W.L. (Deluxe)

Formed at school in Whitburn, West Lothian, Scotland, The Snuts quickly earned comparisons with Oasis and Arctic Monkeys thanks to ferocious live sets of life-affirming rock ’n’ roll. For this debut album, it would have been easy for the band—Jack Cochrane (vocals/guitar), Joe McGillveray (guitar), Callum Wilson (bass), and Jordan Mackay (drums)—to walk into the studio, turn up the amps, and capture that hands-aloft energy on tape. But what makes W.L.—short for Whitburn Loopy, for anyone unfamiliar with Snuts parlance—such a remarkable listen is that they instead pushed themselves to deliver something with far more breadth and ambition.

Working in LA, New York, Glasgow, and London with producers Tony Hoffer (Beck, Air, M83), Inflo (SAULT, Michael Kiwanuka, Little Simz), and Rich Costey (Sigur Rós, Muse, Biffy Clyro), The Snuts challenge conventions about what a so-called indie guitar band can achieve. They also perfectly capture the sweat-soaked joy of early fan favorites such as breakthrough track “Glasgow” and habitual set closer “Sing for Your Supper.” “We could have just done our live set, but it didn’t really set the path for the future,” says frontman Jack Cochrane. “There’s so many different, uncomfortable, interesting sounds that we’d never have dreamed of making two years ago when we set out to do this. That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of—getting outside of that comfort zone.” Here he takes us through the record, track by track.

Top Deck
“I wrote the first verse and the chorus 10 years ago. Sometimes I like to hear a writer on their own, just being able to say something quite clear where there’s nothing that covers it up. I was thinking, ‘Do we have anything like that?’ So I finished the second half of this song. Because there was so much time between writing the first and second half, I was almost able to let the second verse look at the first verse and say, ‘Are these things still happening? Are these themes still relevant to me?’ Which they were.”

Always
“I had the whole thing finished on the acoustic guitar. We took it to Tony Hoffer, and he’s got this great American vibe that he can put on UK indie—he’s done it many times before. That song lets me go to some darker places and talk about more serious stuff that’s sometimes easy to avoid when you’re writing. It was also just letting the boys show how powerful they can be with an instrument. It’s not overly clever. That riff would have worked for the last 30 years, and hopefully for the next 30 years.”

Juan Belmonte
“We had a very ‘2008 indie’ version of this that we played live a few times. In a session in LA with Inflo, it became kind of a groove that worked around the riff. We never managed to finish it with him, then we went in with Rich Costey, who’s just got these thumping sounds, and then the song worked its way between all these different places: Glasgow, LA, London. I listened back to it and I’m going, ‘What is this song and who is this band?’”

All Your Friends
“That was the first track we wrote out in LA. It’s pretty make-or-break working with Inflo. I’d probably taken him 10 songs—at least—and I’m saying, ‘This is what I want to record…’ And he was just like, ‘No. None of them.’ We were writing songs on the spot. He’s all about momentum. Callum put the bassline down on day one and Inflo was like, ‘Get on the mic and just spitball lyrics.’ It was just like, boof, boof, boof: ‘That line is good, next one.’ That was something new for me, having somebody to critique each line, almost.”

Somebody Loves You
“That was written last year and is hopefully my only lockdown song. I feel like I’ve never been in a position before where everybody felt the same: Everybody had these same anxieties, we’re missing the same things in life. The start of that year, there was such togetherness. I moved to Glasgow on day one of the lockdown and there was spray paint all over the city which just said, ‘Somebody loves you.’ Straight away, I went home and wrote the song.”

Glasgow
“It was the last one we recorded. We were all putting it off. You know that thing you don’t want to do at the end of the day, like when you see the dishes in the sink and you’re just putting it off? ‘Glasgow’ is the dishes in the sink. It’s such a popular song for us live. It’s the song that kickstarted everything. When we got into the studio to do it, we had bottle of Buckfast each, like we would at a live show, and just put it down. You do quite a bit of growing up making a record, and it was important to keep the spirit of what kickstarted the band in that song.”

No Place I’d Rather Go
“It was written in America. We did a version there. I’m pretty fussy, and that version never really made the cut. We ended up recording it with Tony again and he said, ‘Go phone someone that’s important to you. Take a step outside the song. Who does it make you think of?’ Small, human techniques like that are something we benefitted a lot from on this record.”

Boardwalk
“This is one of the things I took over to LA that didn’t get batted away. I had a real idea of how it should sound. This one was more trying to dial into that conversation about mental health. It was trying to put my experiences into the writing and try and have a conversation in the song about how things will get better—if it’s dark here, there’s hope on the other side of the song. There’s a darkness to the melodies and the sonics as a whole, but the actual contents are much more hopeful. The production on it is an Inflo special.”

Maybe California
“I was in a bad place in LA, but the fact that this is a positive song is a true testament to the rest of the band. They’ve got some great ideas. They do all their talking with their guitar licks; there’s a lot of emotion in the way that they play. Every time I get too dark lyrically, the boys and the music and the things they bring out in me always bring positivity into anything I write about.”

Don’t Forget It (Punk)
“Inflo would change the studio every day. We’d never work in a studio for more than one day. Every time I got comfortable, if I was saying, ‘I’m loving this song,’ he would just press the X on the computer and close the song. He’d just move me on. It was fucking bonkers. I had put this guitar down and I was like, ‘This sounds fucking terrible!’ He was like, ‘It’s great!’ We had some differences with that song. We got home to Glasgow and were like, ‘Let’s have a bash at recording this on our own.’ I already knew the vibe—all I needed to do was get the worst guitar sound in the world. The first thing we ever properly recorded ourselves. It’s just a pure punk vibe.”

Coffee & Cigarettes
“When we went to LA with Inflo, I was a bit young and stuck in my ways. He was having to force me into places that I didn’t want to go, especially with the writing. I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan—one guitar, just letting it rip lyrically. He sent me a Bob Dylan song once at four in the morning—quite an obscure one, a bootleg—and said, ‘Do you think you could write something like this in the morning?’ So I went into the studio with an acoustic guitar and just spitballed out the lyrics. The whole song was written when I was in the wee lounge, waiting for the rest of the guys to come down.”

Elephants
“It’s quite an unexplainable song. It’s just about being confident. All the big elephant noises, the big, fucking crazy noises in the background, they were recorded in a room in Glasgow. I let Tony hear them when we recorded it. He took the backing vocals and twisted them. They’d already been twisted 10 times, and he twisted them another 10 times.”

Sing for Your Supper
“I think there’s kind of a naivety to this song. It was written a while ago, and when you record something that people already know live, it’s quite easy to want to mature things up. But Tony was quite good at keeping that song young and spirited. It’s an emotional song for us. We always play it last. It’s the song that you see people putting their arms round their girlfriend or boyfriend, their friends, whatever.”

Blur Beat
“With the deluxe [edition] it’s important to try and get the stuff that you would really love to get out there, that maybe never got finished in time. These are songs where there was some really specific things I wanted to say. I think I’ve said it throughout the record but maybe in a less direct fashion. Sometimes, to hear what the actual point of the story is, there needs to be no added-on extras covering it up. I want to close the chapter on some of the themes, or pass the discussion on. Themes of social inequality, something like the drug culture that's ravaging through youth.”

4 Baillie Street
“In music nowadays, it’s quite easy to maybe cut down what you’re trying to say. With songs like ‘4 Baillie Street’ I didn’t have to dilute it or chop it down. It didn’t feel like there was a ticking clock on the song. It’s like, ‘I’ve got as much time as I want here to touch on some of this stuff in a more personal fashion.’ Those songs lyrically bond us together as a band. And when you go through all the shit that you go through, it’s nice to have songs that keep you gelled and grounded and remind you why you were doing it and what you want to say.”

Microwave
“I was recording on five different pianos. I can't even play piano. There’s not a clear structure; you can tell that it’s not been dissected and had other influence on it. That moment happened, we recorded it, and it sounds cool, man.”

Waterbirds
“I really want to deliver a few songs that are direct, and people can go like, ‘I can’t ignore what's been said here.’ It’s nice to have an opportunity to do that just with a guitar. It’s kind of a dying trade, but when it’s done right, you hear the message pretty clearly. A lot of the artists I really admire, like Nathaniel Rateliff, The Staves, Ben Howard, are really great at getting their emotion across really, really directly.”