Louis sat down with London-based band Sorry, who proved passionate and enthusiastic but, genre-wise, difficult to pin down.
Backstages at small venues are seldom glamorous places, and upstairs at The Cookie, Leicester, is no different. I was there to meet Sorry – an achingly fashionable London guitar band – having just watched them deliver an hour of their particular brand of off-kilter pop. It was the first night of the tour, and I sat down with the songwriting core of the group, frontwoman Asha and guitarist Louis, for a debrief.
When I asked how they felt it had gone, Louis stated that he was delighted with the response from the crowd, and how supportive the crowd had been. They were joined by drummer Lincoln and synth player Campbell, and their live sound was far more layered than that of the typical guitar band. Asha and Louis take on almost co-singing duties live, and the result is very interesting indeed. Their debut album, 925, is out on Domino at the of March, and I wondered whether this represented a first airing for many of these tracks, but Asha was quick to point out that they’ve been in the live rotation for quite some time now, and that the album had actually been recorded all the way back in last summer.
Louis shed some light on the recording process, telling me that ‘We did a lot of it at home, and then took it to a studio to put all the bits together’. When asked if they worked with a producer, Asha told me that Louis had produced the record himself, and they’d then recorded with James Dring (a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with Blur, Gorillaz, The Magic Gang and Loyle Carner) at Gas Works Studios.
She ruminated on what it is to be labelled an overnight success, explaining that Sorry has existed in its current form for at least 2 years, and that before that they were known as Fish, but dropped that alias for legal reasons. I asked whether they were glad to have waited this long to record, and they were uniform in being glad to have waited, although Louis maintained: ‘If you said to us 2 years ago that the album wouldn’t be out for 2 years, we’d probably be like gobsmacked. But yeah, definitely glad we waited. Cause we probably would’ve rushed into it’.
'Asha was quick to point out that they’ve been in the live rotation for quite some time now, and that the album had actually been recorded all the way back in last summer'.
They’ve been on Domino for 3 years now, and I wondered if there’d perhaps been any pressure from the label to get an album recorded and released, but Asha told me they were actually ‘quite chill about it… I think they were encouraging us to get to the right place’. Louis added that ‘We were like more hectic about it. But they were relaxed about it, they wanted to wait.’ I wanted to know more about their actual writing process, and Asha shed some light on their method, telling me that they used to write as a band, but now her and Louis will write, and then share it with the group.
When asked about their approach to pop, Louis had a simple philosophy: ‘It’s all about the hooks’. I think that was what I took home from meeting Sorry, more than anything; they’re unabashed in their embrace of pop music and all the accoutrements therein. Their output is pop hooks filtered through the lens of a modern guitar band, not the other way around, and it’s all the more original for it.
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