Conor Mason

It's nice to like play a character in that way, like kind of turn what is essentially a macho sounding rock song on its head.

welcome to the eras podcast where we get into the music and moments that have made your favorite artists who they are today i'm your host abby mccarthy and i'm joined by a british rock band nothing but thieves with four top 10 albums two billion streams and sold out shows across the world frontman conor mason and guitarist joe language brown are on next to talk about their latest album stray dogs Welcome to the Ears podcast, Connor and Joe from Nothing But Thieves.

Hello.

Hello.

Joining Headliner on the podcast today is Nothing But Thieves guitarist and producer Dom Craik, who takes us inside the making of the band's new album, Stray Dogs, which is their rawest and most organic record yet.

As the album's sole producer, Dom discusses capturing the band's live energy in the studio, how he records Connor's amazing vocals, returning to Angelic Studios where it all began for them, working with drums, vocals and analogue gear, taking full control for the first time, and what fans can expect from the new album.

So welcome on Dom, how are you doing this fine August day?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I was very into French disco dance, everything from Justice to the old Daft Punk records to some more... niche, like, I don't even know the artists, but random songs that would come on off the back of listening to Just Ease for two hours straight, which I wouldn't recommend anyone does because that can get slightly fatiguing.

But I was in that headspace and trying to really get my chops up in terms of, like, programming, really, like, learning the art of sidechain compression and using outboard gear in a way that was kind of tasteful and would elevate... predominantly electronically based music and that was a new a new world for me to dive into and kind of threw myself into it and loved it i love how meticulous it is i love the detail and i love like how you can refine something to the point of is it perfect or is it just becoming different now you definitely start getting in your own head about it but that was kind of the the last taste of proper music production I had before we took a break.

And then when we started writing this record, myself, Connor and Joe, who all write the music together in the band, we sat down and we were like, what's the mission statement? You know, as big or as small as we want it to be, what we're kind of setting out to do here.

And I think the general consensus was like, raw organic and that was kind of it which i like as well because that's that kind of says everything and nothing you know that could be a lot of stuff but the one thing it isn't isn't being sat behind my computer screen dialing in a kick drum uh decay time for two hours straight losing my mind that's not what that is um so i was all for that because i think i'd kind of felt like i'd scratched that itch at least for the as you mentioned we went for something that was like we would at the start initially thinking okay how does our band sound in a room like how do we stand on stage how do we capture that so already i'm trying to put my headspace not my head my head into like how do we achieve that and still make sure that it sounds good on radio it sounds like good on vinyl and it's going to stand the test of time against our other records so there were those things to consider but most of all it was like we've got to write some great songs here that always comes first so like any of our records sorry if this is a long-winded answer but like any of our records we dive into the writing process and completely immerse ourselves in trying to create a world and the demos become very very informative as to where the final recording is going to go i would say we take it to the nth degree on that like it's i love i love that part of it because i can i can really work on something um and get it right and the the boys are great soundboards for that so i can do two or three versions of a song or I can do 20 versions of a song and some of them can be quite minimal changes but I can really get it right for all of us so I think getting that demo process right is something we've always found valuable because then we're not getting into a studio looking at each other like almost like that Spider-Man meme where we're pointing at each other like panicking like what are we going to do with this song and it's like you tell me whereas we're going in with like something that's pointing firmly in the right direction and i think like i wouldn't want to speak for the to the boys but i think the general consensus was we were feeling confident with me steering the ship on this record because the demos were like what kind of we were happy with them um so it felt like we were kind of filling in the blanks and still leaving obviously the room to actually enjoy the recording process rather it feel like paint by numbers there's definitely like time to experiment but broadly we knew where we were heading