‘Slap’ is the second EP from Brighton quartet congratulations, following debut ‘Woo Hoo’, both released on Bella Union. Whilst ‘Woo Hoo’ was honed over months of relentless gigging, ‘Slap’ came together over time in studio sessions – “We’ve done it the other way round this time, previously we played the songs to death live and had a clear picture of how they would sound recorded. The new songs have more layers, parts and general experimentation. It has been a cool challenge to work out how to play it all with just four of us!”

congratulations have a huge pool of influences to draw from, and the combinations of styles is so important to creating their sound, but ‘Slap’ shows the band sounding unashamedly like themselves, integrating these influences more seamlessly as their songwriting progresses.

Hosepipe Ban

“Potentially our heaviest song? In David Byrne’s book ‘How Music Works’ he talks about how different environments can influence your music, which is true, as I wanted a heavy rocker for a bigger club size room, to get a pit going. This song goes way back – the drums in the verse were recorded four years apart from the drums in the chorus! And it was heavily debated who should sing this, I wanted Leah to sing it all, and she wanted me to sing it, so in the end we halved it! The original lyric in the bridge was ‘define my sexuality’ but I thought it was too Prince (even for us) and changed it!”

Ice Tea

“In those strange dark days where we’d have to queue to go shopping at Tesco, I would ritualistically listen to ‘Icky Thump’ by The White Stripes every time I went, and those guitar sounds were a huge influence on this song in the chorus. This took a while to get right in the studio – so much so, that we nearly gave up on it a few times – we got very specific with how the rhythms of the core instruments in the chorus danced around each other and the vocal melody, and we played around with adding new synth textures and percussion layers. It was super worth it in the end as it’s our new favourite song to play live”.

1 2 Save Me

“This is deceptively tricky to play live, but we are loving the challenge! This song single handedly has meant our live setup has doubled. The drums came from James putting some of his best chops down and then Greg stitching them together to make new parts which James had to relearn! This is a reason we like writing in the studio first, you can experiment more and run with happy accidents”.

Heaven

“The centre piece of this song is of course Leah’s vocal, which fun fact, is mostly from the original demo, recorded through the Macbook mic! It sounded so fragile, it could not be topped. We’ve not had a slowie before, but it felt so right to include this beautiful song written by Greg and Leah, and it’s a bit of a homage to some of the other bands on Bella Union”.