Black Rebel Motorcycle Club stirs with a raw sexual energy, from howling front porch stomps on the Chattanooga and beer-sloshing Texas roadhouse rockouts, to swaggering proto-punk sneering in NYC’s basement bars.
For six months, Hayes, Been and new drummer Leah Shapiro, holed up in a basement studio together, during one of the coldest winters in recent history. In this house outside Philadelphia – the same place Howl was penned – they built their first album as a new band from the ground up. “It was like a family again, living together and working really closely like that,” Been says. “Something happened to us out there though, I’m not sure if we beat back our demons, or if we just let them take us over completely. But strange days make for strange times.”
Shapiro replaced longtime BRMC drummer Nick Jago behind the set, bringing a newfound sense of professionalism, which she honed from playing with the Danish rockers, The Raveonettes.
“She knows how to watch when she plays,” Hayes says, “there’s intuition and there’s the ability to watch our body language as we’re really going to dig into something.”
With Shapiro on board, the band recorded in Los Angeles at the Station House, tracking all basic tracks in a shocking four days.
“We wrote over 23 songs for this record and the hardest thing about it was probably narrowing it down to a final 13 track album,” Been says. “There’s just a strange effortlessness now, which I haven’t felt since we recorded our first album. It’s just got that kind of nervous, kind of excited, kind of unsure feeling, where we don’t know where it’s gonna go next, so everyone just stands out of the way.”
Print Seating Chart
