Interview with The New Madness: ‘You need to move fast on these energetic songs, to lock that in’

Berlin-based band The New Madness will release their debut album, After Hours, on 27 November, comprising 12 insanely addictive tracks of high-octane rock, massive riffs and lots of singalong ooh’s and ah’s.

The band has developed organically since its inception two years ago. Frontman Bjarke Sørensen moved to Berlin from his native Denmark in 2018 and put out an advert on Facebook looking for other musicians, which led him to Simeon Loth (guitar), Alex Cummings (drums) and Elie Granger (synth).

After Hours is a compilation of eight existing tracks with four new ones: ‘You’ll Know My Name’, ‘Never Coming Down’, ‘Recess, Brother’ and ‘Soon We’ll be Strangers’.

‘Every song on the album was a melody I couldn’t get out of my head for a period of time,’ Sørensen said. ‘If I finish a song, it’s because I think it’s great, otherwise it falls by the wayside at some point in the creative process. And all of the songs on After Hours have passed this test.’

He laughs that their name ‘was not very well thought out’, although it can be interpreted as a reflection of how they write music: ‘We figure out how songs are supposed to sound, there’s a certain interpretation so that they can breathe live,’ he said.

Sørensen wrote the songs on After Hours over a three-year period, both in Denmark and in Germany, and he says he can see where he was – both geographically and emotionally – in the different tracks. ‘The good part of writing an album over three years is that you get inspired by a lot of other music in that time and you can see those influences in the songs. I listen to a lot of different music, including Led Zeppelin and The Black Keys. I love that they took something old and combined it with something new. I’m on a similar mission.’

‘It felt powerful, with the riffs and the woo woo’s, it had a great effect on the crowd’

One of the biggest and catchiest of the new songs, ‘You’ll Know My Name’, certainly has the same kind of feel and energy as a Black Keys or The Struts song, a comparison that Sørensen is delighted by: ‘I was looking for a really fun song to play live last year when we had a garage rock gig in Denmark,’ he said. ‘It felt powerful, with the riffs and the woo woo’s, it had a great effect on the crowd. Sometimes, it’s hard to get the energy of a song across in the recording, it’s in the details. I had to find the right key for my voice and there are a lot of tonal ranges in it. I also transposed it a couple of times.’

The song kicks off with some punchy, energizing woo woo’s before launching into: ‘You’re like a figurine, where do I go from here? You’re in a magazine, calling out my name.’

The album is a great blend of personal themes and non-personal themes, he said. ‘I love bands that do that and we’re trying to do the same. You want a song for your mood, and it’s different on a Monday to a Friday!’

One of the more personal tracks is ‘Better Than That’ which has echoes of The Black Keys and Jet but which is also reminiscent of sunny songs from the 60’s with a huge, hooky chorus. It’s heavy and fast at once, both sexy and electric with a raw energy and they released it as a single last month. ‘That was written when I was thinking that sometimes we do things we shouldn’t have done, we think we have more control than we do,’ he explained. ‘Sometimes, it’s one step forward, one step back. It’s a celebration of that, saying it’s ok if you have the feelings you have, it comes from a place of dealing with that. It’s helpful to tap into my mind and experiences.’

The lyrics are more melancholy than in some of the other tracks: ‘You gave my heart a real beating but after all I’m still breathing. Hate to admit I lost my cool for a while, I’d bring the pain, oh you’d bring the smile.’

One of the defining characteristics of the album is their use of the Moog synthesizer that weaves in and out of all the tracks, adding a solid foundation that feels as if it’s reverberating through your entire body. ‘Using the Moog synthesizer happened early on,’ Sørensen said. ‘I created two or three songs for demos with real bass but it didn’t feel exciting. The Moog synthesizer came about from that, it’s the set up now. I promise I will continue to use it in all of our songs, it keeps Elie happy!’

It feeds into his determination to create a sound that sets them apart from other rock bands. ‘It’s been hard for rock bands in the last few years,’ he said. ‘Will rock music come back? We need more rock bands but they need to evolve. We were conscious that we needed to do something different, to make it interesting, also for our record label.’

We chat about Derby-based rock band The Struts, of whom we are both big fans and who also stand out from the rest. ‘The Struts, they’re doing something new, that’s why I remember them,’ he said. ‘We need more of that.’

Another track, ‘Night Watch’, is impossible to sit still to and has one of the album’s most hypnotising moments because of its dual-harmony bridge. I tell him that it’s my favourite track on the album and he is visibly pleased. ‘It’s my favourite as well,’ he said. ‘I was completely alone when I wrote it, I must have had a lot of energy! I knew I wanted something fast. There’s no real backstory to it, I was looking for some lyrics to back up the energy of the music. I had it down pretty much in one day. You need to move fast on these energetic songs, to lock that in. I then spent a long time producing it, seeing how the bass should fit.’

As the first verse kicks off: ‘Well, you got into our pack, rikkatikkatingting, now we gotta fight ’em all back, rikkatikkatingting. Give ‘em more when they beg for less, rikkatikkatingting. No fun without distress, rikkatikkatingting.’

‘The song’s about the way I was feeling leaving my home country’

‘Recess, Brother’ feels like road-tripping through America’s southern states: ‘With this one, the lyrics came first. Normally, it’s the melody,’ he said. ‘The song’s about the way I was feeling leaving my home country, when you can’t see friends and family as much. I was missing my friends in Copenhagen. It’s not like how it was when we were studying together and hanging out.’

Interestingly, the track ‘New Madness’ was conceived of before the band adopted the name for themselves and is an absolute banger, and ‘Thru Hard Times’, which teased the album in the spring, keeps us in high gear. ‘Go My Own Way’, the final track on Side One of the vinyl record, is true to its title, with a fuller arrangement and a slower pace than any other track on the album. It’s a sunset of a song, bluesy, laidback and cool with a hook that lodges itself in your brain.

Side Two opens with ‘After Hours’, followed by ‘Never Coming Down’, both of which are full-on, intense and danceable rockers. Album closer ‘Soon We’ll Be Strangers’ sees the band take a pared back approach, with Sørensen’s voice and a Rhodes organ alone closing the bluesy lullaby-like tune.

If he could collaborate with anyone, he would go with someone very different: ‘I would probably choose a singer with a very different voice, a very distinct sound to us, maybe a woman? Do you know the American band, Dorothy (I say that I do)? She’s so badass, to get her on board for a collaboration would be so cool. When you work with someone different, you don’t know where it will go, that’s the fun thing. You can create some real magic.’