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BLOOD RED SHOES

Blood Red Shoes

Ø

    "We never seem to take the easy road and we never seem to fit in. We are never in step with what is going on, we’re always the weird kids, with our own weird ideas, following our own weird path." - Blood Red Shoes

    TRACK LISTING

    1. WATER
    2. MISERY LOVES COMPANY
    3. A LITTLE LOVE
    4. CLOSER
    5. XØXØ
    6. ON THE HOOK

    Blood Red Shoes

    Ghost On Tape

      After years spent living on opposite sides of the Atlantic world events threw Laura Mary Carter and Steven Ansell of Blood Red Shoes back together into what has become the must fruitful era of their 17 years together.

      “It’s been a loooong time since we both lived in the same city”, explains Steven. “I mean we actually wrote this album in LA at Laura’s place, then came to the UK to record it…and then everything went nuts”.

      Realising very quickly that they wouldn’t be able to release the album or tour until the world returned to some kind of normality, the band found their energies quickly spilled over into other projects. Laura-Mary started a podcast, Never Meet Your Idols, with her best friend in LA, interviewing everyone from Zack Snyder to Mark Lanegan to CHVRCHES. It is now about to start its third season. Steven started applying his love of electronic music by writing and producing other alternative artists like Circe, ARXX, Aiko and XCerts, racking up millions of streams in the process.

      Having worked together on Laura–Mary’s forthcoming solo mini album Town Called Nothing and restless from the lack of touring, the duo started jamming out in rehearsal rooms, which led to the light-speed writing, recording and release of the impossibly-titled Ø EP in the summer of 2021. Which concludes what the band call an “off year”.


      And that brings us back to GHOST ON TAPE. It appears that like David Lynch’s The Lost Highway, nothing is linear in the world of Blood Red Shoes. Written and recorded before their most recent EP, GHOSTS ON TAPE is a huge jump into new terrain for the band. Musically and emotionally their most mature work, it is a complex, imaginative, and very gothic development on their sound. Musically, it leaves almost no trace of their former selves.

      “We’ve always been outsiders right from the very beginning” says Steven. “This album is really about us asserting ourselves as our own little island”, he adds. “We have made an entire career out of being told what we are “not”, of being rejected, of not fitting in, and this album is us deliberately pushing into all of our strangeness, emphasising all of the things that make us different”. Obsessed by true crime and murder podcasts, many songs on the record are told in character and explore the dark psyche of those at the pinnacle of outsiderdom: serial killers. "Ghosts On Tape" paints a picture of a dark and unsettling world. It is the sound of a unified and confident duo who know exactly who they are, even if the wider world doesn’t really get it. The sound of two people who have spent their entire adult lives making music together and who, more than ever, are finding new pathways for their creativity.

      “Ultimately this album is an invitation”, explains Steven. “It’s us saying, this is our world, these are our darkest thoughts and feelings - our ghosts - caught on tape. You are welcome to join us. Come and embrace the strange”.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Comply
      2. Morbid Fascination
      3. Murder Me
      4. (I've Been Watching You)
      5. Give Up
      6. Sucker
      7. Begging
      8. (You Claim To Understand)
      9. I Am Not You
      10. Dig A Hole
      11. I Lose Whatever I Own
      12. (What Have You Been Waiting For?)
      13. Four Two Seven 

      The story of 'Get Tragic' can be traced way back to the relentless gigging off the back of their 2014 self-produced and self-titled record, when the heels finally fell off of Blood Red Shoes at the end of that same year. A near-decade of incessant road time and a non-stop pace of life finally took its toll, with the band stopping only to quickly hammer out “another ten songs” to release as their next record, before ploughing straight back into touring. The pair exhausted themselves to the point of collapse. “We didn’t, at any point, have a breather,” says Steven Ansel (drums and vocals), “We probably didn’t see each other for about 10 days a year, tops, for six or seven years.” Understandably, such incessant close proximity led to implosion. “We got the to the end of the fourth record and were like, ‘F**k you, I never want to see you again’,”Steven adds, half-laughing, half-sighing.

      Vocalist and guitarist Laura Mary-Carter packed her bags and bought a one-way flight to Los Angeles, a complete radio-silence between the two bandmates stretching on for months. She fell in with a songwriter’s crowd, penning tracks and collaborations with big-time pop producers and pitching songs for the likes of Rihanna. It provided her with “a lot of time to reassess,” she says. Steven, conversely, “went out and took drugs and went clubbing for about half a year,” he laughs. “I don’t remember a lot about it. Classic break-up move, right?”

      “That’s the whole running theme of this record,” says Steven. “The reason we called it Get Tragic is because we realised that everything we’ve been doing over the last three years is kinda tragic!” he says, prompting laughter from the pair. “Just like, ‘Ooh, I hate you, I’m going to America to find myself’, and like ‘Ooh, I’m gonna party for the rest of the year!’ Everything about it is such a cliché – we were like, ‘We’ve turned into a f**kin tragedy!’”

      'Get Tragic', then, fully embraces the absurdity of Blood Red Shoes situation. As a result, the pair come out the other side sounding fresher and more assured than ever. Recording in the States, working with a new producer, ditching the two-piece rock rulebook they arguably helped write - everything that went into Get Tragic was a leap into the unknown. Their first move, post-reconciliation was a writing retreat in rural Wales, which saw them woken up by the village community leaders, who entered the house while they were sleeping and banished them from town, fearful of the rock group’s proximity to the local church.

      Regrouping once more and booking in some more sessions in Leeds, Steven took a phone call a few days before round two. Laura had broken her arm. “I fell off a motorbike,” she explains. “I didn’t tell anyone – I didn’t post anything about it, but the fact is I had a broken arm for a long time.” Throughout it all, they went through a conveyor belt of managers and manager firings, the group falling out with everyone around them as they attempted to rebuild their core, two-way relationship. One of those managers “led us into a record deal that was really fucked, and we shouldn’t have signed,” explains Steven. The subsequent fallout and legal trouble financially crippled them both. As that period came to a close, Laura went through a romantic break-up that still visibly affects her. “We were finally getting there,” says Laura, “and I was like, ‘No… don’t let this happen too…’.”

      Remarkably, though, Laura’s broken arm proved to be a blessing in plaster-clad disguise. Leaving her unable to play guitar, it prompted the longtime-guitarist to pick up a keyboard, and sing more than she ever had before. Through mishap and misfortune, the songs that came out of the sessions were the duo’s light at the end of the ever-expanding tunnel. They decamped to L.A. to record with Nick Launay (Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Arcade Fire / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). He pushed them to explore these new worlds even further, and as such the the after-effects of Laura’s motorbike tragedy can be heard throughout 'Get Tragic' – more melodic and synth-led than any of the band’s records to date, it embraces electronics and nuance in a way their stripped-back and stomping two-piece rock sound of old never could have.

      “That was where it started to make sense,” says Steven. “It was like, ‘How do we combine our songwriting with electronics and keyboards?’ We wanted to have the soul of a rock band, but change the style so it was more interesting, more groovy, and more sexy – and less like everybody else! I started to feel like all rock music around us was one shade of one colour.” Laura agrees: “I really find the music industry, and just culture in general, has a sheep mentality. Like, ‘Is it okay to like this?’ You just need to have a mind of your own. Whether people like it or not, we’re at least trying to do something that isn’t ‘of the moment’ or whatever.”

      Through disaster and dismay, the band have emerged reinvigorated. Every incident has fed into a record of defiance and self-acceptance. Knowingly embracing the tragedy of their movements, and the clarity at the end of such woe – they even laugh at the very idea of having a picture of themselves on the cover – 'Get Tragic' is a total reimagining of the Blood Red Shoes you might think you know.


      TRACK LISTING

      Side A
      1. Eye To Eye
      2. Mexican Dress
      3. Bangs
      4. Nearer
      5. Beverly

      Side B
      1. Find My Own Remorse
      2. Howl
      3. (Interlude)
      4. Anxiety
      5. Vertigo
      6. Elijah


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