Orla Conway| Music Editor
The alternative rock fouresome, Acrobat, played their first Hard Working Class Heroes festival this year, before their show on a sunny Saturday, Naoise Morzadec (bass), Jacob Koopman (drums), talk about their style of music, their formation and what they’ve been up to. Acrobat have not been a band for long, as Naoise explains, but the band have been very busy in their time so far, “Me and Mark, the singer and guitar player, started the band a year or two ago. Jacob joined on drums in January and Conal also joined this year. That’s when we recorded our second EP ‘Flux’ which is out at the end of October. […] We did Indipendence, , Electric picnic, and all those kind of summer festivals, and Hand Working Class Heroes festival tonight. We’re just gigging around the new EP and made a video for it for ‘Not Back Down’.” Choosing the single wasn’t always a clear choice as Naoise continues, “We recorded all four songs with a producer Rob Kirwan in May and we ended up with eight songs. We landed on the four tracks pretty naturally, we also thought that ‘Even If’ could have [been a single]. ‘Not Back Down’ is the most lively and we decided to go with that one. We’re going to make another video for another song later this month. It was the most radio friendly, energetic song.”
They also chose to make a video for the song with someone they were familiar with. They went back to director Al Doyle, who they had worded with before, “We went back to Al because he knows quite a lot of actors and he gets everyone there on the day,” explains Naoise, “he’s really efficient and we got on well with him and because of that there’s no messing around.” The process is “quick and effective” adds Jacob.
They played a good few festivals this summer, and they enjoy that platform because they think it suits their music, as Jacob puts it they “make music for bigger venues” they explain how they change their songs depending on the situation, as Naoise explains “when we do do smaller things we try do acoustic versions of our stuff which is nice, change them up.[…[ change up the structure of things just to make it work. We enjoy changing it for different venues. Every venue we play we think “what’s gonna work here” we’re not just going to go in and blast everyone out of it if we’re playing a small room.”
In terms of their musical style and sound, Acrobat don’t want to be put into any particular box, “Even the four track EP that we did in May, I [Naoise] think each track sounds a bit different. We like all sorts of music,whether it be heavy or quiet or indie or pop. […] [W]e try to meche all our styles together. I think we’re quite conscious of not having anything too quiet because the idea behind the band is an energetic live rock band. We feel like there’s not a lot of bands that are doing that at the moment. A lot of bands are liking to be more quiet. [“More indie” Jacob laughs] [W]e want to make rock music but we like to incorporate [other styles and] still make it interesting.”
Part of the way they keep in interesting and “fresh” as Jacob puts it is by taking influence from all around, including the diverse range of music they listen to. Jacob explains that they grew up listening to 90s (and maybe 80s) music, they listened to bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Incubus, Foo Fighters growing up, but as they’ve gotten older they’ve started listening to wider range of music. This range, and each member liking different kind of music means that they all add different styles to their music. They explain how their guitar player Conal’s indie taste in music brings an edge to their style, “Yeah [Conal listens to] unknown bands that even if I mentioned bands [you wouldn’t know them] which is really cool because when we’re writing we would come up with more sort of straight up rock stuff and he’d bring an indie twist. Mark would like electro stuff. We all listen to loads of different stuff. But bands are what we mainly listen to.”
When it comes to the writing process, Naoise explains how “music comes first, Mark is the singer so he would usually bring lyrics to the table and we’ll do music.”. Jacob elaborates on how it’s a band effort, and everyone has their input “he’ll bring it to the table and we’ll say “okay, this is nice for that…” […] usually we just start jamming it out.” But it’s not always the songs that you expect that you end up with, “sometimes it comes together when you’re recording the song […] you go in with what you think is the song and sometimes things can change in there. We do it in stages, from practice room to studio. They develop every time we play them.”
With that, the final set of songs will be released on the upcoming EP ‘Flux’ on October 31st and the future sees the band gigging around on that until going back to writing in January and either doing a third EP or possibly an album. All in all it looks like it’s going to be a busy few months for Acrobat.
