News: Wild Beasts
Hayden Thorpe says band is at work on new album, offers a few thoughts on feminism
WILD Beasts have begun recording a new album, according an interview with frontman Hayden Thorpe in the New Statesman.
The London-based outfit are reportedly two weeks into recording new material for the album, and comes as a “much-needed” change from playing material on third album Smother, which Thorpe says was made when the band was in a “transient place”.
Said Thorpe: “We’re in that honeymoon period you get to go through every time you start making a new album because that’s, in a sense, the great thing about making music, or any creative work really, is that you always have that absolute right to reinvention. And that ability to reinvent is one of the most important and invigorating things you can do really, to move on and shed that old skin. We’re just at the stage of enjoying that new lease of life and that release from old material because it’s kind of an old world to us. It describes our old selves and it feels very invigorating to refresh the page as it were. It’s much needed I think because the last album was definitely an album that was made, personally, in a transient place, so it felt as if we didn’t have a grounding or a foothold in a still world until this point.”
Thorpe was also invited to talk in some depth about politics and popular disenchantment with wealth inequality, but perhaps most revealing in light of the band’s own lyrical interests was this snippet, on whether or not he considered himself a ‘feminist’:
“It’s hard to say really, it’s quite a strong term. Yeah, I suppose I do. But I’m also in some ways a masculinist because I sometimes do feel there are discrepancies with male opportunity and male ways of being. Women have come to really dominate certain spheres. I mean, certainly in my game, women have become the powerhouses in terms of the four of us don’t have pretty faces and lipstick to go on the front page of a magazine, and the weight and power that carries is heavy, but then also you could argue that it’s a chauvinist world that places a pretty girl on the front of a magazine. But I think actually that strength has been reclaimed by women now. It must also be noted how lowly women are represented in Westminster.”
Women dominating in the workplace? ‘Reclaiming’ the power of lippy? Er, not sure about all that personally, but Thorpe’s comments on what he sees as a crisis in masculinity help put things in context, at least.
“I feel as though there is a crisis of emotionality,” he said. “There is no kind of agreed way of being. I think there is amongst females; there’s a sense of mutual reasoning on an emotional front. Almost as if women are allowed to be emotional, they allow themselves to be emotional, they allow themselves freedom for, in the most part, truth. Whereas with men, there’s always very, very coded ways of being. I suppose I always think of masculine culture as being this ancient thing that has developed out of years and years of ways of being, whereas women have had a very recent revolution and been able to, in a sense, reinvent their way of being. So I do feel there is a certain crisis in masculinity and we could do with a revolution.”
