Following their success with Fascination and Boyfriend, Danish six-piece Alphabeat are back with a new album. With three members of the band called Anders, we catch some rays with two of them - lead singer Anders SG and bassist Anders B - to hear more about it...
The new single The Spell sounds a little dancier than what we've heard from you before. How has your music progressed second time around?
SG: Making this record, compared to the first one, instead of going into a studio and doing the record for one or two months, we were able to go back and forth with songs and do the final touches over six months or so. Compared to the first one, we've used a lot more samples with this one.
B: The first album we wrote, a lot of it five years ago, and we were into Madonna and all that kind of stuff. Last year, we discovered the whole 90s Euro house thing. We obviously weren't that old when it was around the first time and Denmark wasn't that big on the whole dance thing. A lot of that stuff we really loved. There was a Danish girl called Whigfield who obviously had a big hit with Saturday Night and we loved all that as well. The way we've made the album and the stuff we've been listening to is definitely why it's more dancey.
The new album is also called The Spell. Do you have a favourite track on the album?
SG: One of my favourites is actually one of the very last songs we did called Heat Wave and I actually don't sing on it, and that's why I really love it. That's a really good one. It's a very good mix of the more European side of the album meets the American side, the more R'n'B-ish. Some of the songs have an R'n'B influence, so that's a good song to tie it all together.
Your songs are always very fun and feel-good. Do you deliberately create music that people can dance and have a good time to?
B: Absolutely. I think what we thought would be fun to do this time was to make the music even more danceable. Then you could actually tap into things into the song and make them a little less cheery. The Spell is a perfect Alphabeat song but then on the album there is another vein, I suppose that is a little bit darker, but then they're wrapped up this in whole dance thing. Ace of Base, for instance, we adore them. Their songs are super-dark but you still wanna have a dance to them.
It's been almost two and a half years since your debut album This Is Alphabeat was released. At that time the indie scene was really strong whereas now pop music is really coming to the fore. As a pop band, what do you think of the other pop music out there at the moment?
SG: I like La Roux. They have some really good songs, some really well-crafted songs.
B: Mini Viva. They're really amazing, fantastic girls. Left My Heart in Tokyo is brilliant. We saw them live the other day and they were really good. They've got that thing. Hopefully they're bound for big things.
SG: I think they are.
B: I think a lot of the pop music is very good actually. A lot of the pop acts try to be really glamorous, which I really like. I think we wanted to do that last time but with branding and that kind of stuff, people were afraid we'd be too pop and be like S Club 7 or something. That was the disaster for people working for us, that people would perceive us as S Club 7. For a long period of time you had to be not glamorous and we were presenting ourselves in a less glamorous way than we would have liked to, but then Lady GaGa came along and now you can go glam!
The single The Spell is out on 12 October. The album The Spell is out on 19 October.
Interview by Colin Gentry