PROJECTOR: “This is probably us being the most ourselves”
The band just released their second album ‘Contempt’.
Photo: Wall of Sound
The post-punk, noise-driven PROJECTOR announced themselves with their full-length, independently released debut album Now When We Talk It’s Violence, marking themselves as ones to watch. And now, a little over a year later, they’ve signed to tastemakers Alcopop! — who Home Counties and The Wytches call home — and dropped their second album.
Contempt is an unforgiving, no-brakes album; a noisy amalgamation of the bands’ tastes and truly solidifies their status in the music scene today.
We sat down with Lucy and Edward, as well as stand-in drummer Angus and newest member Rowan, to talk album number two, being signed to a label and their local scene of Brighton (even if they are leaving it behind).
So, you released your debut album, Now When We Talk It’s Violence, last year. How do you feel about this one?
Lucy: I think the album is…
Edward: Good?
L: It’s really good. I think it’s a–
E: A solid three out of five?
L: 3.5 out of five. Yeah, that’s a seven out of 10. Oh, it is really good. We suffered to make it because we decided to record almost everything live. So it was an incredibly stressful recording experience. But I think, consequently, it’s got like some very decent energy – it’s also like us consolidating what we do as a band, which I think for a long time we’ve been uncomfortable with our dissonant kind of weird edges.
I think this is probably us being the most ourselves. I use this as an example: a song called Sucking On My Own Dick, we put it next to a very pretty song called Oh Well. We like being weird and angry and stupid, but we also really love harmony and beautiful melodies. I think this album is kind of us just being like, ‘yep, I think I think it’s okay to be like that’.
E: We’ve given up.
L: We’ve given up. [Laughs] We’ve given up trying to like be, you know, this sort of ‘genre band’. I think every kind of industry person that we’ve ever worked with has always been like: we put out a single that does well, they’re like, ‘nice, give us ten more of those’. And you end up listening to these albums and every song fucking sounds the same, and everyone’s just trying to sort of appeal to the kind of short-form model that is music promotion nowadays.
I actually love albums that have a real sonic breadth, like In Utero has Dumb with cellos on it and then it’s also got Milk It, which is horrible and evil. I’m proud of us for making something so…
E: Difficult?
L: And weird and yeah…
E: Three and a half stars.
I think that’s the thing with the existence of TikTok nowadays: so many people are trying to write something to go viral, and it’s stopped becoming about the music.
L: I think we’ve only resisted that because we’re not really capable of doing that. Like, we’re quite shit at social media. We’ve never really got the hang of TikTok… And it’s probably saved us a lot of bother. It’s scary. I think if we were good at that stuff, maybe it would be different, but as it is, we can only really do what we do. And we’ve had people suggest to us in the past, you know, ‘you should do more like face-to-cam stuff’ and it’s like, we’re just such awkward people that no one wants that from us.
Social media can become like a whole other job too, or at least it feels that way sometimes.
L: Oh my God, it is such a job. I do think it’s seeped into the music industry, where music is very much like your singles and to be easily captionable, and you need to make big bold statements. Invariably, a couple of people can do that well. Most people can’t condense their thoughts into like some big, bold, edgy statements. And, you know, like with everything, I think nuance is way more interesting, but it’s just not very easily tweetable in 10 sentences, is it?
How did the name PROJECTOR come about?
L: Laziness, probably.
E: Yeah, it’s very hard to find a band name that hasn’t been taken already and, if you’ve got four people in a band, then finding one no one hates is also quite difficult – then, as soon as you do, you go on the internet and find someone else has already taken it. We just wrote a song that was called Projector and then we were like, ‘oh, well, that’s much better than any other band names we’ve got at the moment’. So, for a while, we had a song called Projector and we weren’t Projector, and now we remain being Projector. But the song is long gone.
L: If you want to be deeper about it, you could say that Projector is kind of nothing, isn’t it? It’s like easily projectable onto anything. It’s also a name that you could feasibly see on any festival lineup. Like, if you call yourself ‘Bum Arse’, then you’re not going to be headlining Glastonbury called ‘Bum Arse’. Projector’s nice and bland.
E: ‘Arse’ is already taken. We played with a band in France recently called Arse and it was just like ‘shit, why did I not think of Arse?’.
How did you all meet and form the band?
L: Edward and I started playing music together many years ago, but it took quite a few years for us to turn it into something worthwhile.
E: Yeah, we started like big long jams, six-minute songs.
L: Now our songs are like one minute fifty-two.
E: Yeah, it took us ages to find other members, particularly drummers; we had like a big revolving door of drums.
L: We’ve had about 20 drummers.
E: Until we found our final form.
L: Yeah, and Callum isn’t here. Angus is our deputy drummer. Angus plays in an amazing band called That Band Called Susan, who you should check out, because they scored the end of the 28 Years Later film.
E: Scored is good, isn’t it?
L: And Rowan’s recently joined because we realised that we boiled ourselves down to a three-piece and then we made an EP that had so many weird noises on it that we were like, ‘we need someone to make these noises on stage’.
R: I was given noises to make.
L: He was given noises to make… and an egg.
How has it been on a label?
L: It’s really nice. It takes a lot of the work off us because for our last album, we had to send [it] out ourselves. Everything that I don’t have to do is a delight. Just the fact that we don't have to send our own records out is amazing, but also like someone doing the PR and stuff. Alcopop! always felt like a nice, ideal home for us because they’ve worked with loads of bands that we like, like The Wytches and–
E: Kagoule. It’s nice as well. We trust them and we trust their taste.
L: Yeah, they’re not going to do anything stupid with us.
E: Quite often, when you’re just like, ‘Oh, what song should we put out? When are we putting that out? How do we make this campaign work?’. And that’s their job. They know about it.
Have you performed any of the new songs live yet?
L: We’ve performed Sucking On My Own Dick. We’ve been performing that for, like, eight years.
E: How many new ones do we have?
L: I think we are playing two today. Hope Springs Eternal. We’re still putting them back together from recording. We’re kind of an operation.
You’re part of the Brighton music scene. Are there any artists there that you really like at the moment?
It’s weird – we don’t play Brighton so much nowadays because we have touring cycles, whereas like, when we started, we’d play every week and we met a lot of our friends through that scene, but all of our friends like us that have kind of grown up and gone. I really love the bands Vincent Vocoder Voice and Ideal Living.
And finally, if you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Angus: Something by Captain Beefheart.
L: Trout Mask Replica?
E: I would like to nominate Greatest Hits by The Killers.
L: I thought of one: Closer by Joy Division.
Rowan: Is that for me? I prefer Unknown Pleasures.
L: Oh, I apologise.
E: I prefer to that, the Greatest Hits by The Killers. Now That’s What I Call Killers.
L: I want to say something cool like Surfer Rosa by Pixies or, like, Joy Division, but I think it’s probably In Utero.
R: I’d probably go with Figure 8 by Elliott Smith.
L: That’s a real good one.
Contempt is out now via Alcopop! Records.
