It’s been four years since Leeds-based the Sunshine Underground released their debut album ‘Raise The Alarm’ and many people have been left wondering whether the band would return at all. However, in February this year, they made their comeback with second album ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’.

‘Raise The Alarm’ was hailed, upon its release in 2006, as being one of the great albums of the then popular “New Rave” genre. With the new album, the Sunshine Underground have gone more towards a guitar rock direction. In a recent interview with Room Thirteen, singer Craig Wellington explained what the band has been up to in the last four years and spoke a bit about the new album.

R13: First of all, well done with the new album. How have things been going since its release?
CW: Good. We did a tour in February to support it when it came out, it’s been going down well. It’s good to get out and play it live after being away writing it for so long. Now that it’s actually out there and people know it, it’s a relief.

R13: Many bands claim that their second album is the most difficult to make. Did you find that this was the case with ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’?
CW: It was in a way. We spent a long time writing it and there were parts that were quite productive. In the early sessions we got the sound of it kind of locked down. Then there were a fair few months in between with nothing really happening. It’s definitely difficult. We gave ourselves a lot of time to do it. We’re lucky that we were able to do that, really. We thought that it was better to not get too stressed. We wanted to release it a year before we did, but it’s better that we didn’t and that we just carried on writing. We got the vital bits that really made it a good album towards the end of the writing sessions. We felt like we needed to move on and that took a little bit longer than we expected.

R13: Following the success of ‘Raise The Alarm’, did you aim to make a second album that followed a similar style or were you keen to try something different?
CW: I think the new record sounds like us, but we wanted to move on a little bit. We wanted to make something a bit heavier and a bit darker. I think ‘Raise The Alarm’ was quite “pop hit” sounding in its production. I think that made a good record, but we wanted to try something heavier, which I think we have in places. I think the idea is to always approach an album with a different view. We don’t want to repeat ourselves.

R13: How would you describe the sound of the new album?
CW: There are a lot of different influences. We all listen to a lot of different stuff and we all contribute equally to the process of writing songs. It’s got its dance influences but it’s more of a guitar record.

R13: You mentioned the tour in February. How have audiences been responding to the new songs?
CW: It’s been really good. Last year, we road tested them a bit. We went out and did a mini tour to try them out. The hardcore Sunshine Underground fans already knew the songs because we’d posted them up on MySpace in demo form. It went down really well.

R13: Were there any songs in particular that went down especially well?
CW: Yeah. It’s interesting when it’s out and people tell you their favourites. The more dancey ones people reacted to quite well. A track called ‘Warning Sign’ and one called ‘We’ve always Been Your Friends’ seemed to go down quite well. Ones that people can jump around to they always like.

R13: The title of the album is featured in the lyrics of its opening track. Please could you explain the meaning of the title?
CW: I like to keep it sort of vague in a way. Open to interpretation maybe. It was the first line that I started singing in that song. We usually just crank the guitars up and start playing and I shout a load of rubbish over the top. Words usually end up forming themselves. It always seems to be the last thing that happens. I don’t know where those words came from, but it was definitely a keeper for a title. It’s a bit doom and gloom. It could be political, it could be religious. I quite like the darker side of lyric writing.

R13: When you’re writing lyrics, do you try to write about things that are particularly meaningful to you?
CW: Yeah, I think so. Some people have different attitudes towards how to write songs. I try not to think about it too much, but there’s always been a serious side to lyric writing that we have. We don’t write love songs or anything like that, but at the same time we don’t write songs about nothing. As I said earlier, I’m naturally a bit doom and gloom anyway. I’m quite a cynic and I think the odd little lines like that end up forming the rest of the songs, so I end up writing a song around literally one line and base the idea of the song around that. Sometimes there are lyrics that just happen straight away and then some songs where there are odd lines here and there, but no actual finished lyrics. It’s strange, the way the writing process works like that. Some songs write themselves and others you’re writing twelve months later.

R13: The Sunshine Underground has been noted in the past for making a blend of rock and dance music. What types of music would you say have influenced the band a lot?
CW: It’s difficult to say. The sound of the band probably comes from the fact that we listen to as much electronic music as we do, and guitar music as well. LCD Soundsystem are a good representation. We’ve moved away from that with this record. We’ve tried to make something that was a little bit more guitar-heavy. But it’s all coming round full circle with the stuff we’re working on at the moment, which is for the third album. We’re up for following that up quite soon as we’ve been away for so long. All the new stuff is kind of electronic and more dance-orientated than anything we’ve done before, even on the first album. Like I said before, it’s quite good to have little projects, like writing an album, and it’s good to do something else with each one.

R13: What about specific bands, are there any big influences?
CW: I don’t know, really. We don’t write songs to replicate anything. For this album, we wanted to make a bit of a racket and form songs out of it. We had our own sounds from the first album, which we improved the more and more we played live and we’ve just sort of capitalised on that, really. There wasn’t any particular band that we wanted to sound like.

R13: I understand that the band’s name was borrowed from a Chemical Brothers song. Were they a personal favourite for everyone in the group?
CW: Yeah, definitely. We grew up listening to their records and we went to see them quite a few times when we were starting the band. That was the song they always used to end their set on. We were looking for a name and that kind of came up. I don’t think I was that keen on it at first, but I’ve grown to like it.

R13: Have you ever mentioned it to them?
CW: I think Matt [Gwilt, drummer] went up to them at Glastonbury once and said: “We named our band after you” and they said that there was a band in the sixties called the Sunshine Underground.


The album ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’ is out now and the new single ‘Spell It Out’ was released on 17th May.