Friday 27 January 2012

...The King Hats!

Photo taken by Ashley Baxter
For the latest Introducing... feature, we venture across the Firth of Clyde to the quiet, sleepy town of Dunoon... which has spawned a young band who are anything but that!  Now based in Glasgow, post-punk foursome The King Hats have just released their debut EP First Light completely off their own backs, and all that blood, sweat and tears have really paid off big-time.  As debuts go, it's difficult to fault.  Yeah it's a wee bit rough around the edges here and there, but that's exactly why I like it.  So sit up and take note all you aspiring, like-minded bands, First Light is how it should be done!

Now I've said my piece, here's the guys to tell you a wee bit more...

Kowalskiy:  Who are The King Hats?
The King Hats:  Just four guys that really enjoy making and performing music together.  We’re all originally from a wee town called Dunoon, so we all knew each other growing up.  We were always playing in different bands; I guess music’s just always been a massive thing in each of our lives (and it still is). So when putting this band together it just seemed to be the line-up that made sense.

Kowalskiy:  How would you describe 'your sound'?
The King Hats:  I guess we originally had quite a big punk influence. We’ve always wanted to maintain that aggression and intensity. However, at the same time we’ve always wanted nice melodies, but nothing as whiny as emo (not dissing emo, but they whine a bit).  Our biggest influences were Blink 182, the first 2 Idlewild albums, Biffy, Radiohead, Deftones, and just partying. That’s really where we’re coming from.  Now we’ve developed that in to something bigger, more epic; maybe a bit slower, but still with that energetic, and aggressive, punkiness at heart. That’s allowed us to really focus on, and develop, the melody-side of things too.

Lyrically it’s all Alan. He’s a big, romantic, softie at heart; and most of the songs are at least semi-autobiographical.  And live? Well, we just love to go mental on stage; like four thrashing balls of hyperactivity. There is no better feeling.

Kowalskiy:  PLUG AWAY!!!
The King Hats:  So, we’ve just released our first EP. It’s called First Light. It’s our first release since we released Riot on Tut’s label. We’re quite proud of it; especially as we recorded it in out flat. Bert knows his way around Pro Tools, so we realised we could just do it all ourselves. It ended up being a bit of a hard slog; but that mentality of doing it ourselves has made us realise we should just do everything ourselves.


I guess what we’re most pleased about with the EP is finally having a set of songs on record that we feel does us a bit of justice. Our shows are always mental, and people always say some very nice things, but we never really had something other than Riot that we were proud to have out there for people to hear.  So all that’s out now; Bandcamp, BigCartel, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, you can get it at all these good places. However, only the physical CD has a couple bonus tracks.

Kowalskiy:  What else can we expect from The King Hats in the future?
The King Hats:  Gigs. Lots of gigs. It’s been far too long since we were gigging frequently, and we really miss it. Hopefully some nice festival slots too. Other than that, we’re building a studio at the moment, so we’ll potentially have another EP out later in the year. And since we’re releasing the stuff ourselves, there’s been talk of maybe starting a label, but we’ll see. So quite a lot hopefully. 2012 is looking to be a very exciting year.

Want my advice??  Get on over to their BigCartel page and get your hands on the CD, which as the band says, comes with two bonus tracks, Time In Japan and the cracking Brand New.  So yeah, off you go!

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