Lovebreakers: Feel Good Hit Of The Summer
In a world where you can make an album in minutes locked away in your bedroom on a laptop, debut albums are a dime a dozen. They come, and they go. Some stand the test of time and solidify themselves as staples of their scene. Others come not with a bang but with a whimper, floating on like tumbleweed through obscurity. For the genre-blurring country-hopping quartet LOVEBREAKERS, they set themselves a challenge of breaking the mould and making an album that moves them into timeless territory.
“We wanted to create something that we love, that we can listen back to in 10 years time, and it’s still in our eyes timeless, and it still stands up” enthuses bassist Christian O’Reilly, who’s joined in the band by drummer Nathan Smith, guitarist Chino Robinson, and vocalist Jack Perry. “We don’t want to be like so many bands that are around where they pop up really quick, and everyone loves them for two years, and then you listen to their record again in ten years, and it doesn’t stand up. You hear that it’s a fad, that it was a moment in time and that’s all it was, whereas the best records stand the test of time and I’m hoping that this record does that.”
The record in question is called Primary Colours. It’s the sound of sunshine personified, a soundtrack of a band who swapped the industrial smog of Birmingham for the west coast wonders of California for a month. Shaken up as a cocktail of pop-punk, folk-punk and indie-rock; Primary Colours owes as much to THE VACCINES as it does to GREEN DAY or THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM. Genre-hopping in the Spotify-era could be seen as a gift, allowing you access to even more exposure across playlists, however for LOVEBREAKERS, the lines are a little more overlapped.
“It’s really hard, cause dude, it’s almost like these days, people want things to be niche, so it’s very easy to be a punk band, or a pop-punk band, or an indie band, or a metal band, but when you’re crossover like we are, people struggle with whether it’s okay to like that, cause ‘they’ve not got a mohawk’ or ‘it’s quite poppy, but it’s got the undercurrent of punk’ and the indie kids are like ‘I dig that, but it’s a bit punk, so I’m not sure’ – it’s really hard man, it’s almost detrimental at times, because when people want to check us out and they ask who we sound like, I’m like ‘I don’t know’.”
This kind of conundrum could topple lesser bands so early in their careers, yet this Birmingham-based four-piece have used it to find their footing in the mountain of mass music, no matter how difficult they are to pinpoint. They’re going on tour with punk rock legends SOCIAL DISTORTION, been featured on GREEN DAY’s Billie Joe Armstrong’s Oakland Coffee playlist, and worked with veteran producer Davey Warsop [FOO FIGHTERS, WEEZER]. They even flew out to California to create their debut. That’s a lot for a little band from the birthplace of heavy metal to cope with in quick succession, or is it? It’s something LOVEBREAKERS found themselves falling easily enough into, until the pandemic put a hole in their plan’s pockets.
“California is renowned for sunshine and palm trees and pure happiness, and it genuinely was the best month of my life so I look back now, and it was like the last real bit of fun we had all together because then the sky fell and we had the pandemic,” admits Christian, who’s joy at discussing their debut record subsides at the thought of the pandemic that’s put Primary Colours on the backburner for two years, having recorded it in March 2019. They had to make their minds up on when they’d release it. Ultimately, it came down to the way their listeners would channel their vibes more than anything else.
“We thought about releasing it during the middle of the first lockdown, which would’ve been the time we released it if it wasn’t a pandemic, and then the SOCIAL DISTORTION tour got put back to this year, and we could’ve released it in the winter of 2020, but the record, we feel, has a sort of summery feel to it, and with me personally, when you first hear a record, you’ll always remember that moment in time so if someone first heard our record in the middle of winter, and it’s lashing it down with rain, and the weather sucks, and you’re not having a good time, it’ll be a bad memory, and a bad taste on it, so we thought we’d wait.”
Primary Colours truly is the sound of the summer in a ten-song pill for you to pop to your heart’s content. It’s a diary of their twenties, told through the sepia-toned lenses of sunkissed california. It’s an album they believe they couldn’t have made at home in England. “I think the environment we were in meant we were surrounded by positivity – the sun was shining, we were right by the beach, there were palm trees everywhere and our producer Davey is the happiest guy on the planet, so I think if we recorded it in England, it wouldn’t have had the same vibe, because it’s really about positivity and longing for a better place rather than rainy England,” explains Christian, who believes that feeling good is as much a cure for the blues of the pandemic as anything else on the planet right now. “It sounds cheesy because at the end of the day it’s all recorded on a computer and you can do it anywhere, but I think when you’re happy in yourself, you give a better performance; it was the best month of my life, and hopefully it translates into music.”
LOVEBREAKERS are infectiously optimistic. As much as the pandemic has put their plans for world domination back a little bit, they’ve seen it as a blessing in disguise. They believe it’s lent their record a brand new set of meanings to be taken from it. Ultimately, they believe they’ve got a cure for the sadness we’re served on a daily basis.
“We see it as something to perk people up, hopefully they listen to it and they’re like ‘fucking hell, we’re coming to the end of this pandemic and this is something I can crank up to eleven in my car with my mates and my girlfriend’, and the sun’s beaming and you can just feel like a big sigh of relief, that things are finally looking up for everyone; it’s a moment in time to reflect positivity and hope for people.”
They may have been lucky enough to fly out to L.A. to record Primary Colours, but at the end of the day, they’re four friends from Birmingham working in non-essential industries plodding along. They know what it’s like to struggle on through, and feel they can be a band for the many, not the few. They’re a band that can bring the feel-good factor back to modern music.
“Everyone is due a bit of good luck and happiness aren’t they? There’s a lot of people who’ve had it a lot harder than me and the boys in the band, and hopefully they can listen to our record and it puts a smile on their faces,” beams Christian, his face resembling the enthusiasm of the Cheshire Cat. “It sounds cheesy but music for me is escapism, I try not to get too caught up in metaphors. I think there’s a time and place for gloomy stuff, but I think there’s something in putting a record on and for that half an hour, your stresses are gone and you just feel good – every human needs that, to feel okay in that moment.”
Whether they’re soundtracking the summer we all deserve or crafting a timeless classic to stand the test of time, it’s safe to say LOVEBREAKERS are a band going against the grain and breaking the mould.
Primary Colours is out now via Wiretap Records.
Like LOVEBREAKERS on Facebook.