“A lot of the album is about different relationships I‘ve had and the chaos and neurosis that goes along with them,” says Erik Sandburg, Wake The President’s chief songwriter. “I had a lot of pent-up emotion which I just put into the songs.”
Certainly one listen to Wake the President’s second album ‘Zumutung!’ will confirm this, as there is an intensity to the Glaswegian band’s music that was missing on their debut.
“I think with the first album there was a lot of references to C-86 indie pop and we tried to rebel against that on this album,” says Erik. “I mean, we’re still an indie-pop band but the lyrics and music are a lot darker. When it came to the lyrics I was really inspired by the Harold Pinter quote: ‘A writer life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.’ ”
When it came to the music, Erik was inspired by Nick Drake’s use of altered guitar tunings. “I just got bored of standard tuning so I’d detune the strings and I’d have no idea what kind of tuning I was using. There’s tunings I use on the record that are really strange.”
Like its predecessor, ‘Zumutung!’ was recorded over five weeks in Chem 19 studios with Paul Savage and Erik is full of praise for the ex-Delgado drummer’s contribution. “Paul’s an amazing producer and it was great to work with him again on this record” says Erik. “It’s funny, I think before we had a bit of a mental block when it came to recording an album. I mean, it basically took five years to get the songs together to record the first one, and its taken about two and a half years to do this one. I think now we feel a lot more confident we can do it, so hopefully the third album won’t take so long.”
‘Zumutung!’ may have taken longer to complete than Erik would have liked, but this is probably down to the band effectively breaking-up after the first album. “We lost our bassist and drummer, so it was just me and Bjorn” (Erik’s twin brother and the band’s guitarist) he explains. “After a while we just decided to carry on going to our rehearsal space to write. It took us ages to get a band together, though. We basically got our final line-up together a couple of months before we had to do shows.”
The band embarked on a tour of European cities in the run-up to ‘Zumutung’’s release and Erik is happy with the reception they received. “In Europe they have more of a tradition of encores, so that was a new experience for us!” he comments. “It’s strange that in places like Paris and Berlin we were headlining but in Glasgow we can sometimes struggle to get a crowd.”
However, it seems that slowly but surely, things are starting to happen for Wake The President. Erik says they are in the process of confirming their first US tour, and they have recently signed a publishing deal. He also reveals that one of their songs is set to be used in a forthcoming episode of Hollyoakes, surely a prime indicator that the band are on the verge of invading the mainstream!
Sync deals with dodgy teen soaps aside, Erik is looking forward to the future, and is set to decamp to London for a couple of months early next year to finish writing album number three. While ‘Zumutung!’ has only just been released, it seems we‘ll be hearing plenty more from Wake the President soon enough.
Wake The President’s new album ‘Zumutung!’ is out now on We Can Still Picnic/PIAS
- Robin Adams - 2 March 2023
- Robin Adams - 3 November 2020
- Robin Adams - 20 March 2018