How have you been coping during the lockdown, have you managed to still be creative?
Luckily for me, Empathy Test had a new album ready to go when the lockdown kicked in, so most of my time has been spent focusing on the crowd funder, ordering all the merchandise, and doing A LOT of email and Zoom interviews to promote the new record. Monsters dropped about a month ago now and we’ve sold over 500 CDs and vinyl as well as t-shirts, handwritten lyrics and mugs. I’ve fulfilled about a thousand orders in the last six weeks, no joke.
Could you tell us a bit about the story behind The Empathy Test, how did it all begin?
Empathy Test was founded in 2013 by myself, a singer/songwriter, and my friend Adam Relf, a music producer and composer. We had both recently watched the movie Drive and were inspired by its synthesiser-based soundtrack to try creating a track with ’80s analogue synthesiser sounds for the first time. The track we made was called Losing Touch, we released it a year later, and since then it has had nearly three million plays on Spotify.
Who inspired you to get on stage and perform?
For me, it was the Brit Pop era. The bands of that time made it feel like anyone could pick up a guitar and form a band, so I basically, I did. I was particularly inspired by frontmen such as Jarvis cocker (Pulp), Tim Booth (James) and Brian Molko (Placebo).
Are there any particular artists or albums that have inspired your musical style?
Empathy Test draws inspiration from so many disparate sources that it’s quite difficult to pinpoint any particular artists or albums. Adam was inspired by film score composers such as John Williams (ET, Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc.), Brad Fiedel (Terminator) and James Horner (Star Trek, Aliens) which accounts for the noticeably cinematic style of our music, while I take my cues from the emotional, confessional style songwriting of the people I just mentioned.
Could you tell us a bit about the writing and recording of the ReverbNation winning track Monsters?
On the first tour, Empathy Test did with our new keyboard player, Oliver, in October last year, we’d just done sound checking and Chrisy, our live drummer, was playing this kind of stadium rock beat, which sounded enormous in the empty venue. Oli started playing this undulating bass part on his synth and a twinly, catchy lead part. I had some lyrics that had been kicking around for a while that I began to sing over the music and I just played around with the melody until it fit. We recorded what we had on Oli’s iPhone and called it ‘Monsters’. When we got back from the tour, I played Adam the phone recording and he was really excited. ‘Monsters’ was new and exciting and captured the energy of our live performances in a way that nothing we had done before had. We decided that the ‘Monsters’ should be the album title track and lead single, and form the foundation for the entire sound of the new record.
How has the reception been to your third album Monsters?
Very good. On the whole, most people liked the inclusion of acoustic drums on the album for the first time, and a lot of fans have been calling it our best album yet. In the first month, we sold over 500 CDs and vinyl and the album has been streamed over 130,000 times on Spotify. It’s just so gutting that we can’t perform the new songs live or take the album on tour, because of the pandemic.
What has been some of your most memorable performances and what are some of your favourite venues to perform at?
There have been so many now, we’ve played to some MASSIVE audiences at German alternative festivals such as Wave Gotik Treffen and Mera Luna. Literally thousands of people. But the best times are always in the small, sweaty venues where you can feel the energy from the crowd and hear them singing along. I will always remember performing at a venue called Moritz Bastei in Leipzig in 2017, one of the first performances where the audience cheered each member of the band as we walked onto the stage, cheered for each song as we started playing it, and sang along to every word. That was a real watershed moment.
Here at Artistic Echoes, we are always on the lookout for new artists do you have anyone to recommend?
These days I mostly listen to new synth stuff and post-punk. I recommend people check out Papertwin, Korine, TR/ST, Twin Tribes, Idle Youth and Spectres, to name a few. There is always a ton of new stuff around and Spotify is actually a great way of finding your new favourite band, if you subscribe to their Discovery playlists. There are billions of bands that sound like The Cure, New Order, Joy Division etc. which is great news if that’s your niche.
It’s a little difficult to make plans at the moment to make plans but do you have anything coming up that you would like to let people know about?
Well, having just released an album in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, we’ve not been able to tour the album or play any of the new songs live. So we’re really looking forward to hopefully going on a headline tour of Germany in September if it happens, everything else is on hold until things become clearer. We’re just hoping the live music scene bounces back and we can get back on the road again. We’re just about to release expanded versions of our first two albums on CD and a neon green vinyl of our new album, so that’ll be some more work for me!
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