This month, on 28th May, StevieRay Latham releases his new EP ‘The Nomads of Suburbia’. There’s clearly a lot more to Latham then meets the eye and this new EP which marks his inaugural on SR24 Records represents a different way of thinking. For this new EP he teamed up with a group of collaborators, and hard though this may be to believe, this was his first experience of recording in a professional studio setting.
Driven by a desire for a bigger sound means a shift away from the intimacy of lo-fi home recordings but don’t let that term “bigger sound” fool you. Spacious drums, overdriven guitars, ambient synths and layers of field-recordings guided under the careful hand of producer Mark Aubrey have resulted in some clever and incredible results, not least of all on Thief, the video for which you can watch below. Stick a pair of cans on and sit back…it has a killer opener that builds slowly around Latham’s riff before those drums kick in…You’ll press play again; listening to this is an experience – how music should be. Thief is also our Song of the Day.
Latham on that riff:
“The riff for ‘Thief’ came to me when I was playing some shows in South Africa around the release of my last album ‘Winter in London’ and talking to the locals there, the same kind of stories of corruption kept cropping up all the time. It made me think about the people who run our country as well and the lyrics came out of that really. After some early recording sessions out in France, I worked with producer Mark Aubrey on the track at North Devon’s Saunton Road Studios with drummer Simon Murfet to get something that brought together influences from across blues, folk and rock music.”
The accompanying video runs in hand with that swamp blues feel of the track – only we’re not in south-central Louisiana but in Asia. The urban decay and feel of the footage gives that extra edge to everything – musically and lyrically… there’s also a reason why the footage feels like a road trip…
“The idea for the video was that we took a flight out to Singapore and we were travelling overland through South East Asia, China, Russia and Europe to get back to the UK. We were documenting the route and the video was going to link all those places into a flowing collage of cultures that encapsulates this idea of ‘Nomads of Industrial Suburbia’. Unfortunately, the pandemic cut the route in half, so all of the footage was taken travelling through Malaysia, Thailand and China before we had to take an emergency flight home.”
This new body of work seems like an important milestone in Latham’s music; it’s an exciting place to be and proof that he’s not short of original invention…onwards!
https://www.stevieraylatham.com