Streaming normalisation ended the fight over volume. It did not end the fight. Three Wire writers spent a month with the mastering engineers, playlist editors and bar owners now deciding what a record has to survive.
Recorded over eleven days in a decommissioned data hall with the cooling still running, 'Half Light' is the most detailed headphone record of the year and completely useless on a motorway. Both facts come from the same decision.
A band who will not play a room licensed for more than two hundred people made a record in a rehearsal space with a 2.3 metre ceiling. The rule is not marketing attached to the album. It is how the album was built.
Eleven tracks built from the way a club sounds once everyone has gone home. The kick keeps walking out of the room and the reverb keeps the whole thing standing up.
Nineteen months, six shopping centres in their last weeks of trading, and a 62 Hz escalator motor doing the job of a bass player. Field recording usually gets away with pointing a microphone at somewhere interesting. This record actually composes.
For fifteen years Sam Okereke made records louder because that is what he was paid for. Now there is a clause in his contract that says he will not. We went to Deptford to hear the confession.
Ten pop songs written on a 1981 polysynth that goes out of tune as it warms up. Nadia Volt sequenced the album by temperature and kept the takes where the machine wins.
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