Unless you happened to be in New York last January or at one of the handful of West Coast dates the band played last summer, your first encounter with Savages’ Adore Life likely came via the video for the opening track, “The Answer.” It came blasting through an otherwise routine workday last October with all the subtlety of the stitching on a Casualties backpatch. For the duration of the video’s three-and-a-half minutes, a roving camera weaves through a tightly packed room. There’s daylight streaming in through the windows, so we can see the faces of the people shoving and nodding and doing the things people tend to do when they lose themselves in a violent song. One guy has his head kicked back and eyes closed in an almost sexual rapture.
It’s hard to find the band in all of this, but they’re there, pushing and pulling with the crowd. Drummer Fay Milton cracks the song’s rhythm like she’s leading a marching band. Occasionally, the camera will circle past guitarist Gemma Thompson or find its way into singer Jehnny Beth’s face, or it will assume the vantage point of bassist Ayşe Hassan. But mostly it floats from person to person on the song’s considerable combustion. It’s a kind of circle-pit of one. Disassociation through violence: it’s not how most worker drones spend their days. When the camera spills out of the venue and collapses on the sidewalk in exhaustion, it’s almost a relief.
“I think a mosh pit is an act of love,” Beth says on the phone. She’s in Los Angeles, where she was recently on holiday before being joined by Hassan, Milton, and guitarist Gemma Thompson. They’re rehearsing for an upcoming tour that will have them on the road from late January until at least May, and which will mean instigating and participating in such acts of love with total strangers every night. “People in crowds running in circles and pushing each other: when you see hardcore bands doing that and you see the energy in the room and sense of communion, I like that.”
That brute physicality and the implicit trust that powers it—rare still, you hope, are the ice-cream-eating motherfuckers who slam-dance with an intent to injure—is at the very soul of what Savages are doing on Adore Life. The album is primarily concerned with the idea of confrontation as an act of love, whether it’s a confrontation with one’s lover, one’s audience, or oneself. It’s an approach to the subject that comes through the music. Adore Life is looser and more open than their 2013 debut Silence Yourself, which in the shadow of its successor sounds tightly coiled and reactionary. The insistent title and the cover’s ALL CAPS MANIFESTO seem suddenly defensive. Adore Life is meaner and larger, more sure of itself and therefore more willing to let its guard down.
“I’ve never really been touched by songs about heartbreak. I’m touched by the efforts of a character in a song who is really struggling with the idea of loving someone. I’m more touched by the darkness.” — Jehnny Beth
Part of that is a function of pure aesthetics: the album is, if not a total departure from the sound outlined on Silence Yourself, at least a step toward the larger crowds that the band has found itself playing for. But it’s also a function of the group responding to their subject matter. “For a band like us to talk about love,” Hassan says, “we didn’t want to have a soft record or something that lost its intensity or was flowery or fluffy. We wanted something that was real and said, ‘Yeah, love can be really fucked up.’ Sonically, we wanted in some ways to contradict or contrast some of Jehnny’s lyrics—so you may have a big poetic sentiment and contrast it with an unsettling, awkward bass sound or an aggressive guitar. It’s not just one simple thing; it’s so complex.”
Adore Life was initially conceived in a small rehearsal space in north London and born live. “We wanted to find a place where there wouldn’t be any other bands, that would be our own place where we had the keys,” Beth says. “For a while, it went really well, but—and this is a very practical, stupid thing, but you need a room to be a certain height in order to be loud.”
“Even taking my bass off, it would hit the ceiling,” Hassan says. When I talk to her, she’s in London, preparing for the trip to LA. “You couldn’t be loud in that space.” So the band moved to a larger room in a more populous area (“We were past the isolation period,” Beth quips), where the songs had room to grow.
Jehnny Beth at FYF 2015 / photo by Rozette Rago
“I’ve never really been touched by songs about heartbreak,” Beth says. “I’m touched by the efforts of a character in a song who is really struggling with the idea of loving someone. I’m more touched by the darkness.” What Beth calls darkness isn’t a fixation on the possibility of love’s ending—that’s precisely what a heartbreak song is, after all—but on the complications and confusions of being engaged with loving another person. “I can’t genuinely listen to a girl who’s desperate because her love is gone and be touched by that,” she says. “Because it’s not something that occurs in my personality or the way I lead my life.”
Love, as it appears on Adore Life, is not a feeling so much as it is a motivating force. “Love is a decision. Love is something you do. I don’t believe so much in love as a sentiment. I love the idea that love is an action, that it’s something you do for someone,” she says. “I think if you love someone, you are constantly working toward improvement—improvement of yourself, improvement of the other person, improvement of the relationship. That’s the case in any relationship. You constantly want to push that, and you need confrontation as a means to emancipation.” And that means a kind of dissatisfaction, a constant effort to fight apathy, death, entropy, complacency. Or, as Beth puts it, “I don’t believe in emancipation without breaking down some walls.”
That’s part of the reason why the band chose to workshop songs that would eventually form Adore Life over the course of a three-week residency in New York last winter. They’d play three nights a week at Baby’s All Right, Mercury Lounge, and Saint Vitus, and spend the rest of their time in a rehearsal space shaping their raw material.
Gemma Thompson at FYF Fest 2015 / photo by Rozette Rago
“The idea of going to a different space and environment allows you to look back at your original environment in a different way,” Thompson tells me. I’m backstage with her and Milton at FYF Fest in LA, several months before Adore Life has even been announced, let alone released. Though the songs they will play that night—nearly half of which come from the new record—are more complete than they were several months prior in New York, they’re no more familiar to the audience.
“This record is more about embracing the other, embracing the audience, and embracing more sides of yourself and not guarding them so much,” she says. Exposing the in-process songs to a fresh audience every few days not only kept the band accountable, it also forced them to participate in the very process with which Adore Life is concerned. Even months later at FYF, they’re playing for a crowd that isn’t necessarily there to see them, and they’re not only confronting that crowd with the material—they’re also allowing the crowd’s reaction to confront them.
“The first week was really raw,” Thompson says of the New York gigs. “We were really writing it then. There was a lot of fear in that, and risk. It’s not a safe option. But we felt comfortable in a way that the audience would be accepting of that.” Trust—that the message is being both sent and received in good faith—galvanizes confrontation, sanctifying it from tool of antagonism to channel of love. Despite (or maybe because of) our volatile civic discourse, the US in general and New York in particular were the perfect location for this experiment. “More than any other audience,” Thompson says, “they embrace the idea of being open and warm.” Milton agrees. “[US audiences] mirror that openness that we’re trying to create on stage. You can depend on getting that back from an American audience.”
“This record is more about embracing the other, embracing the audience, and embracing more sides of yourself and not guarding them so much.” — Gemma Thompson
After those New York shows, the band returned to London to record. They departed from the live-in-studio approach they took for Silence Yourself and recorded their parts for Adore Life separately over the span of a few weeks. The process gave each member the time and space to explore her sound and is in a large part responsible for the album’s expanded palette. “For Gemma,” Hassan says, “she had a week to record and explore sounds and try out equipment, and it was amazing to hear this soundscaped noise coming from [the recording booth] above me.”
Indeed, Thompson’s guitar playing might be the most striking thing about Adore Life. In “The Answer,” she cycles the riff at roughly the rhythm of an attacking warrior swinging a flail overhead. Her guitar parts frequently sound as though they were created with anything but a guitar—a mic’d-up live wire, perhaps, or a rusty milk frother—and even when they do, their frequent twanginess almost feels out of place spangling such propulsive and violent music.
“Intensity can be various things,” Beth tells me. “You can be intense in many ways. You can be intense by being vulnerable as much as you can be intense by being violent in your sound.” True to form, Adore Life is at its most affecting and intense when the quartet silence themselves.
In the album’s stunning centerpiece, “Adore,” Thompson paints in quiet strokes through the verses, and Hassan’s bass knocks a lilting, walking pattern. Then, as the song builds to its brief chorus, the pair fall in line, Thompson brushing an obedient strum before the prom-ready rhythm. “I understand the urgency of life,” Beth sings. The implication is that she’s been accused otherwise. “Maybe I will die, maybe tomorrow, so I need to say: I adore life.”
Though the song grows in size, with Thompson marshaling sound from above her head and slowly swirling it into a hurricane of sound, it seems to radiate outward from that revelation. As a vibraphone trickles a counter-melodic line down the song’s back wall, all four members of Savages seem to be in perfect congress with one another. They are kicking against the beams of fear that hold aloft the world—both the world within and the world that exists between people—and they don’t sound tired. FL
