Music, Style & Culture

Best Of 2011: The Antlers: ‘I Don’t Ever Want To Do The Same Thing Twice’

We spoke to frontman Peter Silberman about ‘Burst Apart’, officially our fifth favourite record of 2011.

If last year someone had said that The Antlers would release an album as good as ‘Burst Apart’ in 2011, I’m sure there’d be as many dismissive responses as ones in agreement. This isn’t because the group hadn’t been showing the potential for such a feat, the reverse is in fact true. But it’s just that it was hard to see how the band would ever top their 2009 effort ‘Hospice’, a heart-wrenching concept album documenting the dialogue between a hospice worker and a terminally-ill patient, all working as a metaphor for a doomed relationship.

But somehow the Brooklyn band have managed to achieve the seemingly-improbable, with this fourth studio album replacing the raw emotion of its predecessor with a certain focus and clarity that shot the three-piece to even headier heights.

We spoke to frontman Peter Silberman about ‘Burst Apart’, officially our fifth favourite record of 2011.

Were you slightly afraid that people wouldn't take to this record, because it's not the emotional juggernaut that 'Hospice' was?
Honestly, I had no idea how anyone would react to a record after ‘Hospice’. While we were making ‘Burst Apart’, I was in a weird fog that had me very disconnected from reality. I was disoriented by how meta everything had become - I’d written a record about my life, and the success of that record completely changed my life from then on. Repeatedly hearing varyingly-accurate re-tellings of your own life makes it feel like you’re living in a story, not in reality. So while we were writing ‘Burst Apart’, I was very much in that “story” kind of existence, assessing my personal life since ‘Hospice’ through new lyrics. It was an attempt to write honestly while feeling like I was living in fiction.

Would you have been happy to have your career defined by 'Hospice'?
Well, that’s tricky. Before we released it and everything happened, of course I would have been happy with that being “career-defining”. I just wanted people to hear that record, for the sake of my own sanity, to see if what I’d experienced made any sense to anybody else. But now that I’ve got a busy career with all this, I hope it goes on, and I want to keep redefining it.

As soon as 'French Exit' comes in, it almost feels like you've turned a page in between the two records. Did you intentionally place such a different sound so early on in the record?
We all felt like we wanted to emphasise the difference between ‘Burst Apart’ and ‘Hospice’ in the first half of the record, to put that out there right away. Sometimes you need to hit people over the head with your point early on, then let the idea settle in as the record goes on.

Obviously you were touring lots before you even starting making 'Burst Apart'. How much pressure did you feel in between 'Hospice''s acclaim and the point when you started writing it?
There wasn’t really much time to feel pressure until after we finished the record. We came home from all that touring and started recording right away, whatever we could think of. I think the pressure started to mount after we were done and it was out of our hands. Even then, though, we all felt pretty confident about what we’d made and felt proud enough of it to put our career on it.

You've really expanded your sound on this record. There's a whole lot more experimentation, musically, from jazz influences to some psychedelic ones. How quick were you to make a final version of a song before you recorded it? Did you play with lots of ideas while writing each track?
Pretty much all of the songs on ‘Burst Apart’ are the result of experimentation. I don’t think any songs were nearly fully written when we started recording them. We recorded them in a way that allowed us to record a lot of small ideas and group them together later.

What were the prevailing influences that helped you make this album?
Our studio was probably the biggest influence on the record. Having our own space for such a long time let us drift away and become relatively ridiculous people. The more sanity we let go of, the better.

Can you see yourself going down a similar route in the future, constantly expanding and working with new ideas, new influences?
I don’t ever want to do the same thing twice. If we ever start unintentionally repeating ourselves or settling into some kind of recipe for making music, I’d hate what we were doing and would have to quit.

'Burst Apart' has received such a wealth of positive reviews. Do you feel you've got more freedom now when it comes to making the next album?
I think the positive reviews are definitely super encouraging, but they don’t necessarily provide you with any kind of security for your future output. Finding a loyal and open-minded fanbase these past few years is the only thing that can really make you feel free. That, and just not giving a fuck. But... well, we give a fuck. Simultaneously, I’ve never felt more free to make whatever I want.

Could you ever see yourself recreating 'Tiptoe' live in some grand production? Perhaps it could be the song you walk out on stage to?
I’ve thought about it, but for whatever reason, we all have a severe aversion to backing tracks in a live show. We don’t have any during the set so it feels weird to have one beforehand. This tour, we’ve been walking out to a Gold Panda song. Better to hear something that inspires you than be inundated with yourself all the time.

People often cite 'Putting The Dog To Sleep' as their favourite song on the record, in some part because it marks such a sonic departure for the band. Is this sparse sound something you can see yourself recreating in the future?
I think we’ll go down a ton of different roads in the future. I predict some more sparse arrangements for sure, but maybe balanced against denser parts. I think it’ll all be there. It’ll be topographical.

The Antlers' new album 'Burst Apart’ came 5th in our Top 50 Albums Of 2011. Read numbers 10 - 4 here.