Cloth – Secret Measure track-by-track

Secret Measure
We wanted this to be a huge-sounding introduction to the record – bigger in scope than anything we’d done before. We were messing around with handclaps in the studio and Ali [Chant, producer] put a delay effect on the clapping we recorded – suddenly we had this amazing, propulsive rhythm that carried the whole song. In terms of its title, a lot of the record is about building resilience in trying times and we liked the concept of having your own private, healthy method of self-assurance; your own ‘secret measure’. It seemed a perfect title for the album. [Paul Swinton]

Pigeon
With Pigeon, we wanted to write a big, bold, infectious bop which still had some weird-sounding guitar work, as we like combining those things. The song came from a riff Rachael wrote which we both really loved and ultimately ended up becoming one of the defining tracks of the record. Lyrically, it’s about teaching yourself to try and be okay with the unknowns of the future, even if things seem uncertain and overwhelming in the present. [PS]

Never Know
This was a really fun one to build up and piece together in the studio. Like many of our songs, it’s quite sparse and minimal so we experimented with a tonne of eerie, atmospheric noises to accentuate that space even more. Ali had this amazing instrument called a waterphone which you fill with liquid and swirl about – it just made these incredible screechy, creepy noises which complemented the darkness of the track really nicely. [Rachael Swinton]

Lido
Lido is probably the most electronic track on the album. We’re huge fans of artists like Four Tet and Caribou so we wanted to approach the song in a way reminiscent of those influences and create something quite dancey and melancholic. We were lucky to work with the amazing Jemima Coulter on this one and they laid down a really haunting Blue Nile-esque trumpet solo in the bridge which just took the track to the next level. [RS]

Ladder
We were recording a session a couple of years back and Paul had tuned his guitar up for our song Old Bear which has a pretty strange tuning. We were messing around between takes when we realised that striking the guitar at certain harmonic points up the neck seemed to make these beautiful chiming noises. We immediately decided to make a riff out of it and that riff became the foundation of Ladder. [RS]

Cloth

Ambulance
Ambulance was a real departure for us in songwriting terms. Normally, we spend a while honing and finessing parts but with Ambulance we wrote the whole thing in two days in Bristol between studio sessions. We worked with an amazing jazz drummer called Matt Brown on the album and one of our best memories from recording was really spontaneously throwing around ideas for drum grooves for Ambulance with him and Ali. It’s probably our favourite track from the record. [RS]

Another
In keeping with the album’s theme of trying to discover ways you can pull yourself through pretty bleak times, Another is about trying to go a little easier on yourself and not overthink things. Everyone can be prone to fixating on upsetting situations but when you let that mindset get out of hand it can become debilitating and you end up feeling a bit frozen on a bad road. Another is a gentle reminder just to be kinder to yourself. [PS]

Drips
Drips was the song that first made us realise how exciting it is to collaborate with others creatively. We produced our first album ourselves so weren’t used to working with others on song arrangements. That all changed when we recorded Drips with Ali and he started putting our guitars through crazy filtering effects, adding drum machine and unusual percussion and generally taking the song to a completely unique place. That day in the studio was a special, eye-opening experience. [RS]

Money Plant
We wanted to really utilise synths on this record as so much of the music we love is electronic. Ali has a whole studio wall of beautiful analogue synths so we got stuck in and ended up using most of them. Two of our favourite moments in the record are on Money Plant – Rachael’s sparkling Stereolab-esque synth solo in the bridge and the huge, epic bass stabs in the outro (both courtesy of a lovely Korg MS-20). [PS]

Blue Space
Blue Space was the first song we wrote for Secret Measure. For ages it was an instrumental as we’d kind of fallen in love with how sparse and haunting it sounded with just two guitars. After adding vocals it did come alive as a song but we kept things stripped back with just piano/synth and floor tom to retain the intimacy we loved from our early phone-recordings. [PS]

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Secret Measure is released on 5 May via Rock Action
Cloth play Monorail, Glasgow, 5 May; TRNSMT, Glasgow Green, 7 Jul