Scotland indie heroes last played live back in 2023, a pair of shows in Glasgow and London to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their Fortuna POP! released debut album ‘Dress Up’. Even those shows were a rare treat: the quartet had actually played a farewell tour four years earlier – in August and September 2019 – so to learn of a new single and an album ready to be shared will bring huge joy to their fans.
So, the hard and fast facts: The Spook School will release their new album ‘Like A Heartbeat’ on January 29th. It will be released via and , and is available to pre-order HERE. And it was built by siblings Adam (guitar, vocals) and Nye (guitar, vocals) Todd alongside Niall McCamley (drums) and AC (bass).
New single ‘Falling’ is out now, while you can catch The Spook School live at The Social in London on October 3rd.
May I start by asking, why did you decide to reform The Spook School?
A couple of years ago – my concept of time is really bad! – we decided to do 10 years on from the first album, kind of anniversary shows. We were getting together and practicing, and getting ready to play those shows. And I think through the process of doing that, we’re like, oh, this is fun, but even more fun if we were playing new music. So yeah, it put us in the mood to do something.
I think we knew that we wanted to continue to do stuff as a band in some context, play gigs and do all the rest of that. But we definitely didn’t want to just play these songs that we wrote a decade ago over and over again. Even though we still like a lot of them, we thought if we were coming back and playing more gigs, we should write new music to bring to people and have a new body of work.
So the seed of new music was sown back at those gigs. But you’ve an album finished, ‘Like A Heartbeat’, set for release on January 29th via Alcopop! Records (UK) and Slumberland Records (US). Bearing in mind no-one knew you were reforming, how did that come about?
The two labels that are putting out this record, they’re the two labels that put out our last record (‘Could It Be Different?). We get on well with Jack who runs Alcopop! and Mike who runs Slumberland. We know they’re good eggs. So that was one of the first things we did. Once we made the decision that we were going to try and write a new record, we sent an email over to the both of them, you know, if we did this, would you be interested in putting it out? And they were both very excited, which I guess gave us more confidence to go ahead with the whole thing.
It’s always fun whenever you tell anything to Jack because you usually get message back with like lots and lots of exclamation marks! So it’s always nice.
The Spook School’s last album ‘Could It Be Different?’ was released in 2018. Were there any significant differences in putting this album together, either creatively or the physical process of it?
Yeah, I certainly felt like there was quite a lot of differences. I think maybe we thought a little bit more about it. Maybe it was the difference between recording an album when you’ve been touring a lot, and recording one out of that context. With our previous albums we’d been playing the songs live lots, and we just kind of went in and recorded them exactly as we’d been playing them live. Whereas with this album… I mean being analytical makes it sound very non-creative, but I think we were thinking a lot more about the songs more as songs, and also we got really obsessed with backing vocals! There’s a lot more backing vocals and harmonies on this album than the previous one, but yeah, I felt it was quite a different recording from than the previous one.
I guess the difference of the context is that definitely the last two albums, we made them while being an active band and playing gigs in between. I guess we had a slightly small smaller timescale. We didn’t really set ourselves any deadlines at the beginning of this process for making this record. Eventually, we found we had to because we were taking ages! But yeah, I guess no one knowing that we were doing this gave us the time to properly analyse what we were doing. But at the same time, I think it was quite difficult at the start, just because we hadn’t played in such a long time, and we definitely hadn’t written stuff in such a long time, so it took us quite a while to get into the process.
It’s almost like flexing that muscle again, and its different going straight into the studio before playing them to an audience.
It almost feels like a first album. It was a similar process that you have with a first album. The songs you’ve been working on for a bit longer, and I suppose you’ve got to that point where you have a collection of songs that you feel is ready to be an album. Yeah, a bit more like that process, I suppose, than subsequent albums.
And so, following on from that, is there a theme that runs through ‘Like A Heartbeat’? What was the inspiration for it
To me it feels like an album of two halves that talk to each other a lot. On the first half of the album, there’s a lot of songs that are more outward looking and quite angry about how transphobic the world is just now. I think there’s a lot of that on the first half of the album, and then as we go into the back half of the album, more of the tracks are about different connections and relationships. They’re slightly more in the kind of personal space. I like that because the reality of being a queer person. Sometimes only one of those can be focused on. It’s either you are just a political statement, and that’s it, or you are just an individual person, and you can forget that there’s all this other mess of stuff that’s going on in the background in your head. So I feel like it was quite nice to have that combination of themes. But I guess they’re all about being like a queer and trans person in the world and existing in the world right now.
The first single is ‘Falling’. What was it about that song that made you want to release it first?
I think we thought it would be fun to come in with a bang, and it’s a very frenetic song. It seemed like a fun one to say: “Hey, we’re here”.
I think if you’ve been silent for that long, to suddenly come out, all guns blazing is quite fun and thematically as well. It gives a bit of a sense of where the album’s coming from and setting the scene of the state of the world just now. One of the things we were in agreement on when we started working on the record is that, we’re all 10 years older now, and there’s this expectation that when bands release records later in their career that they mellow out, and you’ll have this more mature approach to songwriting. And we want to go the opposite direction. We want it to be more in your face, more frenetic. and try and keep that energy up as much as possible.
Only briefly, we did a session with him. I don’t know if he still does it, but he used to do a thing where he would do video sessions with bands, and he asked us to do one. It was another one of those ones where we had an idea that he liked us and he was keen to work with us, which for us is, I think one of the most important things. We’re maybe not the most confident ourselves in what we’re doing. So to know someone genuinely likes what you do is a huge thing and is actually interested, actually excited about working on the record. We got in touch with him and he was really keen to do it.
Obviously he’s got a very impressive CV. We were really excited to work with them on it, and it was quite different to how we’ve recorded records previously. We recorded to a click track, which was a first for us. We were worried about initially. He was pushing it, and we were like, well, our whole thing throughout our experience with a band, is having this kind of slightly shambolic energy. Are we going to end up sounding like a super slick polish group? But obviously we didn’t because I don’t know if we could! He brought a lot to the record. We’d all tracked the base instruments, then there was the additional elements, improving the keys and synths on the record, and obviously he has huge experience with guitars and different guitar sounds. So, yeah, it was really good working with him.
You have a live date in the diary on October 3rdin London’s The Social. How are the rehearsals going? Is it slightly nerve-wrecking after so long?
I think there’s always a little bit of nerves. I’m confident we’ll be able to to go and and play the songs but obviously, when you’ve got new stuff, it’s always the hope that people like it. It’s nice to be coming back and doing initially a smaller show. We’ve always had fun playing in London as well. Rather than the first show being a really big one, that would be more scary. And it’s an Alcopop! anniversary event, so that’ll be nice as well.
Personally I’m really excited to start playing these songs live, and to play the old songs as well. As much as I really like recording, playing in a band, a huge part of that is getting to experience stuff on the communal level, and we’re in that weird stage at the moment where we’ve worked really hard on this new music and it’s all ready to be put out, but we still don’t have that side of the experience, you know, where other people interact with it. To me that’s the most exciting part. So yeah, I’m really excited to play some hot, sweaty shows.