Today, Anna Meredith shares her new single ‘R-Type’, the second track to be revealed from her forthcoming debut album Varmints. Speaking exclusively to Dummy Mag, Meredith says, “With R-Type I was trying to write something punchy, driving and raw, that flips between the relentless rising scale figure you hear being hammered out on guitars, cello and clarinet to great rolling synth lines with a sense of shape and build. (Incidentally, it took me about 500 takes to get that clarinet line right, clearly not quite got the chops I once had…)
I love playing this track live too and consider it a bit of a failure if the entire band aren't drenched in sweat by the end.”
The follow-up to 2012’s Black Prince Fury EP, and 2013’s Jet Black Raider EP, Meredith’s debut full length Varmints will be released on 4th March, 2016 via Moshi Moshi.
For all its atmospheric diversity, Varmints is held together by Meredith’s expert understanding of dynamics. “Pacing is a physical thing,” she explains. “I can feel when stuff has to happen in a track. I knew I wanted Varmints to end privately but start confidently, have moments of privacy and moments of power and build. I love writing a build - my friends talk about ‘the Meredith Build’! I love the feeling of ‘get on board, we’re building up now!’ Even if you’re dancing at a club, there’s an amazing transparency to a build. When somebody is creating anticipation, it’s a very communal experience and I don’t like hiding those structures.”
Varmints opens with the enormous and brassy surge of ‘Nautilus’ which Meredith describes as: “the best version of me, the most confident and bombastic. The best I can be, with three gins!” There’s the complexity of ‘Shill,’ a piece that Meredith conceived as a “punk palate cleanser” and a kind of “workout” for her orchestrally experienced collaborators. The thready, ticking pulse of the closing ‘Blackfriars,’ meanwhile, crosses into new territory for Meredith, marking out a more personal course. “It’s different to everything else, it’s quite personal. I wouldn’t normally want to write about things happening to me but I did have a bit of a terrible time last year - I was a bit heartbroken - and it was the first time I’ve tried to work out a feeling like that in a track.”
Aside from sharing bills with Anna Calvi, James Blake and These New Puritans, Meredith’s dizzying CV includes being Composer in Residence for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a piece written for MRI scanner, soundtracking PRADA’s Spring/Summer 2015 campaign, symphonies created for nursery children, music for park benches in Hong Kong and sleep-pods in Singapore. Recent performances at the BBC Proms have included collaborations with Laura Marling and The Stranglers for the first 6Music Prom, a performance of her body-percussion piece ‘Connect It’ from the BBC Ten Pieces project and her Last Night of the Proms composition ‘Froms’ was simultaneously performed by five symphony orchestras across the UK, was broadcast to an audience of 40 million people
Anna Meredith’s debut LP Varmints is due for release on 4th March, 2016 via Moshi Moshi.
Track List:
01. Nautilus
02. Taken
03. Scrimshaw
04. Something Helpful
05. R-Type
06. Dowager
07. The Vapours
08. Honeyed Words
09. Last Rose
10. Shill
11. Blackfriars
Praise for Black Prince Fury:
“Meredith utilises her obvious skills as an arranger to create dramatic, tension-filled nuggets”
- The Guardian
“Playful, spirited, visceral, and smart… dense, busy and isolated, but essentially fun”
- Pitchfork
“A great throb of dystopian brain freeze”
- NME
Praise for Jet Black Raider:
“swirling, menacing electronica”
- Sunday Times Culture
“the extroverted impact and unserious charisma is admirable and rare”
- Pitchfork
“hugely impressive”
- Clash