Do Nothing

Words by Rosie Norman Photographs by Hollie Dyes Shepherd

How have the last 12 months been for you?

Great thanks! We’ve been working on our first album for a while now, and now it’s finally done. Writing it ended up being pretty tough for me personally, so that sucked haha - but now that it’s finished we’re real excited for people to hear it, and excited to keep writing and developing.

You’ve recently been on tour, what’s the experience been like?

Shows have been really good recently! It feels like people have a relationship with the music we’ve released so far, and you can tell that at the shows which feels super lovely. The new material is slightly more layered, so we’re probably looking at having another body on stage to make it all work. It’ll be a fun challenge for sure - it’s always just been the four of us since we were kids, so throwing someone else into the mix is sure to be interesting.

You are frequently held in the same breath as ‘post-punk’, how do you feel about being labelled as ‘post-punk’ and what does it mean to you?

Yeah, we started the band while that whole revival was really just beginning. As things have gone on we happen to have slightly drifted away from that sort of sound, but it’s definitely still in our DNA. There are lots of great artists playing under that label at the moment, so it’s lovely to be thought of as occupying the same space as them.

What do you love about Nottingham?

Ooo lots of things! We’ve all lived here forever, so it’s full of friends and family. The music scene is really friendly and everybody knows each other. I’m often in need of something or other - a place to write, various bits of equipment etc, and there’s always someone lovely I can crawl to. Also, good restaurants seem to be opening up all over the place.

Glueland in particular was more sonically diverse than Zero Dollar Bill, how important is having an evolving sound to you in your music?

I guess it’s more that we always want to be excited by what we’re doing - if that meant making things simpler then we’d do that! I actually have a lot of faith in our audience to be open to us trying new things, which is a real nice feeling and I love em for it. The album itself is generally more melodic than a lot of our earlier stuff, but who knows whether that’ll carry over to the next thing! It’s definitely been nice to write some more straight up songs, if that makes sense - more along the lines of Handshakes or New Life.

Your lyrics appear to be at once sardonic and random but are seemingly undercut with overarching and often serious themes, what inspires you lyrically?

I’ve ended up with a personal way of writing lyrics that’s I’m just totally used to at this point, so I don’t really think about it much. I’d say that there are straightforward, conversational elements to the lyrics that could come from artists like The Roches - if you listen to the song “We” in particular, you’ll hear some of those very straight up, matter of fact, but still kinda silly and fun lyrics. But then I also like the more abstract approach, so it’s really a mash-up of a few styles. Some semi- random honorable mentions would be The Mountain Goats, Joni Mitchell, Purple Mountains, Pile, Margo Guryan.

You’ve said in interviews that the ‘really sad, downer shit’ is a theme you’re drawn to, is this something which Do Nothing might potentially move towards in the future?

Definitely! I wouldn’t say that the record swings fully in that direction, but there are couple of moments of it for sure, haha. I’m definitely not done trying out sad sad sad pretty pretty pretty stuff.

Who are your main music inspirations at the moment?

Gonna try and just do this one off the top of my head and not overthink it: Alex G’s constantly making great stuff, Aldous Harding, Talk Talk, Mitski, recent Big Thief album is a big old masterpiece, Frank Ocean big old genius, getting into some of the old The Books albums with all their crazy innovative sampling, Underworld, King Krule’s The Ooz never gets old, and I always mention Tom Waits so Tom Waits.

Also, while doing some artwork stuff me and Charlie were listening to Porter Ricks, which is some dub techno stuff from the 90s that was really good. Mentioned it to another friend and immediately got put onto a whole list of other dub techno so now I have to listen to all that.