Liars: A Tale of Two Cities

Before pressing the ejector seat button on their involvement in the New York post-punk resurrection show in the early noughties – only to do a Bowie and exile themselves in Berlin for six years – art-punk chameleons Liars had long since characterised their career with huge stylistic shifts from album to album.

Having documented their frustration with scenesterism (2001’s They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top), studies of witchcraft (2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned) and an adroit masterclass in tribal percussion (2006’s Drum’s Not Dead), their departure from Berlin in 2007 was marked by a soul-searching self-titled LP where the Liars retraced the follies of youth to produce an album arguably more song-based than the barbed percussive haze of yore.

Since returning to the US to record their latest effort, frontman Angus Andrews believes they’re one step closer to working out “what a song is” with Sisterworld. Only took them ten years...

You’re nearly a decade into your career with Liars, what is it that keeps driving you back to the studio?
“It’s still this idea of just learning and being fascinated with more and more possibilities. We’re not a band that gets itself into a creative rut, it’s never like falling back into a comfortable state – it’s always that the next project is like creating a new band or a new way of making a record. As you go on you start to feel more capable and that brings about more opportunity. I don’t know that ten years ago I would have been sure we’d be writing music for people to play on horns or strings, that I’d ever have the courage to do that.”

Liars were lumped in with the whole New York chapter of the post-punk revival when you first emerged; have you found a way to plough your own furrow since?
“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s particular to us [laughs], but it is in our nature to keep evolving. There are great bands around that have stuck to what they know and continue to put that out. It just functions in a different way as music to enjoy more than it does as a challenging or confrontational medium. I just prefer – and I guess it depends on your mood – things that get me thinking, that’s the kind of work I like to make.”

In a nutshell, what's a Sisterworld?
“It’s about the idea of identity, or losing it and trying to find it in another place. Where you feel a bit lost and you need to find somewhere to retreat to, to regain that sense of self. That would be a Sisterworld. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical place, it could be somewhere mental as well – or in the case of some people it’s ye olde digital space. Somewhere you can feel a bit more connected to your surroundings, rather than the ones that we’re plumped into around the world.”

This is the first full album you’ve recorded in the United States in around six years – was it important to the themes at hand that it was done entirely in Los Angeles? Was that a reverse culture shock, to go from relative isolation to a full on pop culture frenzy?
“The themes haven’t been that foreign to us for most of our career. A lot of our records have dealt with a certain feeling of uneasiness or alienation. The circumstances that came round to making this record being that we’ve done the last two in Berlin in a certain sense of isolation, we didn’t speak the language and we didn’t have a particularly large community of people to work with or anything, but I think that’s how we wanted it. I do like extremes like that, which some people can’t really understand. The idea in Berlin was to almost purposefully not engage in the culture, so I didn’t consume TV, newspapers or anything like that while I was there, it’s a real introspective kind of thing.

“But when you fuckin’ turn up in LA, man, it’s like mainlining media, it’s non-stop everything coming at you from all sorts of directions – it’s a real turn on, but how much can you handle? Julian [Gross, drums] and Aaron [Hemphill, everything else] were both born and raised there, so I think that desire – to go back home – came pretty early on. If you mix that with the idea of being out of place or what it feels like to be uncomfortable, you lay that over the landscape of LA and realise that you’ve got something to look at and think about.”

The lead single [Scissor] and Scarecrows on a Killer Slant are, by your standards, fairly straight up punk rock songs – is that the shape of things to come? Are tracks like these, which fit a slightly more ‘radio friendly’ format for Liars, a reflection of any external pressure to cross over?
“I don’t think so; it’s just something you get from yourself internally where you ask ‘what are you looking for? What are your goals?’ Over time it seems to me that we’ve been working slowly towards this idea of ‘what is a song and how does a song work?’ We’ve been thinking more of those traditional elements of melody and verse/chorus/verse. In the past we’ve done pieces that were purely to do with sound so it’s become more interesting to see what it’s like to craft a song, a full album and see how that works as a whole.”

The reconstruction of the album that comes with the original hasn't been put out to the press yet, but it looks like you’ve assembled a bit of a dream team for that. Looking back at the results, which were you most impressed with?
“I’m hesitant to do that – to call any one of them a favourite, because they’re all incomparable – but I remember freaking out when I heard the Alan Vega track; it spun me out because he actually sings on this track with me. It’s just an amazing feeling to have your voice next to Alan Vega’s... so weird.

Did you have a very clear idea of the particular people you wanted to approach?
“No one said no, which was probably the craziest thing about it. We kept on going up and up until it got to the point of saying ‘who should I ask next? Macca?’ [laughs]. It started with this idea of ‘what is a remix and why is it so damn boring?’ This kind of formula that goes on where you take your single, give it to five different DJs and producers and they put a house beat to it with a long intro. Surely there’s more to talk about and more room in that genre?

“I remember we were talking to Thom Yorke and saying ‘you could record your baby crying for five minutes and turn it back to us, that’s totally fine, that makes sense to us because in some way our work has inspired you to do that piece, without any limitation on whether this is the right thing commercially.’ Mostly I was trying to think of an opposite, someone whose music doesn’t sound at all like the track we were giving them. I was always really looking for females, because I like the idea of my voice coming from that other world.”

What went wrong? It’s called Sisterworld, but where are all the sisters?
“They’re all bummed out [laughs]. My sisters were under the impression that they were going to be the cover art. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not quite so literal.”