Kieran Webber
Director and Founder of CLUNK Magazine, CLUNK Events, and other CLUNK affiliate businesses. You’ll probably find me tucked away somewhere sending emails, listening to music, and creating content.
Lincoln’s Northern Captives talk us through their retrospective 00’s sound, new album ‘Dizzy’, and more!
Northern Captives initially formed back in 2016 as a recording project led by lead singer Sam Cook but this quickly became a fully fledged band. They’ve had support from the likes of Alex Baker on Kerrang! Radio, BBC Radio 1 Future Alternatives, and more. Now, fast forward a few years the band have just dropped their debut album ‘Dizzy’.
With this release in mind we wanted to chat to Northern Captives about their release, influences, and much more. Thankfully Steve Haddock was happy to oblige and talk us through everything and more.
Kieran: Hey all, thank you so much for taking a moment to chat with us! How have you been?
Steve: Pleasure – Feeling great here!
Kieran: Any highlights from 2024 so far?
Steve: Getting a debut album and all the band related nonsense that comes with that over the line feels like a win! We have a record release show in our hometown of Lincoln at the end of the month which I’m dead excited to rip a new set for.
Kieran: So, let’s start at the beginning, how did you all meet and at what point did you decide to start making music together?
Steve: Around 2016, Sam, our singer/guitarist had started piecing demos together with a view to practice his recording alongside him studying audio production. We’re a bit of guinea pig and those songs we recorded became the ‘Nervous Energies’ EP. Prior to that we were all without bands for around a year, so it felt like a fresh start for each of us.
Listen/watch ‘Joy’ here:
Kieran: Did you all have similar influences or did they vary?
Steve: We all come from the same little DIY punk centred music scene in Lincoln. We’ve known each other for years and seen one another play, but this is our first band together. Jack has drummed in heaps of dead cool indie and punk crossover bands, Sam fronted 2 really great punk rock bands and I’ve played in various clumsy punk + hardcore bands.
Kieran: How did this affect your sound?
Steve: There are influences that are common thread between us, but I think we all approach the instrumentation in unorthodox ways. I think that helps with nudging the boundaries of the genres. In recent years we’ve definitely forged a collective ‘sound’ and with that have felt quite confident and free to be more creative with the writing.
Kieran: Your debut album ‘DIZZY’ is out now, can you talk us through the recording and writing process?
Steve: I hate to bring it up but some of these songs started life as demos around 2021 during the UK lockdown. We were writing separately and throwing Dropbox links to one another. So elements of ‘DIZZY’ feels quite diaristic from that moment. Our latest single ‘Living In-Between’ was one of the last tracks to be written for the record and actually formed quite quickly as a 3 in the practice space. So there isn’t a formula we work from necessarily, we’re quite responsive to one another starting with the initial hook or lyric thats been brought to the room. Recording is still captained by Sam who is a producer (handy!) – it’s been great to be part of a process whilst witnessing his skills and talent on the tools grow.
Listen to ‘Dizzy’ here:
Kieran: You guys have been playing since 2016 and have only now just released your debut, how come you waited so long to do so?
Steve: We released our first EP ‘Nervous Energies’ and intended to just be a writing and recording project. Though upon release friends and other bands liked it enough and asked us to play a few shows and city based festivals and it’s naturally picked up. Being creative and recording is still what really drives us, but I can’t lie the recent shows have been a lot of fun and we’re making room to do more of that. Did you have an objective that you wanted to achieve with the debut release? Something timeless, genre fluid and honest lyrically. I feel albums should be a journey rather than a collection of formulaic singles. ‘DIZZY’ has anthemic, celebratory sounding songs as well as moments that are introspective and fragile. It’s a real spectrum we’ve created.
Kieran: You have a very retrospective sound that dabbles in the early 2000s punk/emo sound and in recent years there has been a resurgence. Why do you think this is?
Steve: It’s just time and nostalgia isn’t it? It’s probably the same conversation people had when 00’s bands were taking elements from Joy Division came out. I guess 10 years is enough to be considered retro in such fast moving times. New generations have discovered it and put their twist on it. It’s just having a moment.
Kieran: Lastly, what can we expect from you for the rest of 2024?
Steve: We’ve got shows to announce to support ‘DIZZY’ for the rest of the year and aim to finish recording the follow up which we’ve been discussing recently and there’s some really exciting production ideas flying around sympathetic to the writing.