Shortraw’s iTunes number one album
Shortstraw have officially released their brand new album, entitled Youthless, the band’s third full length album to date. The album debuted at #1 on the iTunes Album Chart this week.
The album sees the band venturing into a new direction. They didn’t want to replicate their last album, so the have branched out and explored different genres for this release.
“The album tells a story through different avenues. Some happy, some sad, some funny, some angry. There’s something for everyone, we hope.”
The band started pre-production on the album after playing at OppiKoppi in 2014, the first time they were able to do proper pre-production on an album. They had access to a great studio where they could live track all their ideas, and then go home and dissect it again until they were happy, then go back and re-record the fleshed out ideas and ultimately use those as a base to work from when recording the actual album. The band individually tracked everything, then Alastair and Jacques du Plessis at High Seas Studios spent three weeks producing the album, which was sent to Emily Lazar in New York to be mastered.
“The album is about growing up and the loss of youth, but still not really knowing what you’re doing or where you’re going. It’s a real coming-of-age bit.”
Youthless also features older song ideas. The band say Campus Life was an idea for a song the band wanted to put on their previous album Good Morning, Sunshine, but they ran out of time before they could finish it for that album. So they dusted it off and put it on Youthless. Good Winter is also a song written by Alastair and (then) guitarist Jay almost five years ago. It’s an unabashed ode to Bon Iver – bon (h)iver means good winter in French. It never really fit with the Shortstraw vibe, but with this slightly more mature album, the band thought it is now the right time for the song and it is also most probably their favourite song from the new album.
“The main inspiration behind Youthless was actually just doing a record that we wanted to do. We wanted to just take every idea that we’ve had since the last album and just put it down. It’s a bit schizophrenic like that, but we think it’s a good schizophrenia! In terms of music inspiration, it’s pretty diverse. There’s a bit of the Australian scene that we’ve been exposed to over the past year and a bit, which you’ll hear in Heaps Keen – largely influenced by Australian band, Dune Rats. There’s High School, which was inspired by the White Stripes. Good Winter, inspired by Bon Iver. Then a bunch of others that range from Vampire Weekend to We Were Promised Jetpacks to Taking Back Sunday.”
Listen to the album on iTunes.
