11 Questions with A Week Full of Mondays

If you could share one thing with an audience before they first tuned into your music, what would you say?

What you will hear is an uncompromising tapestry of whatever creative energy we had as a collective during the timeframe in which the track you are listening to was created.

What’s a non-music thing, a book, a place, a random job, a conversation you overheard, that actually changed how you create music?

There’s an unreleased track that’s floated around the band for a while now that we just call ‘Rags’, and at the time it was a pretty scathing critique of the impotent rage found in many young men. The song captures the cynicism and disillusion of someone who has outright rejected any sort of hope.

Give us a song origin story. Where did the idea come from, and did you know straight away that it was something, or did it take a while to reveal itself?

Songs can sometimes take months to finish, and sometimes they’re done in 10 minutes. We’ve never really understood why until we heard that concept of songs just “falling out of the sky”. They’re always the best ones. You learn not to force things in that manner. It’ll always come eventually.

Pick a song that you’ve released that could only have been written at that exact moment in your lives. What was going on, and is there any part of you that wishes you could still be in that moment?

We’ve got a track called ‘A Placebo’. Our guitarist, Jay, had sent in a riff he’d been working on, and within about 10 minutes our frontman had written a song around the piece. His partner sings on the track too since she was about when the demo was being put together, and it ended up staying on the final version. It creates a fantastic eerie vocal that’s almost androgynous.

Tell us about a gig that went somewhere unexpected: a night where the room, the crowd, or just something in the air made it feel like more than a show. What happened?

We couldn’t nail a single show down. Each one has its own energy, and you need to know what energy to bring to it based on your environment. If it’s a festival, you know to play the dancier tracks. If we’re playing with some heavier punk bands, then we’ve got free rein to play some noisy stuff, and on the indie bills the anthems tend to come out. That being said, the setlist has recently been a mishmash of the things we want to play at that time.

What’s going on in the world right now, nothing to do with music, that’s quietly making its way into what you’re working on?

Politics. What a bloody scary world we live in.

There’s a sound, an instrument, a texture you haven’t used yet, but it’s there in the back of your head. What is it, and what’s it waiting for?

On the album ‘Travelling Without Moving’ by Jamiroquai, there are quite literally two back-to-back instrumental tracks that have a didgeridoo droning on it. It’s absolutely nuts. Some sort of world instrument like that is bound to show up one day on a Mondays’ track, for better or for worse.

Which artist, alive, dead, from any era, would you most want to play your music to?

Bowie without a doubt. He was at the forefront of music for his entire career, and he never became a parody of himself. To this day, the DNA of the album ‘Blackstar’ is something we’ve tried to crack into sonically as a group.

Forget the big moments. If your music was the soundtrack to one small, ordinary moment in someone’s day, what would that moment look like?

There’s definitely one or two tunes that you can stare out a train window on the way home from an awful day at work and zone out to. If we can make three minutes of the mundane feel at least somewhat cinematic, we’ve won.

What’s next for you? Tell us what you’re working on and if you have anything exciting in the pipeline.

Plenty of recording going on behind the scenes now. We’ve transitioned into being a completely self-produced act, so what you hear is exactly what we want you to hear.

Any final words to leave us with?

Follow us on Instagram via @aweekfullofmondays!