“Uniquely varied and disjointed” announces the press release introducing the debut single from London trio Is Tropical and for once I am inclined to agree.  It’s a noise that washes over you like a sonic tidal wave which probably shouldn’t work but does on so many different levels .

Only formed last year off the back of shambolic party band Ratty Rat Rat, Is Tropical  have rapidly come to prominence as a band with vivid ideas conceptually and a perfectly honed stage show that delivers clever lo-fi pop serving to stimulate, not bore.

Cramming together a whirlwind of synths and distortions, fucked up beats and reverb soaked vocals, it’s a little slice of electronic pop heaven, with some shoegazing thrown in for good measure.  The lyrics appear incongruous, yet line by line they become relevant and entertaining, as the boys utilize their thirst for facts into a songwriting context. And as if that all wasn’t enough to lavish upon your unsuspecting eardrums, the visual merely adds to the irresistible substance of all that is Is Tropical.  Adorned with masks covering their faces and facing each other instead of the crowd, they are striving to remove the notion of the frontman from the band while leading the focus to the music and not the people playing it.  It’s bold, it’s considered and it’s something that many other bands should take note of as they suck in their cheeks and vie for the attentions of their “adoring” crowds.

So in conjunction with new label Hit Club the debut single offering from Is Tropical came in January this year.  ‘When O When’ produced by Klaxons producer Al O’Connell is described as a ramshackle history lesson in a song, accompanied by the shanty infused instrumental (aside from 4 words) ‘Seasick Mutiny’ which is a major crowd rouser in itself.  It’s a superior foray into the ever growing realm of pop music which sets them out from the maddening crowd and sets them up for what should be a rampage on consciousness’’ everywhere.

4or The Record met with Gary, Dom and Simon of Is Tropical at hipster haunt The Macbeth before they played out as part of their own curated club night Adults to an enthusiastic crowd.  This is what they had to say.

4or The Record: Its fair to say your music is multi-dimensional, coming from loads of different influences, so are you able to describe your particular sound or are you purposefully trying to not be labeled?

Simon: It’s really hard to describe our music - we read a description for shoegazing which is quite fitting but we are very pop underneath and we add a kind of lo-fi noise to things as well.  We have so many different reference points it’s quite a miss mas.

Dom: It’s hard because as soon as you start explaining what your music is you are almost picking how people want to see you.  It’s a lot better if people actually hear all different kinds of music in what you do and pick that out for themselves. Genres overlap now anyway so putting a label on something automatically means people will only see one side of what you can do and if people can like listen to it and then take what they like most out of it then that’s what we want 

Simon: Especially because nowadays you can just access so much different music from everywhere, so much so that you can’t even avoid any music even if you hate it.

Gary: Yeah so even that’s going to influence you in some way even if its that you realise you don’t want to make music like that, everything that you listen to has got a direct influence on what you do.  I hate these people that say I’m into this one band, an obscure band from the 50’s and try and say they write songs like that.

Simon: We actually write certain things on one instrument and then end up playing it on another instrument purely to stop it sounding like a certain genre of music.  So say we write a guitar hook and its quite indie in its arrangement or something like that, as soon as it’s played on a distorted synth it changes it completely.

Dom: It’s a bit like bastardising little things that you hear that sound good in different kinds of music

4TR: So you never approached writing for this band with an idea of sound in mind?  Except that you knew you wanted to make music different to your former band?

Dom: well the first demos that we did we played this tiny gig in Bournemouth like under a different name, The Wizard Lords [laughing] and they were the first demos we came  up with after the old band and they were so different, but we really liked something in them.  I suppose we were stumbling around in the dark a bit.

Gary: Well we are not playing them anymore anyway; we had a religious song and a song about Turkish delight [laughing]

Dom: Yeah we wrote a religious song so that we could get on a Christian rock festival [laughing], but we didn’t get on because it wasn’t good enough.

Gary: It was kind of angry religion though, it had some hideous words in it that you could never play now, it would never get on the radio put it that way.

Dom: I think we stumbled across the sound we’ve got now and its nice not even knowing what it is because you just keep making songs and the songs sound better and better so eventually it will just make sense

Gary: You can pigeonhole yourselves if you are writing songs if apparently you are meant to be one genre but if you come up with something quite interesting that does not fit that you can kind of disregard it and go that’s not our sound we can’t do that, so you don’t restrict yourself by not having a specific genre to the music you make.

4TR: Your debut single came out last month on new label Hit Club Records.  How did they get involved?

Gary: They were really interested in what we were doing, and someone that shows that much interest is clearly going to be good for the band.  

Simon: Plus they have got a really great thing going on as well with regard to things like artwork, which is really important to us, a lot of people.  They actually put quite a lot of money into having a nice sleeve and for us its good to have a nice product overall.

4TR: It’s good to hear that artwork is important to you to work alongside your music, because so many people don’t make the effort these days.  

Dom: We can get just as involved in picking a really nice bit of artwork as we can in like picking a really nice guitar sound. 

Simon: It’s all part of the same package I reckon; if you’re going to put something out for someone to hold in their hands so that they listen to your music then I think it should really represent what you stand for visually.  We also co-made a music video with one of our friends, Gareth Philips, so we like to have all sides very close to us.

4TR: So the creative aesthetic of Is Tropical is as important to you as the music.

Gary: Yeah but it’s by no means a way to sell our music its just representative of us.  Some people rely solely on imagery and stuff like that to sell their music, but it’s not done with that intention.

Dom: It allows us to be creative in a different way.

4TR: One thing that people won’t fail to notice at an Is Tropical show is the fact that you play with your faces covered with masks. Why?

Dom: It’s so you concentrate on the important thing listening to the music and not looking at someone pouting while they are singing.

Simon: We kind of wanted to cover our faces to make it faceless like the music, because the face shouldn’t represent the sound.

Dom: And when we play we face each other because we like the idea of getting really worked up together instead of facing a crowd and ignoring each other throughout the songs.

Simon: We are ultimately making music for ourselves, obviously we want people to like it and get into it as well but when we writing the songs we are thinking about how we can play together and make it sound good.

4TR: I read somewhere that you said it was also about removing the frontman from a band.

Gary: Yeah exactly, Simon used to sing in the old band but now we both sing and Dom writes lyrics as well and we all swap duties.  I think its horrible when you see the front cover of NME or any other music publication and it’s just the front man pictured, when you consider there are other people involved in that band; its not about the face it’s the music that’s important

4TR: Is Tropical as a project is an entirely collaborative effort then, from the song writing, music to the aesthetics.

Gary: Yeah it’s like a sort of gang mentality, you know when you see the kids walking round the streets or driving round on their scooters with their hoods up and scarves across their faces, they stick together and there is something quite nice about it which I like.

4TR: So lyrically are you taking a kind of social commentary stance or is it more about stories and experiences?

Gary: No its not social commentary, we aren’t telling it how it is down the shops like we used to do [laughs].

Simon: I think now with lyrics you can actually sing about absolutely anything, it’s the one thing you have complete freedom with, so we never kind of stick to the same subject or way things are written, we just experiment with different ways so some could be stories some could be random escapism

Dom: Because the music quite often comes first you get a sense of what the song could be about, and you can tailor the visuals towards it and you can have this idea of this kind of separate world that this song lives in and build it around it.  It’s like a little escape for each one and each has its own little theme.

Gary: Plus I’m not too keen on using really wordy lyrics just to try and be really poetic just because someone like Bob Dylan has done it, you don’t need to do that, you can say something that is still really meaningful but in the simplest form.  Simplicity is key for everything.

Simon: the vocals kind of sit quietly in the music as well so it’s not like in a pop sense where the vocals are so much louder than everything else.

Gary:  Its like another sound within, that’s why the grain is on it we wouldn’t just put a clean guitar layer over the top of everything we do, we put a distortion on lots of the instruments with distorted vocals in amongst them so its like a melody that fits with all the guitar lines

Dom: we don’t want all our songs to be complete walls like messes of sounds but its nice to have everything blending together because then its like what the masks represent as well its just all one big thing held together, nothing stands out.

4TR: The single ‘When O When’ is out now and it’s basically about war, is that right?

Simon: Yeah, it’s like a bad history lesson in the key of C#.

Gary: But we are not trying to say anything or preach about war... 

Simon: No, but each line has a certain thing in it, like there’s this one line about Eva Braun asking Hitler if she looks good in this dress and Hitler’s like I cant believe you are talking to me about this when everyone is fighting me.  Then there’s another line about blank expressions on soldiers faces because they were given a lot of speed during the war to keep them alert.  Its basically random little anecdotes put together, but everything has its own story behind it so at first it doesn’t make sense but individually it does.

Gary: We’re massively into facts, [laughs] we make it our duty to learn one fact a day and we take things off on tangents.

Seriously, go and see this band live. Say we sent you.

‘When O When ‘/’Seasick Mutiny’ is out now on Hit Club Records.  

Words: Francesca Strange

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