The Horn The Hunt aren't afraid to tell you that they play pop music, but the Leeds-based duo's new single, Black Fire, is a grand, ambitious song that stands a million miles removed from the confections that often clutter the radio waves and chart listings.
The single, out on September 15, is the forerunner of a new album, due to be released later this year, and represents something of a change for Clare Carter and Joseph Osborne. Their previous records, including their eponymous debut and its follow-up 'Depresseur Jolie', have been dictated by circumstance to some extent, with their current move from digital experiments to a full band proving enlightening.
“In the past we've been restricted by technology because we've been travelling and we just had a laptop and a midi keyboard,” Carter said. “It was all in the computer. We decided we wanted to see what our music would sound like played by humans, rather than a computer. There's no programming or anything on our new album. We've only just found our sound now, with Black Fire.”
For Osborne, the lightbulb moment came early on as they trialled new compositions with their drummer, and, although they are in the process of fleshing out a six-piece band to do justice to their latest batch of material, the differences were immediately apparent once they left the digital world behind.
“Because Clare sketched out demos on the laptop, very basic midi drums and stuff, it still had that rigidity of before,” he said. “When we started rehearsing with our drummer and playing together, we'd listen back to a rough vocal, a drumbeat and bass and you'd immediately feel how much more of a sense of groove there was. Coming across that organic feeling after working with a laptop for quite a few years was amazing.”
Pop has been a constant companion for the pair. It's often music at its most universal, but in the hands of some it can also be unnecessarily reductive and artificial. With The Horn The Hunt, Carter and Osborne hope to find the balance between accessibility and experimentation.
“Pop's responsibility is to make extreme stuff accessible. Emotionally, aesthetically or whatever, that's its job,” Carter said. “Lazy pop is one of the worst things you can hear. Pop music has to be catchy. Unfortunately a lot of people find that a problem, but I don't understand that. We both really want to make memorable songs but we do want to make them human. A lot of pop music goes into something that's artificial, almost too futuristic without having any soul.”
Osborne continued: “All our favourite artists, Björk, Nick Cave, Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, the Doors, REM, in some ways they all have quite extreme elements but their music had a global appeal. That's basically what we like. Nowadays pop gets accused of being plastic, and I would agree to a large amount in the mainstream, but there are artists out there doing what we're trying to do, where you push things but still keep it so that people can get a lot from it. That's what we admire in the music we love.”
Prior to formalising the band as The Horn The Hunt, the pair underwent something of a trial by isolation as artists in residence on an island off Greenland. Nestled some 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle, they were confronted by perpetual darkness for long periods as they sowed seeds for their musical future.
“For the last six weeks we were there it was dark for 24 hours a day and it was making us go crazy,” Osborne said. “There was no sunlight whatsoever and we got really bad insomnia, it was a really dark internal experience. You ended up asking a lot of questions. What was it you wanted? How did you want to do it? It prepped us for really trying this musical project and giving it everything that we've got. It gave us that confidence because it was a scary experience.”
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