Introducing Interview: Pure Joy

Ahead of their debut release, we chatted to Lee from Merseyside’s latest offering, Pure Joy, to find out a bit more about the band and what we can expect from a debut that’s been two years in the making…

Hey, how are you?
Good thanks!

Could you start by telling us a bit about Pure Joy? We can all read press releases but what do you say about the band?
We’re a group of mates from school who’ve spent a couple of years getting together in a recording studio. We’ve gone about making a brand new band, which we’re very excited about. It’s sort of a summation of all the different influences we have – it’s quite unique and we’re all very excited about Pure Joy.

It’s just over a week until your debut album Bang Flower comes out – has it been a long time coming?
It’s been ages! Must be a couple of years since we decided to do Pure Joy and started working on it. We wanted to take our time, and we’re grateful because it’s luxury that not many bands have. Being able to release something you’re happy with and we wanted to announce it all at once. Didn’t want to start playing gigs with the tracks not finished, so I suppose we’ve done it back to front – getting everything ready so we can present it as a finished product.

The album as a whole, and certain tracks, are relatively short (with opener ‘Bubblegum Husky’ coming in at just under a minute) – was this calculated or purely how you write?
I think it just reflects us a band and me as songwriter. There are so many different ideas and little nuggets, it just happened like that. We hardly use the same guitars or synths twice on the album. It’s sort of smash and grab, and it works quite well. Something quite concise drops out. I think it makes it quite different to other psychedelic bands – it’s where the pop elements seem to come in.

You seem to have adopted quite an American sound as well, despite coming from Liverpool – where does this influence stem from?
I dunno! I suppose if we just took music from where we’re from as inspiration we’d sound like a skiffle band or something. But the world’s a small place and it just so happens that the music we make and listen to is from that part of the world – we didn’t set out to sound like anything in particular but if you sit there all week listening to Foxygen’s new album or The Oh Sees, you’re gonna start playing something that sounds like that. One thing that’s been good about the time frame is that in two years the music we listen to changed and so we get madly different influences.

The album does seem very psych-heavy, which seems to be something a lot of bands are adopting. Where do you think this revival/sudden influence stems from?
I mean I’d prefer to just call it ‘weird’: that’s what the album is, it’s just ‘odd’. I mean – and I’m not saying we’re the same – but is Ariel Pink psych? I suppose it’s hard to get back to a time in Merseyside before Liverpool Psych Fest but it’s such a lose term. If we’re talking about psych in terms of it being washed out, weird and trippy then yeah.

It is a very festival ready sound. Have you got any other festivals planned for this year?
Yeah we’ve got Festevol, The Great Escape and then some European dates. We announced everything pretty late, so we can’t catch festivals this year but everything about the band’s been received fantastically so far. It’s just sort of an introduction to the band with bigger and better things to come.

And I’m assuming there’ll be less of a wait for the second album?
I don’t want to give too much away but we’ll be working on stuff for the end of the year. We want to build on the concept with the next album – this one’s quite sporadic and we want to slightly adapt that. Not that we’re not happy with it, we just want to do something different.

Could you pick a favourite track from the album?
I think it’s probably one I didn’t write haha – ‘Theme From… Peach Fuzz’. It’s just very off-kilter. ‘Sweet Jesus’ is my favourite to play, and I do like ‘Girl’. I got a bit bored of it…

… That’s bound to happen with your own stuff though!
Exactly. And I’m really happy because I’ve not got bored of the album as a whole. Every time I listen there’s something that I forgot we did.

Quite rightly so, it is a fantastic album! We’ll finish with a tricky one – if you could have written any song in the world, what would it be?
Ooh, either ‘Chelsea Hotel’ by Leonard Cohen, or Bill Fay ‘I Hear You Calling’. It’s not my favourite song ever but as a simple Neil Young-esque thing it’s a bit of immediate genius.

Huge thanks to Lee for answering our questions!

Pure Joy’s debut album Bang Flower is out 1 April.

Melissa Svensen
@MelYeaahh