All Killer, No Filler

"There's an energy in the band that I've never felt before,” Joel Byrne enthuses when he sits down with The Music. “Maybe that's because there's some new members, but I think it's mostly due to the record. And that can only be a good thing.”

The record the Wolf & Cub frontman is so stoked about is the band's third full-length, Heavy Weight. According to Byrne, it was by far the band's most arduous record to complete. On top of member changes that introduced ex-The Scare players Brock Fitzgerald and Wade Keighran into Wolf & Cub, Byrne and drummer Joel Carrey set out to hold this record to a higher standard than anything they'd done previously.

“We wanted something that sounded classic in the sense that you listen to those classic records and every song sounds great. I think that was our aim, and in trying to achieve that it meant we had to cut bits that maybe were overstaying their welcome. We were very conscious about having everything on the record feel essential.

“I think on the first couple of records I was maybe a little bit naïve in thinking that those long-winded parts were a little bit more essential than they were. We wanted to make things more concise this time... Every song was like a child, and we were raising them.”

Guiding those tracks to their potential saw Wolf & Cub retaining the dark, psychedelic lashings and retro rock grooviness of 2006's Vessels and 2009's Science And Sorcery while introducing a greatly beneficial sense of economy. That pop sensibility lends Heavy Weight a taut and powerful playability.

“I think in the back of your mind when you're making a record, you know there are going to be some tracks that people are going to skip over. You just know that sometimes you feel like you're just indulging yourselves. But on this one, I feel like, more than I have with anything else we've done, this is a record that you don't need to skip any songs. As a whole it's a heavyweight record. Which was the point.”

Byrne feels that they needed to offer up something pretty damn special to make sure parts of the album weren't getting passed over. “The nature of the industry these days, it's so easy to just download single tracks... you don't have to digest the whole album... But we wanted something where every track was that one track that you were going to download. We wanted this album to be your playlist. We've done it for you. This is it.”

Achieving that proved to be a long and hard task given the band was split between cities. Members worked on material by themselves and needed to be smart with the time they spent together. Then there were the recording sessions for the album – small blocks spanning two years. Byrne believes the album was shaped by the somewhat unusual approach. “It would be awesome to be able to go away for a month and make a record, but I've never really had that opportunity so I'd don't really know what that would be like. It's always been this kind of fractured process.

“I think being in a room and knowing it's costing us money and we've only got a certain amount of time to do it… I think that's an important part of our process. I think if we are given too much time and there aren't those constraints I think we could probably get a bit lazy. I know, personally, that I need that pressure, because otherwise I will find something else to do. I think for us, those constraints actually help to make the band.”

Preparing to tour Heavy Weight, Byrne says Wolf & Cub are now faced with a problem they've never really experienced before. “On the other records, there have been tracks that I've known we're never going to play live. But on this one, I can't fathom not playing every one of these tracks. And that's actually a pretty good feeling.”