The debut album of Cork-based five-piece the Altered Hours, In Heat Not Sorry, is surprising. Compared with their earlier singles, it is stripped-back, dark and raw, almost violent. In the opening chords of Who's Saving Who? there are echoes of Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, that same mixture of vulnerability and force, of light and dark.
The album, which was recorded at Berlin’s Funkhaus, a gigantic former East German radio studio, is a more refined, clear-eyed take on the sound the band have been developing over their six years together.
Speaking to Elaine Howley and Cathal MacGabhann, the band's two singers and, respectively, keyboardist and guitarist, it is clear that stepping out of their everyday lives and dragging their equipment across Europe to record in such a famous space had a huge impact on how the record turned out.
“Being put into this space, the architecture, it makes you think, This is important, I should do a good job here,” says Howley. “All we had was the music and all we had was each other: the five of us living together, getting up every morning at 8am, doing our stuff, coming home in the evening and talking about what we did that day. There wasn’t the phone call from family or bumping into people to break that thing.”
Anxiety and fear
“So much of your life is so distracting and causes so much anxiety and fear, even with your friends or anyone,” says MacGabhann. “There’s so much politics at play all the time, and if you want to write and be honest, you have to be a little like, ‘Everyone f*** off.’ In Cork we’d just hang out with people so much, and it’s not even a big city. It’s tiny, like. If you even take a break and go to the shop, you end up meeting somebody and it gets in your head.”
The album was recorded by Fabien Leseure, husband of Irish singer Nina Hynes and producer of bands such as the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the KVB. Having initially worked with the German on their Sweet Jelly Roll EP in 2012, the band would have gone wherever was necessary to work with him again, says MacGabhann. Not that it was always a totally smooth relationship.
“The first time, we fought a little bit,” he says. “I thought I knew every decision about what we should sound like. He taught me a lesson by being like, ‘If you’re going to work with me, how about you shut up and listen to my ideas or just don’t work with me?’ That was actually scary, but now I’m hungry to do it more. I really appreciate meeting him because he’s not like me at all, he’s not like the way I work. But wouldn’t it be more interesting and challenging for my life and this project to be like: let’s listen to people, let’s work with people, see where it goes? It probably won’t work all the time, but we’ll probably learn way more valuable lessons.”
“He had listened to all our songs and he met us with a clipboard,” says Howley. “It was a critique, like: ‘You sound like this on this song, and this on this song’, and you’re sitting there thinking, what? Then you think, This is great, this is really valuable. He was saying, ‘Cathal, you write really good songs, stop covering them in piles of effects and making the song almost hidden.’ ”
Howley and MacGabhann have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences, and the connection that comes from years spent in close quarters is obvious. That is something that they both say is growing in the band as a whole, with Howley saying she looks around and feels “incredibly connected” to her bandmates.
As they get older, and see friends with more settled career paths, they begin to wonder if they are not being overly romantic in taking their music so seriously. Howley says that connection, to each other and to the music, sustains them.
“It’s often the question, ‘Are you making money?’ ” she says. “We have had to make that choice, we do make that choice. But what else are we going to do? The opposite, to me, is really scary. If we don’t push it out, what are we at?”
The album’s title comes with a message. It is more self- directed warning than rallying cry. They are unapologetic in their creativity. It is a reminder that there is no shame in caring about your work or believing in its quality.
Hard to be humble
“I think, in a way, sometimes it’s very fake to be modest, because you’re not being real about how much you really care,” says Howley. “That’s the truth; you really care. You take it so seriously that you’re in a ball over it. So in a way it’s a false modesty and there’s a lot of ego in the modesty, too, because you’re kind of crafting it.”
“We all feel it as Irish people. It’s hard to actually just be like, ‘I’ve got a f***ing fire,’ ” adds MacGabhann. “It’s hard to even say that: ‘I’ve got an idea and it’s cool. And I feel sexy.’ ”
He laughs and shudders at the same time.
“That’s a thing we should all challenge, I think.”
