The Twilight Sad remix The Ninth Wave's Happy Days!
Take a first listen to The Twilight Sad's remix of Happy Days! by The Ninth Wave, taken from their upcoming Unhappy Days remixes EP
Following on from their Scottish Album of the Year-shortlisted debut Infancy, released in two parts during 2019, this year hasn’t seen Glasgow’s The Ninth Wave slowing down for anyone.
In the summer they released their glistening Happy Days EP, six tracks which include arena-ready singalongs (I'm Only Going To Hurt You), beautiful heartfelt ballads (Abattoir), and the more industrial (Happy Days!), further exemplifying the band's ability to successfully and cohesively explore contrast within their music.
A few short months later, they’re back with a remix EP, Unhappy Days – both a pleasing riff on the original title and an apt commentary on what this year has brought to so many. The EP is due for release on 13 November via Distiller Records and features remixes from the likes of Dream Wife, Working Men’s Club, Scottish post-rock behemoths Mogwai and Robert Smith’s faves, The Twilight Sad, who have taken on the EP’s title track.
The Skinny are delighted to be premiering The Twilight Sad’s take on Happy Days!, a rollicking industrial onslaught that hones in on the track’s darker characteristics and dancefloor intentions, which you can listen to in the below SoundCloud player (click here if it’s not displaying correctly).
“I chose to remix Happy Days!, firstly because there are a lot of really interesting rhythmic parts going on throughout the song that it was easy to hear how it could be mixed in so many different ways, and secondly because I used to have a pet snake called Richie Cunningham,” Andy MacFarlane, lead guitarist of The Twilight Sad tells us.
“I wanted to only use the stems that were sent over, instead of adding any new instrumentation, so I made samples out of the vocals by chopping them up and recording them onto a cassette, then I'd chop up that audio from the cassette to make new samples, and kept repeating until I had a few vocal hooks I could build the music around. Then I used the same process for the synths and percussion, until I eventually had a collection of samples that I could put together into some kind of structure.”
Callum Stewart of The Ninth Wave says: “We’re massive fans of The Twilight Sad and they’ve made some of our favourite songs. To have Andy rework the title track of our EP was something special for us and we’re really happy with how it turned out.”
The Twilight Sad’s remix of Happy Days is out on 6 Nov; Unhappy Days is released on 13 Nov via Distiller Records