Temples have spoken to NME about their “Kylie Minogue meets Daft Punk” new single ‘Jet Stream Heart’, and what to expect from their ’90s and early ’00s dance-inspired new album ‘Bliss’.
The Kettering indie four-piece’s fifth album will arrive on Friday June 26 on V2 Records, launched by the psychedelic electronica rush of ‘Jet Stream Heart’ – a sign of the band’s feet being firmly planted on the dancefloor for their escapist new record.
“For me, it’s Kylie Minogue, meets Daft Punk, meets Temples!” frontman James Bagshaw told NME of the single. “These days we’re always just trying to make stuff that’s fun. That song started the whole thing for this record. The song is about being enticed by music itself, and it does it on its own. You’ll be walking past a club or a venue and there’s an allure to it. What is that pulls you in?
“It’s non-apologetic and pulls you in straight away. It’s a shock to the system, but the next single will be the ultra shock to the senses. If people like this, they’re gonna love the next one.”
It’s been three years since the band’s last album ‘Exotico’, which was produced by Sean Ono Lennon. This time, they chose to helm the record themselves.
“In terms of creative output, you’re baring it all and you can feel very naked,” Bagshaw admitted. “For us, it’s all about the purity of the idea and the creative vision. If we took these songs to someone else, they’d put their own stamp on it – and so they should.
“This is pure Temples, more than records we’ve produced ourselves before because we really haven’t thought about how it’s going to be received. That’s incredibly liberating. Maybe the fans will hate it!”
Bagshaw said for for album number five, the band wanted to push themselves to “come at this record from a different angle and not follow our own tropes”.
They questioned and examined the role of each instrument, made all the more extreme by viewing music through the prism of late ’90s and early 2000s dance music to create a feeling of “melancholic euphoria”. They found themselves in the world of Faithless, Underworld, Massive Attack and Portishead.
“We’re of an age where we’re too young to have enjoyed what was going on in the late ‘90s,” said Bagshaw. “It makes me sound old, but the Millennium eve was the first time I tried prosecco – and I was underage by a long way. A lot of the time, music is very nostalgia-driven. You hear people say all the time that, ‘Music isn’t as good now as it was when I was out partying’. Is that true, or are you just nostalgic about a time? For this, it’s that nostalgia of being too young to go out and that allure of what you were missing out on.
“The songs from that time transport all of us back to that pre-legal drinking age. There’s something quite magical but melancholy about it at the same time. There’s a longing. We’re nostalgic for a club scene that we weren’t even a part of.”
He added: “It was just a great time for uplifting dance music. A lot of it didn’t sound electronic because they were sampling guitar music and orchestras. It wasn’t pure electronica even then, and that’s what we’ve gone for on this record.”
Lyrically, Bagshaw said that the album married a sense of longing while also dancing towards the future to create a feeling of “permission: to let go, to move, and to become something unexpected”. The album deals heavily in “disconnection, frustration, surrender and renewal”.
“A track like ‘Vendetta’ is about how we all disagree with each other at different points of our lives, even with our best friends,” he said. “We’ve all been on those nights out where someone disagrees with your plan or you’re at loggerheads about something. It’s about the slight euphoria of suddenly seeing past that and realising you haven’t fallen out forever; you were just being arseholes!”
He added: “This is our most forward-thinking album yet. No one can pigeon-hole us and say we’re a garage rock band or a psych band. There are tinges of psychedelia but in a more modern way. There are no ‘psych’ bands that sound like this record.”
Temples release ‘Bliss’ on Friday June 26 on V2 Records. Pre-order it here and check out the full tracklist below.
1. ‘Jet Stream Heart’
2. ‘Revelations’
3. ‘Megalith’
4. ‘Glimmer’
5. ‘Blue Flame’
6. ‘Vendetta’
7. ‘Jaguar’
8. ‘Horizon’
9. ‘Waiting On The Echoes’
10. ‘Fantasy Realm’