea of your musical style and influences.
We are post-punk, but that’s a very broad spectrum. We tend to just make the music and let others do the labelling; but post-punk suits us nicely as some of our tracks have a very conventional punk style, others are more psychedelic, some more noise/grunge - so having that broad spectrum isn’t awful.
Influences are really just a concoction of what we were bought up listening to - but a few you can hear recently are Cage The Elephant, Jack White, Hendrix, RATM. Contemporaries / modern sounds, likes would be Shame, IDLES, The Blinders, and one of our new favourite bands we recently got booked to support - and you can see why: King Nun.
Explain the production and writing process behind your songs.
There’s no set blueprint to our writing. it varies. But 9/10 times it’ll start with an idea from Tom or myself that we’ve worked on individually or together, and we'll take that idea to the rest of the band. explain parts to them or ask them to develop parts in the vein we describe. or to put their own flavour on it (which of course, being individuals, always happens regardless). Personally, I have stacks of lyrics in books, in notes etc and Tom and Connor do the same: little influences, ideas for songs, verses, choruses etc and we usually build from there.
We work sort of strangely in the way we match lyrics and music - it’s never really a case of what comes first, more a case of having both, them existing separately and then having to find the two that we feel fit perfectly. We’ll then go and demo the track wherever we can, then take these to our wonderful producers Gavin Monaghan and Joe Murray at Magic Garden and make some magic of our very own.
Tell us a little about your new single.
'Frosty' is the first track myself and Tom wrote together years ago at 16/17. We’ve been playing it from the very start but we’ve moulded it into us and what we’re about now sound-wise. The lyrics, I think, have an air of slight immaturity about them compared to our newer stuff - as would happen with age and experience. But that also gives it the charm it has and reflects where we were when we wrote the track. It started as a track, specifically, written about a bitter falling-out with a close friend, and has morphed into this raucous anti-love song with a really ballsy chorus that’s very much open to interpretation. Tom came with the guitar hook and we built from that - but to this day it’s still so much fun to play.
Can we catch up with you at any forthcoming live shows?
We’ve just been on a little tour around the UK to launch the single, but upcoming we have a secret location show in Birmingham on 10th April, then on 11th April we play ULU Live in London with MOSES, Bugeye and Couples. After that we hope to shape up a few more things for the festival season.
Shows pop up all the time with how it is right now, getting our faces in front of as many people as possible - so it’s always good to keep an eye on our socials.
How's the first year of the new decade looking, plans-wise?
I’ll only be echoing the above show-wise, but also lots of new music hopefully. There’ll definitely be a few more singles out this year; a body of work coming up, but we’ll let you guess what that may be. Really just spreading the noise to as many crevices of this world that we can.
Where can we hear more of your music?
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Deezer , Bandcamp - the lot. Or if you want the real deal - come to a show!
Come say hello, drop us a message or comment - we don’t bite, as much as we may look like we do.
Twitter // Facebook // Instagram
No comments:
Post a Comment