Sam Rondeau and Dan Olds of Palm Reader compiled a playlist of 9 banging tracks that helped to inspire them while writing their third, epic studio album ‘Braille’, out April 6th via Silent Cult.
01 Halgrath – ‘The Acceptance Of Inner Self’
Sam: This song is an exercise in restraint. The level of atmosphere this song creates without doing much is phenomenal. It just builds and floats around without ever seemingly landing in one place. With the last two records being relatively frantic start to finish, we definitely wanted to try and sit back a bit and let parts of songs breathe. Whilst we haven’t taken it to the extremes that Halgrath have, this song and the rest of the album certainly inspired and informed my guitar parts in the verses of ‘Coalesce’. Similarly in songs like ‘Inertia’ or ‘Clockwork’ we took the time to try and let the song build rather than just explode straight out of the gate.
02 The 1975 – ‘Loving Someone’
Dan: When it’s time to write an album I try and listen to as many different styles as possible to expand my drumming knowledge. I went on a “The 1975” binge and picked up a couple of beats which was the starting point of ‘A Lover/A Shadow’. I picked this song because it’s my favourite off the album
03 The Ocean – ‘Mesopelagic: Into the Uncanny’
Sam: Song structure is not something we’ve approached in a particularly traditional sense. It’s equal parts us trying to create something that sounds different and us just having a short attention span I think. This time around we wanted to refine that process. The way we’d written before had resulted in the bulk of our material being quite linear in structure, which can be a double-edged sword sometimes. We’d succeeded in writing music that wasn’t as predictable but at the same time, we weren’t allowing ideas the time to properly develop. Whether that was repeating them and building on them or just giving them enough time within the song. With Braille, we are taking ideas and seeing them through. We wanted to give everything the opportunity to become an integral part of the song and try not to have any bits that could be regarded as throwaway riffs or filler. We’ve also paid more attention to how the music and lyrics marry up. With lyrical narrative, there’s often recurring themes and developed ideas. With Josh’s lyrics on this album, there’s more of a sense of resolution at the end of songs and that was something we felt we should mirror the music. Like The Ocean, we wanted to see how well we could tread the line between structure and unpredictability.
04 Neck Deep – ‘Serpents’
Dan: I’m not into the whole pop-punk thing one bit but this song just stuck in my head, think it’s the drumming by Dani Abasi, dude is tight as fuck and really creative with it. Also, it helped me get a bit more an idea of straight-up song structure.
05 Norma Jean – ‘1,000,000 Watts’
Sam: So. Much. Groove. The first time I heard this was when we toured with them and it just blew me away. It would be no surprise to anyone to find out that Norma Jean have been a huge influence on us as a band but this song was released right around the time we were writing Braille. Corey’s vocals on the track are brilliant and certainly had an effect on the way Josh approached his own vocals on Braille. We’d always known Josh had a bit more in his wheelhouse than just a curdling scream and with BTOWL we’d seen that come to the surface a bit more. This time around, Josh wanted to push himself a bit more and pursue more melodic lines and hooks. Similarly to our approach to the marriage of musical structure and lyrical narrative, Josh wanted his vocal parts to fit the music we’d written.
06 Foals – ‘Providence’
Dan: Foals are a fantastic band but this song, in particular, got me as it’s just one vocal phrase repeated over and over and it just builds to this massive release, I wanted to try and implement that In some of my drumming parts for this album.
07 Torche – ‘Skin Moth’
Sam: Pace has always been a large part of what we do and Torche are excellent at pacing their songs. This song thunders along and that relentless drive is probably most evident on songs like ‘Swarm’ or ‘Like A Wave’. We’ve spent a lot of time playing a relatively kinetic bpm and often in obscure time signatures so these songs are great for good old fashioned foot-on-the-monitor-head banging. What’s not to enjoy?
08 Brand New – ‘Degausser’
Dan: I started listening to Devil and God properly for the first time around the time we started writing and it blew me away, I’ve heard it before but it really caught me this time. The way the songs are structured on this album is fantastic, My usual style of playing is hit everything quick and all over the place, but this taught me to slow it down and pick the beats that work for the song.
09 Earth – ‘Rise To Glory’
Sam: This song is the opening track of an album that to me is perfect. It’s the first integral piece of a larger puzzle. That to me is how Braille feels. The previous two albums are definitely clear snapshots of us as a band at that time, but Braille feels far more complete. More thoughtful, more cohesive. We wanted each song to be as valuable as any other on the record. We wanted to record something that felt more like the sum of its parts rather than just a collection of songs.