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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Is Tropical
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 7 June 2011
Is Tropical first attracted attention with the release of their debut single ‘When O When’/’Seasick Mutiny’ in January 2010, subsequently touring with the likes of Klaxons, The Big Pink and Mystery Jets and garnering more fans with their fiercely energetic performances, party atmosphere and multi-coloured bandanas.
With their debut album, ‘Native To’, due for release through Kitsune on 13 Jun, the indie-dance outfit will showcase more of that energy and at least some of those bandanas at London’s XOYO on 17 Jun. Ahead of that, we posed our Same Six Questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
We all fell into music, it was never planned…
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Being the first album we wrote, I guess it’s been inspired by everything up to this point. We approached every song from a different angle – lyrical content, structures, overall feel.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
One of us will start off somehow, write a riff or have a melody, lyrics etc. Then we pass it around in file form, or we’ll play it in the rehearsal room, or bedroom, and build on it from there. The hard thing is to know when to stop.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
We get influenced by everything around us. Music we love or music we hate, art, photography, books and so on. We believe genres are hard to fit into with all the music accessible right now. We love the obvious: The Coral, Bjork, Clark, Daft Punk, Justice, Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, The Strokes.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
I guess to make up their own minds. Because we’ve been so close to our music we don’t know if it’s instant or not. Listen to it like you would pop music…
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We’re looking forward to touring the album for the next year, hopefully touching down in countries that we’ve never played before. With the album out, it means people will hopefully know more of our songs than the two singles, which will be great! We’re also working with some great video directors right now which is exciting. French directors MEGAFORCE just made our latest video for ‘The Greeks’ and it’s totally amazing.
