After years in production, Sydney electronic pop trio Glades have released their debut album, 'To Love You', and celebrate with a national tour.
Comprised of vocalist Karina Wykes and multi-instrumentalist producers Cameron Robertson and Joseph Wenceslao, Glades have spent the past few years honing and finessing their craft.
“We've been writing for so long, for like the past three years, just developing our sound and developing the vision of what we wanted to be,” Karina says.
“For every song, there's another 10 or 20 songs behind it in that process of refining. There are so many songs that people will never hear. We've come out with this product 'To Love You' and we're so excited about it because we bare our heart and soul on this album and we're so invested in everything that's on there and everything we've said.”
Producer Cameron explains how the trio persevered through the challenges of writer's block and opening up to collaboration in order to achieve the vision they had for the band and their first full-length record.
“It definitely hasn't been an easy process either; there was a whole period of six to eight months where we'd just released our first EP and everything had just been between the three of us songwriters,” he says.
“We were asking what was going to happen next and what we were going to be working towards; we were working through a period of writer's block where we couldn't really find what we wanted to say, we couldn't find how we wanted to sound and everything was a bit average for us.”
To break the creative drought, the band undertook a songwriting workshop in Los Angeles where their reservations about and resistance to working with outsiders were summarily dismantled and done away with.
“At that time we were a bit nervous about letting people into the project because everything up until that point had just been us three,” Cameron says.
“But I think that was a really pivotal moment in what the album is now because it opened us up to collaboration, but it also gave us the opportunity to learn off other people and I think that just helped us so much in our own songwriting and production that the album wouldn't be the same if we hadn't done that.”
Glades recently played Listen Out and this November, they take 'To Love You' on a national metro run, with Karina saying crowds can expect to be taken on a journey. “I think the album itself is a journey and that was the point of the live show,” she says.
“It will be emotional but it will be full of energy; it will be fun but we're also going to bare our hearts and people are going to see the emotional side of us as well.
“Our hearts are so in this album and I think we didn't realise how invested we would become, but we honestly feel like our hearts are in this album, especially when it comes to the conclusion at the end – it's so full of emotion and our experiences. I feel like people are really going to hear that there.”
'To Love You' is available now.
Glades Australia Tour 2018
Sat 24 Nov - Corner Hotel (Melbourne)Fri 30 Nov - Jack Rabbit Slim's (Perth)
Sat 1 Dec - Jive (Adelaide)
Thu 6 Dec - Metro Theatre (Sydney)
Fri 7 Dec - Woolly Mammoth (Brisbane)
