The Howlers: 'We always want to strive for more – that's what keeps us going’ | BIG INTERVIEW

The trio had already played a prominent slot at January's Icebreaker Festival at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea and a handful of other gigs.

And they were preparing to build on the momentum of previous singles, La Dolce Vita and Matador, which had brought them praise from national media as well as airplay from Radio One, 6Music and Radio X, and plays on BT Sport, Sky Sports, Soccer AM, among others.

New single Badlands was locked in for an April release, and then of course, a by now familiar tale unfolded.

‘We had the whole campaign planned,’ recalls frontman Adam Young. ‘Then it got released a few days after the national lockdown, but we were so far down the rabbit hole to releasing it, there was no way to postpone it.

‘I had the worst 24 hours where our publisher, our press agent, our plugger, they all called me saying: “This is screwed”.

‘As a result, Covid brought a rather unceremonious close to that chapter of the band.’

Despite the lockdown and the difficulties of working through the pandemic, Adam says: ‘We're a bit of a different band now. That whole set we played that day at Icebreaker, that went out the window in April.

‘We wrote 12 new tracks, and the band is way better now. I know people often say that, but we've found our place where we're comfortable on stage and our sound, and I'm really looking forward to everyone hearing it.’

While Adam is from Portsmouth, and moved back here last year, he met bassist Gus ter Braak and drummer Cam Black while studying music management at BIMM in London.

During the first lockdown, and before he moved back here, Adam’s grandfather died and he began processing his grief through music against the backdrop of Covid and the BLM protests then taking place in the capital.

‘We dealt with it as a band, in my grieving period I wrote a load of tunes very, very quickly.

‘I was using music as a cathartic tool, and me and the boys were able to lock ourselves away in a north London factory for 10 hours a day in a windowless box, just driving to and from the studio in a Covid-world. Driving there in the morning to protests and sirens and coming home to protests and sirens.

‘In that time, we wrote all these songs, and it's the first time we all really wrote together on every facet of the music – Cam was getting involved with the lyrics and everything.

‘We were using the emotion and the feelings we had, and the feelings in the city around us, feeding it into the music. It's the best stuff we've ever written, by miles.’

They decided to decamp to a studio in Eastbourne, East Sussex, to record the new songs.

‘It was just the most incredible recording experience I've had, the most comfortable experience you could want. From the moment we arrived there we were welcomed as if we were old friends.

‘We were in our little bubble together, we isolated together, which gave us this little bit of normality for a week. It was almost like going back to pre-Covid times and everyone was able to have a laugh and a beer.

‘The producer said let's keep the live energy, let's not try and tidy it up too much. We didn't record it to a click, we didn't want it to be regimented, we wanted it to flow – if it speeds up, it speeds up, if it slows down, it slows down.

‘We're quite a tight band anyway so without tooting my own horn, there were takes we used which were the first take. You felt the energy in the whole room and we didn't want to detract from that.’

We will get to hear the first fruits of those sessions when they release a single on March 5.

‘I'm quite excited about it, we've been planning this for nine months! Then there will be a couple more singles to follow and an EP around late July time. The singles are all really good, and they get progressively better.’

The material has also been mastered by Third Man Records, the label and studio set up by The White Stripes’ Jack White out of Nashville.

And when it came to which tracks to release first, Adam says: ‘We're having conversations with people in Detroit and Nashville, and the team's spread out in Eastbourne and Brighton and London, and Newcastle, we're getting all of this input, so we decided together which one of the kids to sacrifice first...

‘It was a hard decision because they're all of a high standard, but we've whittled it down to what we think is a good order.

‘It will definitely demonstrate how comfortable we are in our sound, we've taken a more ’60s-’70s lo-fi garage-rock west coast sound, but we've kept a lot of the elements which made us who we are.

‘Songs like La Dolce Vita and Matador had big riffs in them. We've taken those elements and applied them to actual songwriting,’ he laughs.

‘Being in a band, you have to take the advice and criticism you get from those around you, and you have to apply it, you can't ignore it.

‘We came to the realisation, instead of me being the primary songwriter and wheeling the skeleton into the room and hoping we can put the meat on the bones, I came to the room with the idea and effectively, we took apart the songs, rewrote a lot of parts and a lot of lyrics and what came out of it was these tracks.’

The only outing for the new material so far was an acoustic show in the summer in the garden of The Victoria pub in Dalston.

The acoustic format, with just Adam and Gus, was in itself new to the band.

‘It was weird, because we've never even played these songs live before and we'd never played an acoustic set. The gig was packed out, socially distanced, and it went down really well, there was a really good atmosphere.’

Since moving back to Southsea, Adam has started up Brutalist Management with Sam Leadbetter, who founded Brutalist as a DIY cassette label.

Sam and the band have a long association – he put on their first ever Portsmouth gig under the Calamity Cratediggers promotions banner, and released La Dolce Vita as a cassette single.

‘Sam came to me and said he wanted to start managing acts, and he wanted my help to do it. We brainstormed during the first lockdown how to do it and got it all in place.

‘We now have a team of seven across Portsmouth, London, Newcastle and Manchester, and we’ve got acts from Paris to Scotland.

‘What me and Sam have been doing have caught a lot of people's attention really quickly.

‘To be honest, I've bitten off more than I can chew!’

Much as he clearly enjoys the management business, Adam is obviously champing at the bit to get The Howlers back on track.

‘One of the things I've really taken from this pandemic is people's ability to grow from something that was destroyed.

‘Even with our band, we tore everything up and started again. I've even changed the way I sing, I always knew I could sing like this, but I never had the confidence before to do it.’

The band are due to play at The Wedgewood Rooms on April 1, supported by Hallan and Slug Money. Tickets £6. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.