Beirut's Zach Condon: €œI wanted to make a pop record

For Zach Condon, it’s the morning after the night before, the night in question being an after-show party with Arcade Fire and long-time collaborator and friend Owen Pallett. It preceded a Hyde Park mini-festival where all of the above put on a top-drawer show, any celebration afterwards being richly deserved. “It was a nice reunion,” is all the Beirut front-man lets slip; now sitting somewhat crumpled in a top-floor London hotel restaurant.

Essentially, Condon is here to talk about his upcoming third album, The Rip Tide. Even as we speak he is putting the finishing touches to the tactile artwork, choosing the gild of the gold lettering and the surrounding material to frame it. It looks promising and certainly enough to shut the yaps of those who bemoaned its initial reveal as being ‘dull’. As ever, Beirut are a band you really need to ‘feel’, quite literally in this case.

If the artwork is a departure from the previous found-photographs of Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup, then it’s perhaps befitting of the music that will be found within it. Somewhat shorn of the bombast and romantic geography of what once made a Beirut record, The Rip Tide is an understated experience from the first listen. Yet the new clean lines, pop nous and mature restraint eventually showcase a very different Condon to the one fans have become accustomed to.

“I’ve been trying to find some sort of stability in my life that I haven’t had up until this point,” Condon explains of the four year gap between albums and the fresh new sound it has borne. “I’ve bought a house and I’ve been trying to sort my life out a little bit as it was getting ridiculous. I had literally been living out of a suitcase since I was seventeen and it just wasn’t making sense anymore.”

It’s bad news for those of us who like to imagine Condon as the musical troubadour; soaking up the minutiae of whichever local culture he happens to have stuck a pin in the map of. However, The Rip Tide soon reveals itself to be a more considered, introspective and stealthy album than previous efforts. “I was trying to develop the sound to be a bit fuller, a little bit warmer and less kitchen sink-y,” he elaborates. “I didn’t want to polish it, but I also didn’t want it to be as loose and wild as it used to be. That’s been the joy of live shows, finally feeling some kind of cohesion that I never had as a teenager when I was first writing. It’s been such a new experience for me that I felt I had to put that on the album.”

Condon’s relatively young age is a frame of reference that crops up again and again during our chat. Debut album Gulag Orkestar was released in 2006 whilst he was still a teenager, something he’s unsurprisingly as aware of as the rest of us. “I still had a lot to grow into,” he admits looking back at the period. “As a nineteen year-old you just don’t think your own sound or your own story is very interesting, so you really wear your influences on your sleeve and tell other people’s stories.”

As such, The Rip Tide finds Condon writing about his own thoughts and experiences for the first time. As clear evidence, one track is even called Santa Fe, the New Mexican capital city he grew up in. It seems a far call from the usual Beirut tack of name-checking far-flung, romanticised destinations, moniker and all. Would it be fair to assume that Zachary is feeling...“Comfortable in my own skin?” he helpfully offers. “Yeah, that is true. (With Santa Fe) I now feel this connection with a city that, as a teenager, I felt almost wanted me out.”

Elaborating further, it seems he is starting to see his hometown in a whole new light. “It’s a tourist town, so as a teenager I felt more like a display,” he laughs. “But going back now, it has really revealed itself to have a lot of warmth and charm. The people are really nice and the food is amazing. It’s also really pretty. There’s a reason tourists go there; it’s fucking gorgeous.”

It’s quite a volte-face for the seasoned traveller he is, and little wonder then that he has chosen to settle down, though he has opted for New York life rather than boomeranging back home. “I live in Brooklyn but the funny thing is that I can’t write there,” he reveals. “So I rented a farmhouse about two-and-a-half hours north of the city, out in the woods. I knew I could focus there and get things done. It’s the kind of place where you chop wood in the morning but I remember promising myself that I wouldn’t write a wintery, folk album. I wanted to write a pop record, despite the surroundings, and I think I was able to do that.”

Indeed he has, though The Rip Tide is not without the rustic charms we’ve come to expect from Beirut. Condon’s fascination with brass (he has trumpet tattoos no less), is still evident, yet on tracks like The Peacock it’s no longer quite the focal point. “I was trying to rein that in, in a big way,” he agrees. “We’ve used fewer instruments on this album than ever before. I approached the brass in a very classical way as the other two brass players spent their college years studying their instruments. They’ve all become masters of their own craft so it would’ve been a shame not to use that.”

Furthermore, lyric-writing, it seems, is no longer the bug bear it once was. “I’m feeling more comfortable because, well, I’ve lived more, you know?” is his succinct summation. “This is the first album where I feel that a lot has happened to me. In that context I’d like to express it and make it relatable. As I said, I used to invent a character and sing from that point of view but if there’s any character on this album, it’s me as a teenager.”

It’s a strange circle of events, one not lost on Condon himself. Another turn up for the books is that The Rip Tide will be released on Condon’s own Pompeii Records, having parted company with the influential 4AD. “It’s a weird thing with labels,” Condon begins when asked if the move comes down to previous creative constraints. “You can become very friendly with the people you’re working with, but all the time someone higher up is telling them to ask things of you that they know you don’t want, but is good for business.”

Whatever the events, it is clear that Condon is in a happier place now. “Any pressure from above is only pressure from myself,” he laughs. Yet with the new album now completed (the finer points of artwork aside), does he himself feel the strain of expectation ahead? “I was incredibly anxious right after we had finished it,” he admits. “That lasted until I got the first vinyl sample delivered. I put it on at a barbeque and...that was it. I got this total sense of calm that I’ve had since that moment. I remember thinking to myself, ‘fuck, I finally did it. I finally found a musical home.’ It was such a good feeling.”

Yet whilst Condon qualifies this as something of a first, it’s not at the expense of what led him to this plateau. “I feel like I’ve been circling around this sound for a long time,” he claims. “You can hear the strain of youth on the other albums, which I’m very proud of and see them as accomplishments of their own, but they always left me wanting. It’s not like I was ever going to stop writing music but this new direction has given me a focus and a point on the horizon to head towards.”

He may have found a place to lay his hat, but thankfully Zach Condon hasn’t hung up his walking boots just yet.