Animal Kingdom Demo New Material For Forthcoming Album

Posted on Feb 2nd 2010 3:22PM by Animal Kingdom
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Holed up in a North London church-turned-studio, Animal Kingdom are gathering material for their sophomore album just months after the release of their breakthrough debut, 'Signs and Wonders.' The British quartet will be checking in during their creative brainstorming process with personal anecdotes and photos. Here, the band describes their demoing process and what they've been working on so far in the new year.

Our UK fans have been awesome this week -- XFM, 6 Music and Radio 2 all nominated us for various competitions that require fans to vote, so we've been sending out emails almost every day letting them know how to do it. Hopefully, we'll find out the results next week. As for radio in the U.S. our tunes are being played on about 30 college radio stations so we're well chuffed to have made it on so many playlists. If your college or local radio station isn't giving us a spin, you can always drop them an email and introduce us to them...

This week we have mostly been working on new material for the second album. It's always really exciting starting new songs, playing through new sections and coming up with melodies, grooves and hearing ideas for the first time. But then you have to finish them (i.e. work out the structures, intro's, outro's, and nail down any parts that are not sitting right). This can start to get tedious; hearing the same parts over again, knowing that a section doesn't quite work, but not finding the answers [is] a real headache. Finally, however, the new songs are being signed off as finished until its time to record it professionally. We do our own demos in our studio.

We have a very basic set up, an 8 in/out MOTU sound card, some nice monitors and a very limited amount of mics. We have set up mics on all the amps and drums so we can record all the ideas at the press of a button. By having the rehearsal room set up to record means we can listen back to ideas, tempos, lines etc. to see what's in the bank and what needs to be adjusted. The plan this time is to try and finish as much our end, including all the keyboard sounds/parts, guitar flecks and harmonies before we go to the studio. It's hard because you don't want to get demo-itus -- this is where your ears become settled with the demos and you feel a need for the final recordings to sound like them. This can be a problem, especially if the producer is keen to rip things apart and try other ideas, which of course is a good thing as it's easy to go back to where you started. There'll probably be a few live versions of these new songs kicking around on YouTube as we test drive them at gigs.