Absent Friends are a young bunch from Coventry. Taking cues from the recent rise of psychadelic music that’s actually listenable, the band recall The War On Drugs, Tame Impala and Radiohead to name a few. We caught up with Chris from the band to find out where they’re at:
What would you regard as your main influences?
I won’t do a massive list so I’ll just say Radiohead. I really got into ‘Hail to the Thief’ when it came out but before that I didn’t really pay much attention to music outside of chart stuff and then a lot of the stuff that was linked to skateboarding and all that. Extreme sports, baggy jeans and nu-metal were big when I was in school so that was all anyone listened to. And then all of a sudden I think the video to ‘There, There’ got put on Kerrang. At first I was like “What is this shit?” but it began to grow on me the more I saw it so I bought the album and then that opens up other avenues you go down, finding similar bands and before I knew it I was buying albums every weekend. I know the revolution of The Strokes preceded ‘Hail to the Thief’ by a year or two but I guess that bypassed me. It’s not everyones favorite album but it changed a lot for me.
Ha! I said I won’t do a massive list and then I reel off a massive paragraph of shit… anyway, next…
It’s the end of the world, you’ve got time to listen to one song, what do you choose?
All Is Full Of Love by Bjork. It’s just lovely really isn’t it? And it’d probably calm me down if the world was about to go to shit. You wouldn’t have long to think about it so my rule here originally was to go for the first song I thought of. Thing is, that ended up being Chocolate by Snow Patrol because I think the world was ending in the video to that. It’s not a bad song really but I thought I could do better than that, so err, yeah, Bjork it is!
A solid choice! Do you have any releases planned for the near future?
Yeah, sure. We’ve got a few recordings from last month we just need to polish a little bit so they’ll probably be free to download or something soon. We’re really slow at doing anything haha! Expect them at Christmas.
Where can we see you play?
We are gonna be playing at the Bull’s Head in Birmingham on August 16th. Everyone should come see us so we feel loved. Hopefully we’ll announce a few more soon too.
And finally, what’s your favorite thing about raccoons?
My favorite thing about raccoons are their arms. I only became aware of that when I saw your new banner by the way.
Check out Absent Friends on Facebook. Their Anniversary EP is available on iTunes here.