“You need to bear in mind in the studio that sometimes when things sound good, they sound good, and sometimes when things sound bad, they sound good,” Ruairidh Wallace, co-songwriter and guitar player of Curiosity Shop, tells BEST FIT. “But sometimes when things are bad, they just sound bad.”
Of their collecting pile of music, Curiosity Shop sound nothing short of a band that builds entire songs around their little musical inside jokes. Then agonising over which are truly funny, which are bad-funny, and which make no sense to anyone but them. The result is a light-footed, welcoming sound that uses minimalism to maximise the meaning of their occasional maximalism.
In their newest single “About A House” preluding their debut EP , Curiosity Shop owns that creative philosophy fully, with a perfectly whelmed kneading undercurrent of three-part harmonies that wind like a lazy river and almost-weird flourishes. A glorified ZYN container making a cameo for percussion, lapping slide guitar wicking the moisture off of itself with each unrushed strum. Layered atop, the track is unique without forcing itself to be oblique.
Contributing to the backstory of the upcoming EP, “We picked the songs we wanted to record, and post-recording was around the time when we started to realise the connection between them all,” says fellow songwriter Sonny Scott. “It traced a sort of journey for Ru and me, having grown up together in school and moving to Edinburgh and meeting the rest of the band. Each song is a component of that journey, but I suppose ‘About A House’ is the sort of domestic life in between those times.”
On the varied, time stamped feel of , Wallace adds: “When we write songs, you can always hear the stage we were at when we made them, whether that’s through the lyrics or the songwriting itself. I think because it’s us, there’s always going to be this thread running through the songs. They naturally make sense together.”
Scott shares a similar perspective, but qualifies: “Something we quite enjoy about the music we have, and the music we’re choosing to put out there, is that it all has a different air. I suppose it’s coming from the same place, but it takes on a different character. It’s communicated through the five of us, though, it always ends up with a similar feel. It’s the way we all play together that shines through in it.”
Though a consistent sound that still surfaces differently from song to song is contradictory on the surface, the timeline of the project makes the distinction clearer. Curiosity Shop have been playing together long enough for a shared instinct to emerge, but they’re equally interested in letting each song preserve where they were as writers and people when it first took shape. “I think the nature of our demos is that they’re all pretty much just on our phones’ voice memos,” says Scott. “We can get very attached to voice memos of practices, which helps us map out the song in our heads and solidify our parts.”
It becomes increasingly clear, however, that their preservationist philosophy is tempered by an equally stubborn determination not to let sloppiness slide, under the guise of demo-charm protection. Scott clarifies the demo-to-studio process: “When we went into the studio, we were really trying to distill the essence of the song, and to be as conscious of what we’re playing as we can be. Whereas in a demo, you’re thinking, ‘Oh man, I’m hungry, I could eat some food after this.’ We definitely pour a lot of energy into a lot of different things in a song. We spend a lot of time making sure the harmonies are right or that a certain chord has the right sound to it.”
Still, not everything gets cut from the demos. “The jaw harp”, Wallace beams – a weird demo detail they got attached to. “We have a harp in the end that we were told to remove. Somebody was like, ‘What’s that sound in there?’ But no one noticed. Have you heard of snus? They’re like ZYNs, I used one of those boxes for some percussion, and I’m sure they’re still in there. It got removed from the demos, and somehow it just appeared back in it. I just kept my mouth closed about that.”
“We make a massive piano crash as well”, contributes Scott. “I suppose for the whole EP, we’d record a song and then have a little more time in the studio and be like, ‘Oh, should we add this?’ If Duncan [Biggar] were here, he’s the drummer, he’d probably say the triangle because that makes it onto ‘About A House’ as well. It’s fun that those little moments have shone through at the end, though the producer was like, ‘Guys, chill out.’”
“We’re always talking about keeping space for everything to sort of breathe and do its thing,” Wallace explains. “You want to be able to pick everything out. It’s important to be able to hear everything, because if you do too much, you can just mud everything up.” When asked if Wallace overcommits to making small details make sense, “It gets to the point where it’s a bit ridiculous”, he jokingly self-reproaches. “With the harmonies, especially on ‘About A House’, I was constantly going back and changing them, and then at some point they were finally like, ‘Ru, I think you need to just sit down and have a cup of tea.’”
This autumn, Curiosity Shop will be debuting a headline tour across the UK and Ireland. is out 25 September, via Fontana Records.