Already gaging attention from the likes of Huw Stephens, BBC introducing, and Zane Lowe’s ‘Next Hype’ with their last release ‘Part Of’, the five Essex boys, known as Courts, are back with their latest single ‘Sanatana’. Taking diverse inspirations with everything from disco, hip-hop, indie and soul, the addictive and energetic band are creating a new musical hybrid that entirely has their own stamp all over it. Sounding like the love child of Mac De Marco, Stone Roses and The Streets, Courts are not only finding their own place in UK scene, they’re creating their very own. We caught up with Dan to talk about the latest single, those diverse influences and not taking themselves too seriously.

Hi Dan! Everyone is talking about Courts unique sound and the bands effortless abilities to juxtapose and blend completely different sounds and genres to create something that is entirely new. Where do your influences originate?

Well, it’s hard to say really, there are five of us in the band and we all like a lot of the similar music, but individually we all listen to so much. We draw influence from what we listen to, but when we’re writing and recording we never say ‘Oh we want to sound like this or that’, effectively, although I hate the term, we are just very organic.

You can hear that we like guitar bands from the music, but we’re all into a lot of hip-hop now too. As your taste inevitably develops as you get older, you can hear that grime influence in there too. Even things like soul, disco, funk we try and take influences from there. There is loads going on, but we somehow manage to get it all into one thing. 

Courts describe themselves, as a ‘band with a message’ -what message is that?

For us, setting out doing music, we’ve never consciously decided to do one particular thing, it was all just about staying true to yourself, and doing what you want to do. Not necessarily being pinned down by what others are doing, or worrying about other people’s success, just concentrating on what you’re doing and making sure that it means something to you. If you’re creating something and you love it, then that’s what is important. Music with a message for us is just all about having fun, ‘don’t take yourself too seriously, and really just do what makes its is that you like doing’.

When people say ‘they don’t really have a dream’ we don’t understand that. People just in that work bubble, not trying to strive for anything. We’re from Basildon and like most new towns, there’s no sort of hope of getting out of it. For us, I guess we feel like we’ve got that hope there, and we have a shot at doing that if we just keep doing what we love.

As a band of the 21^st century, do you think it is important to connect to your listener on a ‘real’ level, addressing current social and political messages rather than create pop escapism; singing about unachievable romance and having excessive money?

Yeah, definitely. For us we never want to be one of those bands that goes away and churns out pop songs just to purely make money. I was talking to the boys at the studio the other day, and we were discussing how we have evolved and how we have managed to get to where we are musically. I feel like we have become the band we have always wanted to be, but without realising it. I think it is important for us to be relevant. There’s a lot of social commentary within our lyrics, but its just not done in a way that is too preachy. It’s basically us saying, here is what we think, take from it what you will.

Let’s talk about Sanatana the new single- I tried Google definition to find out what the word meant. I had one of two options, both were alternate spellings. You’re either talking about a Latin Rock Band from San Francisco in the 60’s OR ‘Sanatana Dharma’ which is something to do with Hinduism and never taking life seriously? I’m hoping it’s the second. Tell me more about this?

Yes, it’s the second! We all really have a spiritual way of thinking and we wrote this song around two years ago. Everything was there; lyrics, the musicality, but it just didn’t have a title. And I was just online reading, and I came across the word Sanatana, and at first it didn’t really mean much to me. Then I some how managed to bump into the word again a few months later, and it just felt like it would just work. It’s basically a native way of thinking; it means ‘the eternal path’. For us there are elements within Hinduism as a religion that’s really beautiful. We feel we relate to the word as a band as well as within that song. With Sanatana it still feels like it has that summery aspect to it still but it still has a bit more of a deeper meaning.

There’s five of you in the band, are all aspects of your writing/recording process a collaborative effort or do you find you fit into certain ‘roles’?

Honestly it varies from song to song. We will all be at the studio at our instruments, and one of us will offer up a certain hook or a bassline or whatever, or someone will put on a personal playlist and then we go from there. If we like something we stick with it and develop it, but if we don’t we just scrap it immediately, because we feel like whats the point in wasting time. We build the bones and then just start fleshing it out. But that really is just one of the ways we go about it. One of us may just write a whole song at home, and then bring it to the rest of us at the studio. It really does vary. There are no egos with us. We don’t want to stick to writing for our own personal instruments. It can hinder you, that way of thinking, you are only going to get the best product if you all just keep your egos out of it and work together to try and achieve the best possible outcome.

You say you feel like you’ve stumbled on being the band that you want to be now accidentally, so where do you grow from there?

Well we have tonnes and tonnes of material at the moment that people haven’t even heard yet. We know where our sound is going, but I don’t think I want to reveal too much. As an evolution, I think we will inevitably become a little more disco, and have some funk sounds thrown in there too. It is hard to say, because we have a lot of songs, and they are all very diverse, but they somehow manage to fit to this unique sound that we are creating.

You say you have a backlog of tracks that people haven’t heard, so once those are done do you just leave them alone or do you find that you will continuously go back and experiment with them?

Generally once it is done, it’s done for us. Only sometimes do we listen a few months back and hear bits that we think ‘oh maybe we should do that’. We’ve been doing this band for years, so even though it looks like we are relatively new, we feel that our sound is quite mature, and we know who we are as musicians. We do have ideas, but we don’t want to do them all too quickly. Obviously our brains are always working at 100mph but sometimes we have to just hold back and do things a little slower.

Do you have dream collaboration?

For the band it would definitely be somebody like Nile Rodgers, just because he’s fucking sick. But then there’s some grime MC’s that we would love to do something with. We’ve all been into Skepta for so long, so that would be a dream

What would be your ultimate gig/festival to headline?

The weird thing with us is that every time you achieve what you would consider a feet, you always think, well we could do more than this. If somebody had turned around to us two years ago and told us what we would be doing now, we would be so pleased, but now that we’re doing it, its not enough. We always want more. Ultimately, though if we got to headline Brixton academy that would make us pretty happy.

What’s next for Courts, before that inevitable Brixton academy headline?

Well, we have a few small festivals coming up this summer, and a few gigs. Release wise we’re planning another single in autumn and an EP too. We don’t want to put a date on it just yet, but we’re working on all of that now, we’re just trying to get it mixed and finished, artworking and videos etc. Just all packaged together for our next release.

Thanks Dan!

-Katie Muxworthy

@katiemux