They say you have your whole life to make your first album, years upon years of growth, learning and experience filtered into one perfect record. Your debut is supposed to be the one you labour over, while the follow-up is meant to be served up within spitting distance of the last. Well, not if you’re London based Wild Palms. “We did that in reverse,” explains the band’s sardonic, quick-witted frontman Lou Hill. “The first album was just the songs that we would play live, we wrote it really quickly. But this one took ages...” Five years in fact. Recorded by the band in the same self-built Manor House studio where they made their 2011 de-but ‘Until Spring’, the new album ‘Live Together, Eat Each Other’ is a lusciously layered offering of hazy experimentalism and off-kilter alt-pop, that follows in the auspicious lineage of Beach House, Cocteau Twins and TV On The Radio. The vinyl LP is housed in a gatefold sleeve with download code included.
Half a decade in the works, ‘Live Together, Eat Each Other’ packs a lifetime’s worth of experience into 13 tracks, alongside a painstaking approach to recording that beams out of its shimmering glitches and collaged soundscapes. “Because we redid the songs so many times, and sat with them so long and went through so many transformations in terms of layering, it was kind of like the songs had eaten themselves and been regurgitated as something else,” explains Lou of the al-bum’s title. “It seemed like the whole thing was this weird process of consumption and reconstitution. The time it took seemed to allow for a kind of gestation, or fermentation, period. It gave time for influences to bond and stick to each other. Things were made, smashed up into fragments and reformed repeatedly until we couldn’t really remember what it’d been before and it was just what it was. Darrell’s, (the bands guitarist and Saatchi approved artist) artwork followed the same trail as well, collage, re-working, painting, and blotting.”