It’s got really good resonance and it’s easy to play even though it hasn’t had any love.
“I picked up a really fun SG copy from a tiny little shop in Mold, North Wales,” she says. She has a US model that remained in heavy rotation while recording AAARTH – without ever making it out on the road just in case – but also a guitar from humble beginnings that became a star in a supporting role. To complement her Fender amp, Bryan is an avowed Stratocaster fan. It was a thing of real beauty and I loved it, but across so many records, when you need to get a lot of different effects, I’ve had to streamline it. “At the end of the last cycle I had a really big analogue board. “We’ve always got a few toys to play with, but not so many that we get lost,” she says. That’s true whether she’s in the studio or attempting to melt faces at a hundred paces live. Over time, and as The Joy Formidable’s discography has deepened, she has come to believe that less is sometimes more. In Cardiff, Bryan is travelling light – the show is one of two, along with a night at London’s Lexington, slotted in prior to Reading and Leeds festivals – before rolling out a newly finessed setup to open for Foo Fighters at enormodomes in the US and Canada. This balancing act is replicated when the band stride on stage later that night. We’ve got that digital side combined with some nice tube distortions and I’ve never really swerved from my very first amp, which is a Fender Hot Rod.” Going digital “It’s not that you couldn’t do that with an analogue setup, because you could, but it’s whether you would get to that place as quickly and not lose some of the beauty of the momentum within that. “It has so many filters and delays happening one after another,” Bryan says. After recording Hitch in North Wales, which was a case of heading home for the group, this LP was tracked in Utah, where they quickly embraced the spirit of experimentation under a boundless sky. Its sharp edges are resolute and confrontational, with requests to tone the guitars down for radio play swiftly ignored. It’s home to the usual generous helping of Bryan’s rich vocal hooks, but it’s also happy to spin off in any direction it chooses, whether that’s the creeping weird-pop of Cicada (Land on Your Back) or an old-school glam-rock rager such as What For. This anger was channelled in a good way.”ĪAARTH is a multifaceted record.
To get to the point where we felt like we’d been beaten brought in a different emotional quality that went somewhere hopeful. We’ve always seen each other as having the tenacity and balls to have a long career. “We didn’t want to be unravelled by this industry. “There was kind of a relief element that we were enjoying it and we were still the band we set out to be right at the beginning,” Bryan says. But from the moment Y Bluen Eira’s crushingly heavy riff smashes through the speakers, driven by a thunderous performance from drummer Matthew James Thomas, it’s clear that a high stakes game suited them just fine. Rather than enter the studio with a spring in their step, and a stack of ideas in their pockets, the band hit record with the feeling that they had nothing to lose. Prior to recording, Bryan admits that bassist Rhydian Dafydd was working through some “pretty horrible, ugly stuff”, while she also stared down a case of writer’s block for the first time in her career. It’s definitely affecting, and we were questioning whether or not we were in the right frame of mind to go there.”
We’ve done enough records to know what the process can end up bringing out. “Going into the studio, especially in this band, is not always a cathartic thing,” vocalist and guitarist Ritzy Bryan says, while sat on a fathoms-deep sofa at Cardiff’s Clwb Ifor Bach. In another world, 2016’s Hitch was etched into the history books as The Joy Formidable’s final LP. The first thing to note about The Joy Formidable’s new album, AAARTH, is that it nearly didn’t happen.