Almost four years since their last album, Nottingham’s best party band Seas of Mirth have stormed back onto our record players with Kriller, a groovy fandango of deep sea disco tunes. We caught up with members Al Juddy and Paul Lynch to find out their recent highlights and hijinks...
Big congratulations on Kriller - it’s a fantastically fun record! How's the reception been so far?
Al: It’s been great! We’ve just done a few small shows in Carlisle and Edinburgh, then also London and Kent. We’ve had lots of good feedback, sold lots of merch and hopefully gained some fans for life.
Your sound has moved on a little with this album, a little less sea shanty and more of a funky under-the-ocean party. What has inspired this evolution?
Al: It's really come from what music we’ve been listening to, what kind of people we are and what makes us tick. There’s always been a bit of a theme to our stuff, but you can do a lot with it - the deep trenches of the ocean lend themselves to lots of wild and wacky music. The transition has been more noticeable on the last couple of albums as the instrumentation has changed - there’s no accordion on the new one for example.
Paul: We’ve had a completely different line-up for every album, which naturally lends itself to change. I don’t think I started playing electric guitar until album three. We’re such a big band and people’s lives change, or there’s geographical factors involved, so we’ve always had a bit of an open door policy with who’s playing live and on the records.
Al: There’s bound to be some fans from years gone by when we were playing the more piratey shanty stuff who don’t really like the new stuff, and that’s fine, we totally expected that, but most people just like us for being Mirth, rather than a style or genre.
I feel like Kriller has a bit of a disco-cabin-fever vibe to it. It reminds me of some of those strange isolated living room parties we all had during lockdown. Did the pandemic have an effect on putting the album together?
Al: We were quite full of juice at the start of the pandemic - we’d just put an album out at the end of 2019 and obviously couldn’t tour it, so we were all just trying to get on with things. I was doing up my boat and it was during those repetitive tasks when ideas would come. It was also great weather in that first lockdown, which is probably why the middle of the album sounds a bit sun-drenched.
Paul: When we were all in lockdown we started playing with our toys and pedals at home. Going from that time when you could practise together to using a multi-track recorder and getting loads of sketches down. I ended up making a different album effectively from Seas of Mirth offcuts, which is a dream pop electronic thing called Pale Stranger. But if you take a song from the new album like Li'l Underworld, which has Yay Maria featured on it, it's basically lots of songs stitched together.
The deep trenches of the ocean lend themselves to lots of wild and wacky music
Lyrically, Seas of Mirth are great at telling a story. What kind of tales can people expect on the new album?
Al: The album in general is like a neon paradise, and about trying to coax your more reclusive friends to come out. You’ve got the recent single Dig Out The Moves, which is obviously about encouraging people to get on the dancefloor. Tiki Tak is a fictional tale of some divers getting trapped underwater not being able to communicate. Then there’s songs like Bobbit, which might sound like a silly tune, but it's quite a personal one. When you get into the verse it's about an artist’s creativity and what you’re expected to do, then thinking no - stop that, I just want to do what I want.
Paul: Back when we began in about 2006, I had been trying to make some electronic stuff and you [Al] were just completely indifferent to it, but you liked the sea shanties with modern pop culture references. In the early days, none of the time stuff made sense - it was riddled with historical inconsistencies, like what’s Carol Vorderman doing being mentioned in 1555?! …There were definitely two strong categories: either character-based songs, which were about debauched pirate types and lusty sailors, or songs about an unbranded type of booze that would make sailors go mad or blind.
You have had a pretty full on summer on the festival circuit, can you tell us some of your favourite highlights or hijinks?
Paul: Definitely Glastonbury. We last played in Shangri La in 2014 and there was a monumental storm. We’d hyped ourselves up so much so we felt slightly underwhelmed. We’d also brought a massive sixties organ with us which wasn’t fun to carry through the mud.
Al: I had to give the giant tug-of-war rope we use about an hour’s bath afterwards… But this year we played two gigs, one at The Bandstand and another at The Rabbit Hole and we got a lovely reception. We got offered it a week before the festival - they said Saturday night, 1am - you’re the perfect band to do it. And we were like yes - it’s happening!
By the time our readers get their hands on the mag you’ll have already played Hockley Hustle, but what else do you have coming up for us to look forward to?
Al: We’re going on tour, hitting Birmingham, Hull, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool - all the northern powerhouses, then finishing off the tour in Cardiff and Bristol. At the moment it's all about the present, getting Kriller to as many human ears as possible, and encouraging as much movement as possible as well. We’re just really proud of it and want to share it with the world.
Kriller is available to buy now in Running Circle Records and via Bandcamp, or you can listen online via all major streaming platforms
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