Hailing from London, England, Yuck is an indie rock band whose sound draws heavily on the likes of bands such as Sonic Youth and The Cure. In 2011, the band earned critical acclaim for its debut self-titled record. On Wednesday, The band makes a stop at Chapel Hill’s own Local 506.
Singer, guitarist and songwriter Max Bloom spoke with staff writer Stephanie Zimmerman about Yuck’s new album Glow & Behold, current tour and future plans.
DIVERSIONS: What is the story behind the cover art for your albums?
MAX BLOOM: Well, the first album cover art was done by our lead singer at the time, and then the cover art for this album was done by an artist called Catherine Campbell.
She does a lot of kind of abstract work, and I told her to listen to the album and do what she felt like doing, and she came up with a few things and this one, I thought I wanted to use it the most.
DIVE: Glow and Behold seems to have a cleaner, lighter sound than your self-titled album. Was this intentional, and if so what reasons did you have for making the change?
MB: It wasn’t, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but, I mean, I think the cleanness in sound was probably due to the fact that it was recorded in a studio rather than at home, which was self-recorded, which was what the first album was.
But, I think we wanted to sort of experiment more with more interesting textures and music rather than doing the same things we did the first time.
DIVE: Did you try anything different with Glow and Behold that you didn’t do on your first album?
MB: I think we wanted to make something that you could listen to more as a whole, like an album that you could listen to from start to finish, rather than the first one which was kind of like lots of tracks that were sort of made into track listings. This one’s kind of written to flow from start to finish.
DIVE: How did Daniel Blumberg leaving the band affect the music?
MB: It’s difficult to say really. I mean, I can’t really say, I’m sort of too involved to kind of make a judgment on that.
But I mean I guess this album was — I guess I used to be, for the majority, we just let me do the music and he did the lyrics, and this album was done by me doing both of those things.
But the way we write music is kind of in transition at the moment, so there’s not really one set way of doing things.
I mean, I didn’t think him leaving necessarily changed the band too much, because I don’t think his presence in the band kind of was like the kind of deciding factor on what kind of music we would make.
But I think Johnny (Rogoff, drums) and Mariko (Doi, bass) have an effect in the sound just as much as he does, if you know what I mean.
DIVE: What bands have been some of your greatest inspirations, and how did you incorporate that into your music?
MB: On the first album, I was listening to a lot of Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub – Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo, I don’t know, and a lot more from the list, but those were kind of like the big ones.
But I don’t really know, yeah Pixies is one, I don’t really know how that kind of plays into the way we write music, but it’s just bands that we really like and they just kind of subconsciously influence the way we write music, I guess.
diversions@dailytarheel.com
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