“Balancing Act” draws from 60s and 70s pop-rock while blending in modern indie, symphonic, and electronic elements. How did you approach merging such different sonic eras without losing cohesion?
Cohesion. That’s always our big fear and something we risk every time, you know, not achieving. I think we just trust that our songs basically sound like us no matter what clothes they wear. Every time we start working on a new song, at some point we will start thinking about certain sounds we like or different approaches and they can come from very different musical periods, yes. We want to give each song a unique identity but we are aware of the potential dangers. When we sit down and sequence the songs it’s always difficult to make everything ebb and flow because the material is often quite diverse. I think we manage to tie the songs together via a concept or a certain overall mood. I think we got lucky a few times but maybe some of our previous stuff has lacked cohesiveness, I don’t know. Speaking of ‘Balancing Act’ I think there’s a main theme running through the record and the biggest challenge this time around was for us to integrate some electronic elements which we began to dabble with during recordings. I hope we succeeded. It felt new and exciting.
The album is described as exploring “finding meaning in a chaotic world.” What personal or external experiences shaped that theme for you?
I think a lot has changed since we started working on our previous album, pre-covid. Everything’s more uncertain and more authoritarian. It’s really scary. What Daniel and I have done for the most recent two albums, as a sort of mental survival kit, is to lock ourselves inside our own little bubble and write from there. We make up stories and characters and through these we relay our own personal feelings. Sometimes as an escapistic getaway, sometimes as a comment on the times we live in. It sure is a balancing act trying to find your footing in the world as things are right now and we always write from the individual’s perspective.
As brothers working together as Vinyl Floor, how does your creative dynamic influence the songwriting and production process on this record?
I think there’s a sort of mutual understanding going on which is especially present in the beginning of the process, I think. When we are bringing in songs. Actually, those 13 songs brough in were the ones to get recorded. No leftovers. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have other potential songs, we had several, but a big part of it is just trusting one another to bring in his best songs and also trying to keep an eye om which new songs could fit the ones already in. For me, ‘Mr. Rubinstein’ was a key song since it was my first contribution to this record and thus all other entries had to be able to go along with that one in some way. Later in the process we start arguing a bit more about how to arrange the stuff and that’s also where all the exciting stuff begins. We never seem to have a certain type of production in mind this early in the process, we just go with the flow until we have enough finished songs and then the record usually starts revealing itself without too much effort from either of us.
You recorded the album across Sweden and Denmark. Did the different environments or studios influence the sound or mood of any specific tracks?
Oh yeah. When we record in Sweden and there are other people working for us and the clock is ticking, I think there’s a certain need to prove ourselves, to do things as efficiently as possible. There’s a certain energy in that live room. for sure, which rubs off on our recordings. At least it seems so. We need that energy to build upon, especially since we continue work in our own cosy surroundings where it’s easy to re-do things and polish stuff too much. The most immediate part of the entire process is when we hit the studio in Sweden and need to get every basic track done in, like, 3-4 days or whatever much time we have booked there. The Malmö mood has definitely influenced previous recordings where most parts or everything was recorded there. That’s a bit harder to say this time around since we only did bass and drum parts and a few guitar tracks there. But it inspires us to be there, every single time.
With 13 tracks on “Balancing Act,” how did you decide what stayed in and what was left out to maintain the album’s overall balance and flow?
We sometimes do leave out songs which are too different, especially lyrically, but as I mentioned previously, we actually only brought in what was to end up on this particular record. However, I was very sure what to pick out from my latest songs, what would probably go together the best. I think Daniel feels much the same way. I think I wrote 8 songs on ‘Balancing Act’ so I must have chosen those from a batch of maybe 20-25 new songs. We spend a lot of time recording demos and then the final versions so it would be a lot of time wasted discarding something this late in the process. We do spend a lot of time sequencing the songs as we want it all to balance out the best way possible. Hence the album title, ha!