Despite being relatively new to the scene, Manhattan indie pop outfit Cults has made astonishing headway since its inception in 2010.
Composed of Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, the band released its first full-length album, the self-titled “Cults” in 2011, just a year after meeting as students in New York City. Fast forward six months, and the band’s single, “Go Outside” is being made into a music video starring Dave Franco and Emma Roberts.
Since then, the band’s song “I Can Hardly Make You Mine” was featured on the soundtrack of the latest “Carrie” remake. The band has also made huge strides when it comes to musicianship — Follin deals largely with vocals, while Oblivion tends to stick to instrumentals, but for “Static,” the two collaborated.
“We’ve taken what I consider pretty gigantic strides as musicians because when we started, we were real
amateurs,” Oblivion said.
Along with the strides the band took as far as
musicianship, Cults changed its pace aesthetically. The title for the band’s latest release, “Static,” is completely conceptual.
“We kind of have an aesthetic framework in mind before we start working on a record, and for this one it was just an image that we had come up with of like a TV in a dark room playing static,” Oblivion said. “If there was music coming out of it, what would it be? How would it feel? We like how ambiguous the whole word is and the whole idea of static in the digital age and how it relates to disconnection, as it relates to changes. It was a concept that we really
developed.”
Follin and Oblivion have faced their share of challenges since the beginning of Cults. The stresses of touring and the end of a four-year relationship between them led the band to take a brief hiatus in May of 2012. Since then, the only challenges met by the band have been self-imposed.
“The only challenges were the ones that we put on ourselves,” Oblivion said. “We wanted to make sure that every part of every song was as good as it could be. We had to audition a ton of different things, and we recorded three different times in three different studios. We really pushed ourselves to make sure the sound that we heard in our head was what was on the record.”
What they heard was, in part, influenced by two producers Cults brought in for the record. Shane Stoneback (Sleigh Bells, Vampire Weekend) and Ben Allen (Animal Collective) were both largely to thank for the album’s eventual sound.
A longtime friend of the band, Stoneback produced the band’s first record. He’s notoriously a perfectionist – much like Oblivion – and the two spent weeks poring over every detail of the album. Their perfectionist mentality got so bad that Cults’ label had to stage interventions so work could get done.
“Our label and our manager came in and made us listen to the old mixes versus the new ones and we could barely even tell the difference anymore, we were just kind of spinning our wheels like crazy because we were so involved in it, so that’s why we went down to Atlanta and worked with Ben Allen,” Oblivion said.
The band is looking forward to Voodoo not just for their set, but also to see festival mates Nine Inch Nails and Paramore.
You can catch Cults on Saturday at 4:15 p.m. on the
Ritual Stage.
Cults to bring improved set to Voodoo
October 31, 2013