WHAT We Might Know, the forthcoming album from Edinburgh’s Broken Records, brims with hit single contenders. From the proclamatory swagger of opener and lead single They Won’t Ever Leave Us Alone through the pistons-firing, driving rock of The Inbetween to the throbby, New Order-esque pop of Perfect Hollow Love, it fulfils the band’s intent to make a “record that you could play on a hot summer’s day and turn the windows down”.
Rather than 2014’s string-swathed Weights and Pulleys and the sprawling cinematics of its 2010 predecessor Let Me Come Home, What Me Might Know is the most straight-up rock ’n’ roll record the band have made in more than a decade together.
Joy, resilience and redemption are the predominant tones, and the influence of Bruce Springsteen – eternal king of those qualities – is a given.
“Our love of Springsteen is getting to the point of parody,” says frontman Jamie Sutherland of himself and his brother Rory, who formed the band with pianist Ian Turnbull and drummer Andrew Keeney.
“There’s something in the way he writes songs. There are bits of him and it’s not him. And the craft of his song-writing, the weird moral centre. The killer part is the bridge, then you move on to the chorus. I love that, and to me it never gets old.”
Drawing a line under their Weights and Pulleys era with a September 2015 show at Edinburgh’s La Belle Angele, the band took a break, had some children and reconfigured. Adam McMillan – aka AdMac from hard-grafting hip-hop politicos Stanley Odd – joined full time on bass in 2016, freeing up former bassist Craig Ross for his principal instrument, the guitar.
Springsteen, especially 1987s Tunnel of Love, was “kicking around”, as was The Cure and Life’s Rich Pageant, the 1986 album which saw REM winningly move into accessible pop.
“That record is 10 really great rock ’n’ roll songs thrown on an album,” says Sutherland. “That’s what we wanted to do: write some pretty linear pop songs, keep things simple and have some fun with it really.”
It was the first time the songwriter had used Logic, software which allowed him to “point people in at least the right direction” rather than “spend months of us in the practice room, or me trying to articulate ideas without any musical language whatsoever.”
Honed by a few months of intense rehearsals and some preproduction work taken on by former violinist-cum-electronic whizz Rory, the album was in lean, rippling shape by the time they took it to Stephen Watkins at Edinburgh’s Post Electric Studio.
Now run by producer Kris Pohl and Idlewild’s Rod Jones, the studio is the site of the recording of Broken Records’s Watkins-produced debut EP, lain down in 2006 when the Constitution Street site was called Tape Studios.
“We just wanted to work with the guy who had got us excited about making music,” says Sutherland. “Watkins is a bit of a mad professor and he captured what excitement we had at the time into that record. It was what I think got a lot of people interested in us in the first place.
“So when he got us in the room we just went through it. We were tight, the feeling was really good. He really looked after us, kept the mood up. And I think with this record he’s done that again, it really jumps off the speakers.”
Broken Records’s strong suit, Sutherland says, is the “big moment”. And while the songs are big, the themes are just as weighty. Many tracks, like the storming They Won’t Ever Leave Us Alone – the tender, joyful video to which features a real-life couple – are about “couples in their 30s, and dealing with the fact that not everything works out all the time”.
“I make a point of telling my wife that a lot of these songs have elements of her in them, but that they are not autobiographical,” says Sutherland. “There are parts that are mine and Emily’s and parts that are not about public consumption. It’s about feeling that, yes, things may sometimes be a little difficult now, but visualise an older couple that has gone through all this stuff, this is what has made them. Having the difficult times made them the couple we admire today.”
Mar 30, live instore and signing, Assai Records, Edinburgh, 1pm.
Apr 13, The Tooth and Claw, Inverness, 7.30pm, price TBC.
Apr 21, Church, Dundee, 6.30pm, £10. Tickets: bit.ly/BRDundee
Apr 26, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 8pm, £14. Tickets: bit.ly/BREdinburgh
Apr 27, Strange Behaviours with The Little Kicks, The Cobalts, Tolbooth, Stirling, 7.30pm, £9. Tickets: bit.ly/StrangeStirling
Apr 28, Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, time and price TBC.
May 18, Stereo, Glasgow, 7pm, £12. Tickets: bit.ly/BRStereo
What We Might Know is released on March 30 via JSharp Records
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