Jul 05, 2018
The other night inside a dimly lit hallway underneath Soho House in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, I had the pleasure of sitting down with electro-soul duo, HONNE.
In this interview Andy and James talked about the concept behind their upcoming album, what it was like making it, the importance of relationships in their work, and their plans for the rest of 2018 and beyond.
Here's what they had to say...
Indie Shuffle: Tell me everything we need to know about the new album
James: The new album is called Love Me/Love Me Not. It’s coming out August 24th.
We’re releasing in a bit of an unusual way with two songs coming out each month, and the last two coming out on the album release date.
The concept behind the album came from a song that’s coming out tomorrow called “Forget Me Not." At the very beginning of that song it talks about like, she loves me, she loves me not -- just like picking the petals off a flower.
Andy: We took the inspiration from this song and made it the concept for the album. We've split it right down the middle. Half the songs are about love and the other half well, aren't.
When the vinyl comes out we’ll have one vinyl for “Love Me” and another for “Love Me Not”. So depending on your mood, you can listen to whichever half you feel like. If you’re a little down in the dumps and you want to wallow, you could listen to the "Love Me Not" side of the new album.
Indie Shuffle: What was the process like to make this concept come to life?
Andy: There wasn’t really a concept at the beginning. We went into it just wanting to make a really good album.
Basically we wrote a bunch of songs and it wasn’t until we wrote this latest track "Forget Me Not" that we knew we had a solid concept in place. We wrote about 30 songs and "Forget Me Not" gave us a clear direction of where the album should go. The split concept made it easy then to decide which songs fit what we were trying to do, and which songs of what songs would eventually make it onto the album.
Indie Shuffle: Is it hard to be successful touring musicians and maintaining friendships and romantic relationships, especially when so much of your work draws inspiration from modern relationships?
Andy: It’s great being away on tour. I mean really great. But we miss being around our loved ones very much. That’s always tough.
I would say being away and being on tour hasn't hindered writing about relationships or being in love. If we didn’t write about those things, we wouldn’t be staying true to the core of what HONNE is about.
James: If anything being away and on tour helps to feed the inspiration. For example, a track like "Day One" is about a celebration of love and being with someone and having a relationship even before all of this started. Whereas a track like "Location Unknown" is the flip side where it talks about being away from your partner and all you want to do is get back to them.
Indie Shuffle: How does Love Me/Love Me Not differ from your first album?
James: The new album gave us new avenues to explore and try some new stuff. The production, or how we produced the new album was a big change, but we still wanted it produced it a bedroom kind of way.
We didn’t want to do something super polished. Even with a higher production value, we kept what was authentic to us -- our sound and the character -- behind it. So, for example, some of the piano is recorded on an iPhone. In some of the tracks you can hear James talking in the background!
Indie Shuffle: You're about to play a private show in New York. What do you think about this crazy city?
Andy: It’s great. We absolutely love New York. It’s really cool and everyone here is cool.
James: In London people can be quite closed off. They go to work and don’t look or speak to people on the train. But In New York you see people talking to each other on the street. People are more expressive generally and they’re not afraid to say what they mean. There's lots of opportunities for random moments with strangers. We've found people here to be really lovely, chatty and genuine.
Indie Shuffle: What's the rest of 2018 have in store for you guys?
Andy: We’re putting out two songs per month, with another two tomorrow, all the way up to August 24th when the full album will be out, and then from September onwards we start touring.
Where are you going?
James: We start touring in a couple of weeks actually. We’re going to Asia, then we come back to the US in September, then we do the UK and Europe after that.
This will be the biggest tour we’ve done in the US -- 5 weeks! It’s crazy for us because in the UK we’ll do a tour in just 5 days. We spend a lot of time already in Asia visiting our fans and we're hoping next year to maybe go to Australia for the first time. We're keen to get down there and play some shows.
Thank you HONNE! We look forward to hearing more from the upcoming album!
HONNE's new album "Love Me/Love Me Not" goes on sale August 24th.
Stay up to date with all their latest releases and upcoming tour dates via their Facebook and Twitter pages.