There are many bands and artists famed for their prolific output – between them contemporary psych favourites OHSEES and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard seem to have a new record out each week, over the years The Fall put out almost as many albums as they had members and garage punk cult icon Billy Childish is currently on over 150 LPs and counting, but even these titans of musical productivity might balk at the task that Glaswegian artpop oddballs How to Swim have set themselves. The band celebrate their 25th anniversary this year, and to mark the milestone have resolved to release six albums over the course of 12 months – and we’re talking freshly recorded new material, no fobbing us off with live albums, remix projects, best ofs and collections of b-sides and rarities (perhaps in part because they released these final two options for their 15th anniversary).
This week they released the second installment, Poundstore Diabolism, following hot on the heels of March’s excellent Greek Active (check out a track by track guide to that record here), and we’re happy to report that despite the gruelling task they’ve set themselves, the quality remains just as high. From punchy, brassy opener ‘Greasy’ through to the charming whistling section of final track ‘The End’s A Chorus’ via ‘Squibs’ squelchy synths and ratatat snare, and the frankly disturbing ooze of ‘We Are Meat’, HtS are showing no signs of fatigue as they set about completing their new music marathon.
We caught up with frontman Gregor Barclay to find out more about the project.
Six albums in one year? What on Earth are you thinking?
Hahaha. Yeah, we’ve given ourselves quite the task. The genesis of it, I’d been listening to a lot of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and I found their insane prolificness to be kinda inspiring. They put out five albums in 2017, which is absolutely wild. And it’s not like one album and four tossed off things either – it’s five proper records (well, four and a offcuts compilation, but I’ll give it them) and they’re all pretty great. So I thought, I’ve been on a bit of a writing tear the last couple years, plus we’ve got a big bag of tunes from earlier in our career that we never found a home for – fuck it, let’s match Gizz’s five, and go one bigger just for the sake of it. We’re gonna start politely heckling them this year to encourage them to match our 6 or beat us. Currently, we’re winning 2:1, but there’s everything to play for in the next six months.
The other part of it, when I started the band I figured we’d put out an album a year, like the Fall or something, and that when I reached this point in our career (25 years) I’d have a couple dozen albums to look back on, a properly sizeable catalogue. But as it’s panned out, we’re way off those numbers. We’ve not been slouches, but it’s nowhere near the document it could have been. So this is aiming to address that imbalance to some degree. We’ll be releasing as much music in 2025 as we did in the previous 24 years put together, in fact.
How have the six albums been planned out – will there be a particular theme or style to each one and is there a link from one record to the next?
Thematically: no, but a couple of them do have a stylistic idea – the 5th is a lot more acoustic, it’s mostly tunes that I’ve written at the piano. And then the idea with the last one is that we play a little more with electronics. We’ve not really had much in the way of programmed drums on any of our tracks before, we’re gonna experiment a bit with that on the last record of the year. It’s dancier overall, I kinda see it as ‘HTS go LCD.’ Then the two albums in the middle are a little more sprawling and jammy – there’s a track that’s 10-minutes plus, and a few other things that are heavier than we’ve tried before, there’s a few fun time signatures.
Where does Poundstore Diabolism fit into this hexology? What are the general flavours and themes of the record?
With Poundstore, the original sessions in Barcelona, we knew we were gonna have limited rehearsal time. I came over from the UK with our drummer, Ally, and although we’d been rehearsing the tunes a bit in Glasgow, we hadn’t actually played in the same room as Sean and Jordan (bass and guitar) until I think the night before the first session. So the songwriting was purposefully playing into those restrictions – a lot of it is quite punky and brutal, all the tracks are in 4/4. I think that simplicity and directness works in its favour, particularly compared to the next couple records.
Prior to this planned glut of new music things had been fairly quiet new music wise for around a decade – what have you all been up to in the intervening years?
I stepped back from the band in 2016 to do some film projects, and then my son was born in summer 2017. It wasn’t supposed to be that long a break but it did turn into that. I’d argue the hiatus was from the beginning of 2016 to Christmas 2021, when we put out Melt, so more like half a decade than ten years. The rest of them have just been doing the stuff they do the rest of the time – none of us do the band as a job (as you would undoubtedly have assumed!) so it’s not like anyone was struggling to fill the time haha.
There were some great music videos from Greek Active, can you give us a quick tease of the audiovisual delights coming up for this album?
There’s a track on Poundstore called ‘Squibs’ and I REALLY wanted a video where we were all gunned down in slow motion in a hail of practical squib effects. But it turns out that kinda thing is prohibitively expensive for a wee band like us… As it sits, the first video was a kinda silly idea I had that us and another Glasgow band we really like – The Slackhead Incident – would release singles on the same day, and the video for their song would have us playing their tune, and our video would be them playing ours. Those dropped maybe a fortnight ago, but I think the result was mostly blank confusion from both bands’ audiences! I’d recommend checking out Slackhead’s “I Look Like That Dog (From the Thing)”, though, as it is a really great tune. Beyond that, we shot the first half of the video for ‘Greasy’ at the Glasgow Tigers speedway track a couple weeks back, currently trying to prep the remainder of that shoot. That should be a fun one.
Are you managing to fit in any live shows amongst the recording and releasing frenzy? A full six album live extravaganza perhaps? Are there any challenges in playing the released tracks live while working on their successors?
We’re trying to play live as much as we can. The advantage of our relative obscurity is that we don’t get a whole pile of people yelling for us to play our “Creep”, so we can basically compose a setlist however we please and not worry that we’re gonna disappoint anyone. At the moment the sets are a mixture of stuff from Greek Active, Poundstore and the next two (Animal Maximum, and Maximum Animal). And then the plan is to end the year with an anniversary show as December will mark our 25th birthday as a live entity. There’s a filmmaker following us this year to make a documentary about us and he wants that to be the big finale, so hopefully it’ll be a decent bash. We’ll be bringing some of the pre-hiatus material out for a spin as well, I imagine.
Do you have a favourite hexaptych (whether musical or from art/film/literature)?
Ha! That’s a really tricky one. Nothing immediately is coming to mind, with the possible exception of Dylan’s imperial period, the six album run from Freewheelin’ to Blonde on Blonde. But that’s just an accident, that’s not an intentional run of six, so I don’t imagine that counts. I get the impression it’s more common in visual art, and I’m really no expert in that field!
Should anyone else be feeling foolish enough to take on a recording project on a similar scale, what advice would you give them?
Don’t second guess yourself too much. The old ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’ adage is a pretty apt one for this venture I’d say. The point is to get the material out there, if you’re happy that the songs are good, and the performances are energetic, it doesn’t need to be overworked. Particularly if you’re doing it on the budget we’re working with, you just don’t have the luxury of 47 takes. Trust the musicians you’re working with.
What’s up next?
The plan for next year is an album recorded live with an orchestra. There’s a Divine Comedy record he put out in 1997 that he recorded over two nights, just playing the tunes live in a big space with like 30 musicians. We’re gonna try and do the microbudget version of that, if we can pull it off, ideally in the second half of 2026. The problem is, Gizz’s new album has an orchestra on it, so everyone’s gonna think we’re just getting our entire playbook from them! But I swear this has been an idea since long before their orchestral stuff. Hell, we were an 11 piece with strings, brass and woodwind when those boys were still in school!
Poundstore Diabolism is out now – get in now as a digital download from Bandcamp or stream in all the usual places via this handy Linktree
How to Swim: Facebook / Instagram / BlueSky / TikTok
Review by Paul Maps
Header photo by Ethan Knight @knighttimephotography_
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