bdrmm on their new album for Rock Action

It seems almost cruel to begin our conversation with bdrmm with reference to lager, considering how hungover they are from a raucous, surprise homecoming show at the Adelphi in Hull the night before. Jordan Smith is looking astonishingly fresh-faced despite a late night, while his brother Ryan, bdrmm’s frontman, could perhaps do with a little more sleep. Guitarist Joe Vickers is calling in from the venue (with a canine companion called Clyde), looking the most alive of the bunch, breaking down their gear and chastising drummer Conor Murray for leaving his kit standing.

Yet here we are, because a Scottish magazine talking to a band who have just signed with Mogwai’s label Rock Action absolutely needs to know why Ryan was previously in a band called The Tennents – spelled, crucially, like Scotland’s national drink. “It wasn’t even my idea. It was the boy who started the band who chose it. A homage to old uncles,” he explains. “I could probably do with one now to be fair.”

It’s not a surprise Ryan and his bandmates are in a celebratory mood. They are on the brink of releasing their second record I Don’t Know, an epistle from minds simultaneously constrained and expanded in recent years. It began to come together during lockdown, but some songs date from a while back, and others only came to fruition afterwards. It’s a testament to finding new experiences by looking inward.

“You were forced to find other means to inspire yourself [during lockdown],” says Ryan, pointing out the positives that it brought to the writing process. “I was able to listen to so much more music and broaden the way I was approaching the songs.” 

Jordan says: “You can hear moments on the record where we’re quite fragile. But you can chart the development of the sound. The record really works well to provide a snapshot not of one particular time, but several moments over the course of the years.”

The band’s self-titled debut record was a product of excavating the soul, with Ryan writing about, among other things, his brushes with substance abuse and mental health struggles. But ultimately, Bedroom worked because it wrung emotion out of noisy catharsis. Its expressionistic layering of loudness earned it the title of “modern shoegaze classic” by NME, a genre tag that now seems wholly earned but somewhat limiting. On I Don’t Know, bdrmm explore electronic textures inspired by digging deep into Kid A, Autechre, the Warp back catalogue, graphic scoring, and other innovative ways to interpret music. If they are a shoegaze band, in the great pantheon of those types of records, this is their Soon, their Pygmalion.

“It's dangerous to think that you're part of just one idea or genre because then you close off so many possibilities for anything else you could do,” says Jordan. “It’s whatever sounds good to us at the moment and if we can fuse these ideas, different styles of music that we all love and appreciate together, then it sort of works perfectly. We'd be lying if we said we ever thought about genre; I feel like that's up to music people to decide what we are. And we just have fun making it.”

All three agree it was a journey through self-doubt before they arrived at their second record, discarding three attempts before getting there. “There were times it felt easier to bow out and have one really fucking good record because there were periods where we were just getting on each other's nerves and no one had any money,” says Jordan.

“After the first [album], I felt a bit lost. It was uncharted territory,” says Ryan. “I didn't even think we'd release one album. So then from there, it was like ‘what the fuck do we do now?’” Joe continues: “But we worked our arses off for years to get to that point, to even slightly break even. We owed it to ourselves to get it done. It took some false starts but it was worth it in the end.”

One of the major reasons they came out the other side was the support of Mogwai, who took them on tour and then put a label contract in front of them which, despite being in a happy place with previous stewards Sonic Cathedral, the foursome jumped at due to the nurturing attitude the band showed them while on the road. Ryan recalls a time asking Barry Burns sheepishly about the band’s work film-scoring, and being moved by the attention he dedicated to answering such questions. He says it made the band feel like they’d “joined a family”.

Jordan says: “To have such brilliant people that you consider your friends, but also be mentors to you and look after you in such a beautiful, selfless way – it feels like a true honour.”

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I Don't Know is released on 30 Jun via Rock Action Records
bdrmm play Monorail, Glasgow, 5 Jul; Edinburgh Psych Fest, Summerhall, 3 Sep; Classic Grand, Glasgow, 12 Nov