Search - Bombay Bicycle Club :: Different Kind of Fix

There are few things in music more exhilarating than the sound of a young band in a hurry. Velocity, hunger, surprise: these are the qualities that keep a band interesting. Bombay Bicycle Club's third album in as many years reminds you there was a time when new bands put out a record every year or so, each one expanding their territory and making listeners reassess their assumptions. As its title promises, A Different Kind of Fix is not at all what you'd expect. It is the sound of a band throwing the doors wide open and confounding all preconceptions. Signposts to their third record emerged last year in the form of Jack's low-key solo tracks on Soundcloud and MySpace, bearing the influence of J Dilla's instrumental hip hop and Flying Lotus's fidgety electronica. It was a dramatic departure from the stripped-down, organic sound of Flaws but it hadn't come out of nowhere. Jack has been making electronic music in private since he was 14, when he first discovered Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. "With that type of music, until you become comfortable with producing it, it sounds like a 10-year-old's made it," he explains. "You can be bad at playing guitar and a song can still sound great but with electronic music you need to be a bit of a nerd. I've been trying for a long time." The band reconnected with long-time producer Jim Abbiss (Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian) in London last autumn and again in Hamburg in February. They also traveled to Atlanta in April to record Shuffle, Your Eyes and Favourite Day with Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley, M.I.A.). Tinie Tempah was in the studio next door. "He came in," says Jack. "'Oh I'm a huge fan, when are we going to collaborate?' He was charming everyone." Finally, it was mixed by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Portishead, the Horrors). "We'd always talked about making an album in one place with one producer and we ended up with the complete opposite," says Jamie. Bombay Bicycle Club have always had youth on their side. Through touring and social media, they have built a fiercely loyal, tattooing-lyrics-on-their-arm kind of fanbase. "I've always thought it was because of having fans who were the same age as us who could come to talk to us after a gig and relate to us," says Jack. But A Different Kind of Fix is a giant step into adulthood: an intoxicating, enveloping record, which anchors its diverse inspirations in the warmth and dynamism of Jack's songwriting. It draws the strands of I Had the Blues, Flaws and Jack's solo instrumentals into a panoramic picture of what this band is capable of. It is a watershed for the band: not just their best record yet, but a promise of still better to come. "Bands these days get so pigeonholed by their first album, which 40 years ago was not the case, but we're constantly trying to find the kind of music we want to make," says Jamie. "And I'm not sure we've discovered that yet." Long may they continue searching.