Three mad professors, 'Two Hands' and one feisty Firebird - Turbowolf are back on the prowl.
It has been a long time - too long, in fact - since Bristol's psychedelic space punks Turbowolf put out their self-titled 2011 debut. Hoorah, then to the news that they're back with second album, Two Hands. The new record has been produced by Tom Dalgety (best known for Turbo-tourmates Royal Blood's chart-topping debut), with sessions split between Rockfield studios and Dalgety's Bath base, colloquially dubbed 'The Lair'.
"Blake [Davies, drums] would come and get us late at night. He'd just find this gibbering mess - these giggling mad men just lying on the studio floor and murmuring nonsense"
"We spent I don't know how long in there," says guitarist Andy Ghosh. "It's pretty much a few practice rooms: no windows, nothing. We were just losing our minds because there were no restrictions on how long we could stay."
Andy says he relied on his humbucker'd Gibson Firebird ("I sort of realised it's the best guitar I'd ever played") to provide the full-figured body to the record's riff-heavy heart. Then there was an Orange Rockerverb, a sparkle-modded Fender Blues Junior, a 70s Master Volume Marshall - and that barely scrapes the surface...
"Whenever we record, I just borrow anything that anyone will lend me," explains Andy. "We had a wall completely covered with amps and I laid out all of the effects and they covered the whole floor of the live room. Anytime I needed to get a guitar tone together, it was just like, 'What am I doing!?'"
You may have already heard the fruits of Turbowolf's labours in their warped Daft Punk-y riffer Solid Gold and hip-shaking voodoo jam Rabbit's Foot, but the "weird, noisy" solo on Rich Gift was born from a similar bout of delirium.
"I'd been putting it off," recalls Andy of the solo in question. "We'd been in the studio all day, but I got home and ended up staying up all night and recording it on my computer at about seven in the morning. I had no idea what I'd done. I'd just completely lost my shit at that point..."
It seems, we suggest, like quite a lot of this album has resulted from pushing the limits of Andy's sanity.
"Not just me!" Andy affirms. "Me, Chris [Georgiadis, vocals] and Tom would sit there all day and then Blake [Davies, drums] would come and get us late at night. He'd just find this gibbering mess - these giggling mad men just lying on the studio floor and murmuring nonsense. So, yeah, we all pushed our brains, err, beyond."
Turbowolf release new album Two Hands via Search And Destroy on 6 April.
“It didn’t even represent what we were doing. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song”: Gwen Stefani on the No Doubt song that “changed everything” after it became their biggest hit
"There was water dripping onto the gear and we got interrupted by a cave diver": How Mandy, Indiana recorded their debut album in caves, crypts and shopping malls
