The Amazons On The Sounds That Fuel Their Electrifying Second Album

'Future Dust' drops this week...

The Amazons' debut album erupted with life, this volcano of precocious youth.

Matching biting guitar pop against influences that suggested something deeper, the band spent the best part of 18 months continually on the road.

Deciding to retreat from the limelight and focus on new material, the band worked on their second album at a remote location in Wales.

New album 'Future Dust' is the result. Out this Friday – May 24th – it's a bold, direct return, reflecting the dystopian world we live in with its darker tones.

Clash finds out what fuelled it…

– – –

Jerry Lee Lewis – 'Money' (Live at the Star Club, Hamburg)

Jerry Lee was an artist we were introduced to on a deeper level through the Nick Tosches-penned biography ‘HellFire’. It follows Jerry Lee’s life from birth up to about 1980. The book is very much written like a novel and packed with dense, dark religious imagery and language that reflects Jerry Lee’s upbringing and very much the perceived monstrous character he was.

It was that language that helped to inspire a lot of the lyrics across the record, specifically our latest single 'Doubt It', which deals with succumbing to temptation.

We were recommended the ‘Live At The Star Club’ record by our agent, put it on during a photoshoot and were kind of blown away by how wild his performance was, a recording that reflected his character rather than some of his studio recordings.

– – –

Rolling Stones – 'Gimme Shelter'

We listened to a lot of the Stones at our time in Three Cliffs Bay where we wrote the majority of our album.

The apocalyptic nature of 'Gimme Shelter' perfectly reflects the sense we had that the world we had just recently left, far away from our little hut in Wales, was falling apart. This was something that influenced the tone of 'Future Dust' as a whole. The escape and release of the music, the expression and reflection of the lyrics.

– – –

Muddy Waters – 'Let's Spend The Night Together'

The album ‘Electric Mud’ served as a particularly potent gateway drug into the Blues for us. It was only after a little digging we found out it was a record retrospectively despised by Muddy, who deemed it an awkward and slapdash deviation from his more traditional blues sound; an effort to cash in on the increased exposure indebted to the famous British invasion.

This Rolling Stones cover, a song we knew well already, seemed to us to be, initially at least, the most palatable habitat (to our green ears) for Muddy to show off the raw power and soul in his voice.

– – –

Kings Of Leon – 'Black Thumbnail'

We listened to ‘Because of the Times’ a lot while touring our first album. There’s a consensus within The Amazons that the album was the peak creatively for Kings. They managed to make an expansive sound on record with very little overdubs, creating that live, exciting sound without sounding too raw.

With ‘Future Dust’ we created limitations on how many guitar tracks and overdubs we could record, forcing us to consider each track's purpose.

– – –

Arcade Fire – 'Keep The Car Running'

One of the many second records we were listening to while writing Future Dust. This is one of the lighter songs on a record that also possesses a degree of apocalyptic undertones.

The momentum of this song and the lyrics dealing with the desire to keep moving forward to escape from our shared doom (something we reflect on in our title 'Future Dust') is something that influenced The Amazons a great deal and still continues to do so.

– – –

'Future Dust' will be released on May 24th.

Join us on Vero, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and photo shoots. Get backstage sneak peeks and a true view into our world as the fun and games unfold.

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.