British India play their first big show of the year at City Limits Festival in Perth and frontman Declan Melia isn't too sure about the line-up order.
“The thing that intimidates me about the show is that there are so many good bands on the line-up,” Declan says.
“We're playing after Frenzal Rhomb, which feels kind of weird to me because when I was 12 records like 'Meet The Family' and 'Not So Tough Now', they were the records I loved.
"My year level in high school, in my mind, was separated into people who liked Frenzal Rhomb and people I didn't talk to. Playing after them is going to be a bit weird; I think they kind of f#$%ed that up but so be it.”
Last year British India released their sixth studio album, 'Forgetting The Future', which had them working with Oscar Dawson from Holy Holy on production. “I was really stoked with our record, working with Oscar and [how] it all came together really well,” Declan says.
“It was at a point where it was good to work with someone different in that we'd made the first few records with Glenn Goldsmith, so we tried something different. It was really fun and I was really happy with it too.”
While some critics claimed 'Forgetting The Future' left them wanting, Declan says the album is a return for the band to their more aggressive roots and taps into a sense of emotion that was missing from previous release 'Nothing Touches Me' in 2015.
“We really wanted the record to be emotional whereas the record before was more about songcraft, we were more into writing songs,” he says.
“Sometimes in that you can lose the emotional edge, so we wanted emotion to be the real lynchpin of each song and aggression is such a good emotion for us as far as being writers goes.
“There was a lot of anger on that record… we haven't written songs like that since the 'Guillotine' era of the band so it was cool to get back into that.”
With 'Forgetting The Future' not yet a year old, British India plan on taking the album out on the road one more time this year before releasing what will be their seventh studio album. “As for what we do next, it's been a long break for us not having been writing,” he says.
“We haven't really been writing as a group since we made the record, which was probably this time last year.
"So it will be interesting when we get together for the next one because this album was a collaborative work but the one before it ['Guillotine'] was not so collaborative. So now we're going to go back to being less collaborative again; it certainly seems that way.
“We gotta get back into the writing thing, that's for sure. I have to try and get together with the guys over the next few weeks and work out where we're going to start.
"For the last few records we had a studio to work out of but we don't at the moment, so we have to work that out, then writing will be a major priority.”
