July
‘Cult: A person or thing that is popular or fashionable among a particular group or section of society’ – Oxford English Dictionary. Releasing one of the best debuts of this year NYC duo Brian Oblivion and Madeleine Follin aka Cults are living up to their namesake.
The band first ignited a blog buzz a year ago when they started posting songs online and frustrating bloggers with their un-searchable name. Since then they’ve gone onto to be snapped up by Lily Allen’s label, In The Name Of, and release one of the best debuts this year.
Our very own Marie Wood caught up with Cults’ Madeleine Follin and Brian Oblivion to talk about the origins of their bittersweet pop, Britney Spears and transcendental meditation.
How did Cults start?
Madeline Follin: We met when he was on tour with my brother’s band and I went to show that they were playing and he snuck me in as I wasn’t old enough to get into the bar. We starting dating that night basically and I went on the rest of the tour with them.
We were both living in New York going to school and working internships and we were really bored with everything that was happening in our lives and all of our friends were in bands and doing really exciting things and going on tour.
Brian Oblivion: Even just playing crappy shows.
Madeleine: We just started messing around making music on the weekend putting the stuff online and we weren’t really expecting anything; we wanted to be like: “we can do this too!”
Brian: I remembered a couple of days ago that my friend who’s in a couple of really successful bands had heard Madeleine singing around the house and was like: ‘Oh, I want to start a band with Madeleine”. We were dating and living together and I was like: “You’re not starting a band with my girlfriend, I’m doing it!” So then I started writing songs secretly and he ended up slacking and I got the voice!
When you first posted stuff online there was big buzz around you and because of your name no-one could find out anything about you adding to the mystery. How did you react to that at the time? Were you really freaked out?
Madeleine: It was really shocking. People were like: “we want to do an interview with you” and we were like, “What? Why do you wanna do an interview with us? What for?” But, it was exciting and nerve wracking, because we were like ‘what are we gonna talk about? We’re pretty boring people.
Why did you pick Cults as a name? It’s seriously un-Googable.
Brian: That never played into our psychology, like ‘people aren’t gonna be able to Google us’. The first person we got on our team was our lawyer and she was like: “guys, you know you’re going to have change your band name?” And we were like, “fuck no.” And she’s like, “you are, because not only that people can’t find it but you’re probably going to get sued by The Cult.”
Madeleine: And, Julian Casablanca because he has Cult Recordings.
Brian: I was like ‘The Cult’ and ‘Cults’ are two very different things; nobody could confuse those two things. She was like, “I don’t know, I think you’re going to get sued”, and it never happened. Everyone, everyday was like: ‘change your band name’. We said that if they made us change it, we’d change it to C.U.L.T.S – just make it into an acronym.
The band name started because we just always had a fascination with Cults; we were both raised religious and we stopped being religious and I kind of fell into weird other religions when I was a kid.
Madeleine: He was in a cult
Brian: No, I probably bounced around through a couple. I got into transcendental meditation for a while when I was like in tenth grade and I was like: ‘this is awesome’. I emailed David Lynch as he did a scholarship fund and I was like: “hey, I want to do transcendental meditation, but I don’t have enough money and I can’t go to these centres”. So, he offered me this scholarship and I told my parents: “David Lynch emailed me, I get to meditate”. And my parents were like: ‘Go to your room!”
I think it’s just been something we’ve both been really fascinated by and then around the time of the music we’d just started dating, so we were like “this is my favourite goofy PBS documentary Jonestown” and then kind of mentally ear-marked our favourite quotes and it just kind of ended up making it into the song.
Who does what in the band?
Brian: Madeleine writes the lyrics herself and I do most of the music myself, but then she’ll help me edit it altogether; it’s collaborative.
Your lyrics seem quite dark and tumultuous.
Madeleine: I guess I’m just a very anxious person. I guess that I would pick-up when he was working on the actual music and I would be listening to it and feel that was what the vibe of the song actually was.
‘Abducted’, for example, is quite sinister as it talks of love in terms of abduction.
Brian: It’s also about guys knowing what they’re doing in breaking people’s hearts; bad people. We just wanted it to be like a little movie of a song, like a character song; the guy talks, then the girl talks and the guy talks again and then resolve unhappily.
Your music has been compared to a lot of sixties groups, like the Shangri-las. Do you think that’s a fair comparison?
Madeleine: Yeah, it’s what we’ve been listening to pretty constantly for the past few years, so I think it naturally seeps its way into the music.
Brian: I think we also admire the drama of that period like the freedom of people to be silly and kitschy and mean it; there’s so many songs like ‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison it’s like the corniest song ever but the way that he sings it and the way he that he comes out of it, it just makes your skin crawl. I think a lot people since the sixties have got, the word’s not pretentious, but a little bit scared of honesty and real emotions; I think we’ve felt more direct like that, it’s like the simplest way to say something is the best.
We always sing that song in the van, it’s a fun song to try to sing as you can’t do it as it takes that crazy vibrato and it hits that really high note at the end, so we’re always trying to cover it.
You seem to have incorporated as you said the drama of that era with Phil Spector style drum beats. Do you admire the production sensibilities of that era too?
Brian: Yeah, definitely. I think the dirtiest word in the studio that we always tried to stay away from was ‘retro’, we didn’t want to make an album that sounded retro. We’re definitely inspired by albums from that period, but I think it’s more in sensibility than necessarily in sound; I don’t think there’ll ever be drum-beats as fast or as loud on any of those recordings, which is something that you don’t hear much today on a lot of rock music drums are really quiet so we try to crank them up.
Madeleine, you have a feminine yet powerful voice. Is there anyone vocally you look up to?
Madeleine: Kim Gordon. I love Britney Spears!
Yeah, she was on the Billboard Awards show miming with Rihanna dressed in fetish gear and handcuffs, which was a bit weird.
Brian: I have a feeling, I don’t know what the word is, when Arcade Fire won the best album Grammy, Madeleine and I both teared up, we both got really emotional, we were like “holy shit, good music is coming back’….This whole system of false celebrity is tumbling as we speak, I hope. Everyone is always going to be fascinated by it, which is why it always wins as people like us are like, ‘that’s really funny’, but I’m not buying anything.
Madeleine: I did, I bought the new Britney Spears record. It’s really good; everyone in the band likes it.
You were quite restrictive about the amount of information you were putting out at the beginning. In an age of Twitter and everything being public knowledge, do you feel quite protective over your privacy?
Madeleine: We try to keep our private lives out of it, you know? Just let people focus on the music, it’s really hard.
Brian: The best that we can do is just to not actively feed into it ourselves; I always think back to the perfect model band putting themselves in front of their music and it not hurting them, like Oasis were remembered for my generation in America as ‘Champagne Supernova’, ‘Wonderwall’ and being huge assholes. It’s pretty much all anyone knows about them, but they’re like ‘yeah, they’re crazy!’ As opposed to Radiohead where I don’t know anything about Thom Yorke’s personal life or what he thinks about music or what he does at the weekend, what type of clothes he wears, bland ideas.
That’s what beautiful is that you imagine, that’s what so great about it is that everyone’s like “he’s up at a nightclub in Ibiza selling coke”, and it’s like “no, I think he’s in his backyard with his kids relaxing”; you want to have that ambiguity as an artist, you want people to have their own creative process of imagination when listening to things rather than being like so bland about it. We tried to hold it back as much as we can.
When you started the band you were both studying film in New York. Does that ever translate into the music? Would you ever want to combine the two?
Madeleine: We tried that, but it went horribly wrong so no we don’t want to combine the two. We’re pretty involved with the directors.
Brain: We’re grossly picky with them
Madeleine: For our new video [‘Abducted’] we’re really involved, but as in doing the work and coming up with the idea it’s just too stressful.
Brian – It’s still influenced us a lot, like the way that I think about sound is hugely influenced by the way of working on sound in movies that’s why there’s quotes and I’m not afraid to be dramatic and that’s why our songs have character. I used to do a lot of film scoring and that’s kind of important for me.
Where did you record the album and who did you record it with?
Madeleine: We recorded it in New York with the most amazing engineer in the world, Shane Stoneback.
Brian: He also recorded both Vampire Weekend albums, Sleigh Bells, Fucked up and Magic Kids that’s a big reason why we decided to do it with him. All of those records are so wildly different especially ours in that mix, but he has this amazing ability to understand what you’re going for really fast. Within the first two weeks of being in the studio with him I didn’t have to say anything to him anymore, I’d just hear the mix and I’d be thinkng that snare drums a little low and he was like, ‘snare drum up’.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
Madeleine: We’re touring all year our schedule’s fully booked until January and then hopefully we’ll go back into the studio as that’s our favourite place to be
Brian: We’re trying to put together a hip-hop mixtape of the album, like five or six tracks I’m remixing them into hip-hop songs, Madeleine’s going to sing the chorus and then we’re going to have rappers, it’s like a passion project for us. I’m really stoked on it, we’ve got some really cool people on-board, but it’s just hard to find the time. That’s the next thing.
Watch ‘Abducted’
22 August, Bowery, Sheffield
24 August, Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
