Scottish indie-rock favourites The Snuts are making their way back to Australia next month for their biggest run of headline shows yet. This comes alongside their third studio album “Millennials” (out now), which hears them elevating their sound and steering towards an intentional live show focus with big hooks you’re going to want to scream loud. Lead singles “Gloria”, “Millionaires”, and “Dreams” are perfect examples of the direction, and find an energy that captures their riotous live show. This tour and album follows their visit to Australian shores last year where the shows were sweaty, fun and energetic to say the least. (Read the live review for their Sydney show HERE). And they are ready to do it all over again. 

I recently chatted with The Snuts lead vocalist Jack Cochrane about creating their new record “Millennials” with the live show in mind, how Australia found its way onto the record, and explored how they build their live show ahead of their upcoming Australian tour. Check it out BELOW:

THOMAS BLEACH: Your third studio album “Millennials” is out now, and it really is a punchy record that feels like it was meant to be experienced live. While you were creating it, were you specifically thinking about the live show, and how you were going to play these tracks, and how they’d resonate?

JACK COCHRANE: Yeah, I think so. When we started this band a long time ago, we didn’t really understand the concept of being a recording artist. That wasn’t in our sights. It was always just about how we can get these songs in front of people, how we can make them work live, and how we can get people singing them. It was really all about how we can do what live music does for us as gig goers ourselves. So I think that element has always influenced the recording side. I think if anything feels like it’s not going to work live, we kind of stop and question ourselves as that’s a big part of being a band now. 

TB: One track I really wanna experience live is “Yo-Yo”, as it’s truly an immediate standout on the new record. Something that people might not know is that this song actually started while you were in Australia from a shower drip in your hotel room. So can you explain the creative process behind this track and how it evolved from that shower drip?

JC: Yeah! There’s a restaurant in Australia I always go to while I’m there called Gnocci Brothers, it’s an absolute favourite of mine. So I was sitting in my hotel room waiting for that to be delivered, and all I could hear was the shower head dripping and it kind of sounded like a syncopated pattern. It got me thinking about the Billie Eilish interviews where they’re talking about recording the traffic light noises in Australia. That is something I’ve been doing for my whole life. I’ve got sound bits of planes taking off, trains coming in, and all of these different silly bits. But this was the first one where I actually thought it could work as a drum part. 

50-60 percent of this record was demoed in my living room. They were really bad demos, but I also feel like that’s kind of my style. I’m the 30-40 percent guy who starts a song and then never looks at it again until someone compliments it. So anyways, I had this really bad demo with the drum beat from the shower and I took it to my friend Scotty Anderson to build it up and turn it into something that was listenable. 

TB: Did Australia creep onto the record in any other ways?

JC: We actually worked on the record quite a bit in Australia. We recorded the vocals of “Millionaires” at a studio in Melbourne. And, we recorded a lot of the guitars on “Circles” in a hotel room in Sydney. So there’s heaps of things like that from our trip to Australia on it. There’s actually a nice little bit of Australia on the record, which I think is pretty cool.

TB: What’s the weirdest thing that you’ve recorded on your voice notes that you’ve gone… “maybe I’ll use this one day?”. 

JC: Oh man, there’d be so much right now. Honestly, it’s become a daily process of me going “this sounds like it could be something”, and then just recording it. I think it’s really funny as iPhone does this thing where it just decides the name of your voice note from the location. So these are some of the names I have on my recent voice notes; Urban Outfitters 2, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Hotel Ziggy Los Angeles, and Café Du Nord. I love that I now just associate these sounds with these locations. 

TB: If you could be any type of NPC – what would you be / what would be your dream purpose? 

JC: Oh that is a great question. Do you remember when you were playing The Sims and you’d have your house, and shit would be getting pretty good? Your life was looking good, and then all of a sudden people would just be moving into your house. I think I’d be one of those Sims squatters. Just on fire in the corner and stuff like that. That feels very me. 

TB: What song from the album went through the most versions to get it to where it is now on the record and why?

JC: I’d say probably “Circles” had the longest lifespan. I wrote the chorus just after our first record,  so that’s like three years ago or something like that. It was a much darker song that was just on the piano. It was one of those songs that disappeared onto a hard drive, and the people I had shown it to kind of liked it, but I didn’t know if I really liked it a lot. So when I re-discovered it I was playing with the production and trying to build it up from a ballad. It floated between a few different ideas, and we really didn’t want it to be a Brit-pop thing like The Verve, not that they aren’t great songs, but it just wasn’t what this song was. We tried a big subby weird kind of electronic version of it which was strange, and we were constantly trying to keep the acoustic guitar out of it, but I reckon we ended up with 30 different guitar tracks at one point. 

TB: You’re returning to Australia next month for a run of headline shows. You started this album tour in the US, how would you say this album has translated to the live space, and how are the shows feeling? 

JC: When we made this record we were in a super positive space, and we were trying to make sure we actually took note of that as it’s easy as artists to constantly be chained to this race or idea of being successful. In this day and age there’s just a crazy amount of struggle and sadness that has to come with it. And we’ve been battling that as a band, and trying to find solutions and ways out of that, and trying to pick our own path of what it means to be in a band, or to be an artist, or be writers.

So when we made this record we were in this positive space, and we wanted the album to reflect that. We wanted to be able to take a record on the road that made us feel good as well. Our last record was not that record. It was dead angry which was cool in its own right, and the shows from that era were quite aggressive and cagey, which were a lot of fun. But there was something calling me in making a straight-up fun record. So the shows have been really joyous, unfiltered, and drama free. And I think that was really international within the music. We wanted to be able to go up there and enjoy it. 

TB: Have there been any of the “Millennial” songs that have surprised you with their reaction from the fans through the live shows? 

JC: I’ll probably speak a lot about how the landscape for artists and bands is changing. We’ve been in it for a few years and I think about how dramatically things change with how people are consuming music, and the volume of it. The song we put out as the second single, “Dreams”, there was a bit of disappointment in the camp of how that went down online and with streaming. I don’t look at the numbers because that’s so depressing, but I could feel that energy around that single because the first single did so well. But I genuinely always thought this song would bring people joy at the shows, and “Dreams” has become the one that people actually dance to. I love that because I see it as a challenge as an indie band to get people dancing instead of just jumping up and down and punching each other in the face. We have such a varied crowd now. You have the lads, the fangirls, and then older people, which I love. It’s so fun now seeing everyone dancing together. 

TB: When you were in Australia last year you were performing “Gloria” and “Dreams” live, so now having gotten to play them a fair bit live, are you finding how you’re playing those songs has evolved or changed in any way? 

JC: Yeah, for sure. As I was saying before, guitar music is a supersaturated space at the moment, and everyone is seemingly trying to do something really different. But for us we just try to ignore that noise and just look at how we can challenge ourselves against our own work. We ask ourselves, “Is this more exciting for us than the last stuff we’ve done?” and “Is this different than the last stuff?”. I think we’re always very conscious of being a carbon copy of anyone else. I don’t think we are. But I think we’re always quite worried about being a carbon copy of ourselves of a previous era of a band, which maybe holds us back. Maybe people want more of the same, but we quite like to challenge ourselves in that respect. But yeah, we were playing “Gloria” and “Dreams” on that tour, and we definitely weren’t playing them well then, but now we are, which is cool. 

TB: Are there any older songs from your catalog that you haven’t played in a while that intertwine well with these new songs that you’re starting to bring back into the live set? 

JC: Yeah, for sure. There’s actually one already that stepped into the set. We had this old song that was on the first EP we ever did. It was at a time where we were just putting on shows in a local area, and we were quite popular. But it got to a point where we had down 3 shows and people were traveling to see us live, and we decided we needed to record a four-track demo EP so people could learn the songs. So there’s a song called “What’s Going On”, and the original recording is horrific. It’s purely a bit of the time, and I think you need to forgive yourself a little bit because at the time we thought it was so cool. But listening back now, it’s so bad. 

Anyways, when we were putting this record together we decided to do a deluxe version, and because the theme of this album is the highlights and lowlights of your life so far, we decided to embrace that with re-recording this song. It was always a fan favourite, and we always hated playing it live because it sounded so bad. So we re-recorded it in this weird U2-esque way, which is pretty funny to me. 

TB: How important is building a setlist for you in the right way? Are there any songs you are over performing that you try to avoid, or instead have to perform?

JC: I’ll be honest with you man, playing the same shit every night gets so boring. There are so many songs I’m sick of performing, like watch me trying to pick a setlist. It’s hard because the more success you have in the library and the longer your sets become, you kind of need to play particular songs. It’s quite unusual for the year we are in to have three albums in three years. We’ve not stopped. We’ve constantly been on the go and we’ve constantly planned. We genuinely want to have no old stuff to play as we want to keep it fresh for ourselves, but people are coming to the shows so we have to deliver what they want. But what I can definitely say is that we’re not making a record this year. I can’t take it, man. 

THE SNUTS AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Thursday 23 May – Northcote Theatre – Melbourne

Saturday 25 May – Metro Theatre – Sydney

Sunday 26 May – The Triffid – Brisbane