In the Studio: Nine Black Alps

It's the last day on our stay at Beethoven Street studios in London. We've spent four days here and ten days in a remote farm studio in North Wales recording what will hopefully be our third album.

It's the first album that we've actually recorded on British soil and also our first album with the producer Dave Eringa, who has previously worked with the likes of Idlewild and Manic Street Preachers. The whole process has been very fast and very enjoyable. Where previous recording sessions for other albums have been more laboured and definitely more expensive, this one has been breezy, focused and nothing less than fun from the onset.

All of the tracking apart from vocals has been live, to retain the feel of the live performances. And being couped up in a ramshackle studio in the middle of the Welsh countryside with no outside involvement from labels, management or press has proved to be a blessing, with sessions going on late into the night and often through to the next morning.

What's coming through the studio speakers in front of me sounds great. Very heavy, weird and menacing. We really wanted to make this our heaviest album yet, something very unapologetic, unfussy and extreme. So rather than overanalysing each drum take or each guitar tone, it's pretty much been the four of us plus Dave hunting for the most extreme guitar noise and then moving quickly on, so that we can get to the local Spar before closing time for supplies of beer, tea and cigarettes to take us through to the early hours of the morning.

It's hard to describe an average day at the studio, as it seems like a blur with no coherent pattern or schedule. Mostly we wake around eleven, consume as much caffeine as possible, grab a piece of toast and then walk across to the studio, where we talk crap with Dave for a bit and then plough on with the next song. Then we talk crap with Dave a bit more, somebody takes their turn to cook dinner, and then we start another song, and finish up with thousand-yard stares at about five or six in the morning.

We're roughly doing about two or three songs a day at the moment which is incredibly fast compared to our first two albums – it's amazing what paying for your own record does to your work rate.

After finishing the basic tracking in Wales, we came down to London for four days to add some vocal harmonies and a few more weird guitar noises, and now I find myself typing in these words with our finished third album playing through the speakers. Voila.

Sam Forrest - June, 2009