Two door.cinema club bob hund
Lyrically, Trimble addressed his dissatisfaction with the information age from a distance. False Alarm, then, explores how humans are what Trimble calls a "very strange species.
Two Door Cinema Club
This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. And they appear to be emerging from the floor, like characters in a game of Whac-A-Mole. They have two top 10 albums, they're a mainstay of summer festivals, and frontman Alex Trimble sang as part of Danny Boyle's London Olympics opening ceremony, watched by an estimated million people worldwide.
We're quite foolish and we're quite self-destructive. But it's all happening in quite a funny way. We were introduced to it in our early teens. This time, Trimble and his bandmates are realising they're just as vulnerable to technology's perceived dark side as the rest of us.
Two Door Cinema Club - Wikipedia
Their portrait-mode new album cover suggests as much. And that allowed us to slowly build up our fanbase and get to a level where we're pretty consistent now. The last Two Door Cinema Club album, 's Gameshow, came off the back of inter-band tensions and a two year hiatus in which the Northern Irish group nearly split. We've been trying to get you to do this for so long! False Alarm's artwork isn't your standard artist portrait, however.
And that's where the name False Alarm came from, because most of it is needless. They still don't have a Brit Award to their name, album Beacon was one place shy of the Number 1 spot, and they've yet to top the bill at a major UK festival. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies.
So it's a perfect disguise," he laughs. We've been very lucky to have done this for 12 years.
Two Door Cinema Club
Halliday says that while recording and touring Gameshow, they learned to "speak our minds and be assertive. It can be a little bit anxiety-inducing. Rather than pointing the finger at specific trends, or getting doom-and-gloom about the world we live in, the new record explores the "bizarre side of it and the absurdity," he says.
Yet it's something of a surprise to see the trio appearing on the front cover of new, fourth album False Alarm because, until now, they'd shied away from putting themselves front and centre. Sleeve designer Kingo was on the same page as the band when put to task on an album cover. The first time they floated the idea of appearing on their own album cover, Baird remembers the band's management saying: "Guys, this is amazing!
London-based photographer Aleksandra Kingo designed the sleeve, placing the trio in a scene of panic - surrounded by red alert alarms, megaphones, telephones and hazard signs. It's partly because they've become more comfortable with themselves as they approach their 30s - and partly because the spectre of self-implosion that preceded their previous album allowed them to hit the reset button. There remains a side to Two Door Cinema Club, however, that wouldn't mind being directly in the spotlight.
We've seen a lot of bands at the pinnacle, selling out the O2 Arena, and we've seen those kinds of bands disappear. So from the outside, there weren't a lot of people expecting much from us. This summer they play one of the biggest sets of their career so far; a post-sunset slot at Glastonbury on Friday. Baird puts their longevity down to never quite being the coolest, most talked-about band - particularly in the days when guitar music was far from in vogue.
So it can still be very overwhelming to us. Playing on a big stage when it's dark, it changes everything. In theory, the members of Two Door Cinema Club shouldn't be hard to recognise. And the album's off-kilter social commentary is channelled through shiny, funk-nodding pop; already found on singles Talk and Satellite. That's not to say there aren't pressing global issues to get worked up about, insists Baird.
That's something we're aware of, and it allows us to keep challenging ourselves and becoming better and better, without getting too comfortable with the way things are. And the brinkmanship of those previous years gave them a new lease of life. It sees the three members - Trimble, Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday - in matching turtleneck jumpers, their haircuts waxed to one side. False Alarm sees Two Door Cinema Club writing more astutely about the human condition than in their heady, jangle-indie early days.
It all ties in with the theme of False Alarm, which Trimble says is about a sense of collective, mild anxiety that many people experience today; where most of us live in a world of endless phone notifications, doom-ridden news headlines and general despair. Communication hadn't been their strong suit before then, but "it felt like the three of us finally had some sort of security," says Baird.