News

AMSTERDAM – British indie rock band Lostprophets released their fourth studio album The Betrayed earlier this year. Several producers tried their hand at the record, but the band was never fully satisfied with the results until they decided to just do it themselves. “Nobody was really understanding what we wanted to say with the songs.”

Lostprophets is an alternative rock band from Wales. Since 2000, the six-headed formation released four albums. Their latest effort, The Betrayed, appeared in January 2010 and was produced by the band's bass player Stuart Richardson.

The choice to produce the album themselves came at a high cost, keyboard player Jamie Oliver reveals: “We went into the studio and spent, like, 400 thousand dollars with a producer, and finished a record. But then we just went 'that's not us'. A weaker band would have felt like they'd better put it out anyway, but we just couldn't do it. We gotta play this every day, you know. So we basically went, look, it's all or nothing, and we threw it in the bin and we started again. It was frightening.”

After some deliberation, the band members decided that working with an external producer was the bottleneck. “A producer can only ever interpret what you're trying to convey to them,” drummer Luke Johnson explains, “they interpret your vision of what you want your album to sound like. Having Stu produce the record meant the vision between everybody in the band came together as one. So rather than an interpretation, it's you actually getting what the band wanted the record to be like.”

The radical decision had a big effect on the band's morale: “As soon as we decided to do it ourselves we got our chests pumped up and we felt really proud," reminisces Oliver. "The responsibility was entirely on our shoulders. That was really exciting. And that's where the album was born, trough that kind of tension that hasn't really been there since the beginning.”

This newfound excitement came at a perfect time, too. Lostprophets had been on indie label Visible Noise for the last ten years, but that contract had now ended. For the band, this is an opportunity to start anew. “It's weird, because most bands would be like 'game over' at this point,” Oliver realizes. “But for us, I really feel like it's about to start. We're gonna take the training wheels off of our bike and start riding ourselves.”

Interview: Kristiaan Asscheman
Text: Bas Steeman

Comments