Welcome to BuzzMusic Walk The Waves! We're absolutely loving "Leave a Scar"! What was the songwriting and production process for it like?
“Leave a Scar” started as an honest reflection of my (Daniel's) relationship. So the whole lyrical theme and storyline are based on how she made me feel. In terms of the songwriting, we used a melodic loop as the foundation and added some big 80’s drum sounds with some percussive guitar licks. With a couple of risers and melodic tweaks, it reached the end goal.
The recording was actually pretty quick, I recorded a demo vocal line which was used as the reference, then Davison came in and recorded the final version. Vocal production is something we love to play around with like dubbing the main vocal, using UltraPitch and distorting delays and reverbs to give a different texture to the song. Mixing-wise, Jazley went through a couple of mixes for this song and a lot of the post-production was done in the mixing stage. She tries to keep it clean and simple so that the audio files breathe instead of over-compressing them. The bass line was tracked by Jazley too and the song was mastered by Chris Gehringer.
We're loving the 80's style rhythms and sounds used for the rhythm section. What inspired you to go in that direction? Do you have any other influences or idols?
The use of 80’s elements and present-day ambiance has kind of been the blueprint for our production. Also, trying to keep it simple and disciplined like LANY is a key factor. The classic DX7, Roland Juno synth patches, and the gated Linn drum sound have been our go-to. You can definitely hear the chemistry happing in the group, how did the brothers meet Jazley? What does the song creation process look like between the 3 of you?
We met Jazley from college we were fascinated by her production, so that was the basis for our conversation. Eventually, it morphed into a clockwork-like regiment, where both of us concentrated on songwriting and production and Jazley took over the engineering and recording side. Once a song idea is started, we run it through Jazley and start fine-tuning it, and that process goes on for a couple of weeks until we finally land on a finished song. How would you say Walk The Waves has evolved as an artist and in the music? Where do you see yourselves in the next year?
It’s been 1.5 years since we started as a band, the first year was us trying to find our sound but in the last 6 months, we really started to get a direction that we wanted to go in, in terms of songwriting, lyrics, production, visual aesthetic and overall identity. We’ve seen a huge leap in our fan base and listeners in the last couple of months because we finally started to find a place of comfort in our sound. We hope to be touring and building our brand across the US (once we can leave the house again).
Listen to "Leave a Scar" here.