Understand: The 25-Year Deadline
Following up on a debut album is no easy task for any band but in the case of UNDERSTAND, they simply never got around to it… until now. Released 25 years after it was initially recorded, the band’s second album Real Food At Last, finally started to take shape after a few “what ifs” in a group WhatsApp got the ball rolling again. Guitarist Robert Coleman took us back to 1998 and what exactly caused the original recordings to remain untouched for the best part of a quarter of a century.
“I actually find it hard to remember. I think we all just had other things going on and because we had no time pressure or no one sort of cracking the whip over us, it just became this ongoing thing of something we’ll finish at some point. Then a couple of months turned into six months and that turns into a year and then another year, and then it sort of becomes this distant thing of, ‘oh yeah, there’s this record sitting around somewhere’.”
After being somewhat unsatisfied with the way their debut sounded, the band decided to wait until their previous record deal was up so they could handle the process themselves. On the flip side of this point, that meant no deadlines and as time went on, people grew and their tastes and interests changed over time. After some messages back and forth, the idea of putting the album together just to hear what it would sound like started to get bounced around. After hearing the recordings as scattered individual tracks for so long, the record started to take shape.
“It was quite nice to be that removed from something because usually like the other sort of recordings, it’s such an intense process and you forever hear something as a thousand individual points. You don’t hear it as one big thing. In that respect, you can never really enjoy your own music because there’s always something that’s irritating about it. But with this thing having never released and never been mixed, when you heard it again, it was like hearing something with fresh ears. It was quite nice talking to the other guitar player because we genuinely couldn’t remember who played which bits.”
Not only does the record sound fresh to the people that recorded it, but it’s also a time capsule of an album that has only recently been mixed. Whilst certain sounds always come in and out of fashion, this is an authentic UK hardcore album from the 90s that sounds like it was just recorded. After hearing the album completed for the first time, one of the things that Rob was most proud of is that it sounds authentic. There are very few studio adjustments or trickery, just them playing together as a band at a point where that was all that mattered to them. “If I’m listening to more hardcore things, I like a bit of fluctuation. I feel that’s really healthy because it just gives a song a bit more life and I’m quite glad that we did it before any of that happened because we were probably on the cusp of that process happening. At the time, you probably could have been seduced into thinking that was the way to go.”
During the process of finally polishing the album, UNDERSTAND were hit with another potential setback in the form of tragedy. The main creative force of the band, guitarist John Hannon suddenly passed away in May of 2021. As a studio engineer and producer, he had been crucial in breathing new life into this forgotten body of work and whilst they weren’t in a rush before his untimely passing, the rest of the band knew they needed to finish it for their friend. Giving them some urgency and a deadline finally got the project across the finish line in its entirety, putting this chapter to rest once and for all with a completed project to show for it.
“I think in the back of your mind, and I have this with my other work especially, you can get the first 90% done really quickly and enthusiastically but then it’s that last 10%. That’s the last realisation of when I commit to this, this is over, and then it can’t really get any better. But in my mind, in that last 10%, something quite incredible could happen there and I’ll kind of just put that off because you don’t really wanna admit that maybe it won’t be as good as you hope it’s gonna be,” Rob says. “You’ve always got that optimism that it might be better than you think and so I think committing to these things is always difficult because of that. You’ve gotta accept the fact that that was it, and you know, it’s now finished.”
Real Food At Last is out now via Rise Records.
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