After receiving rave reviews for their EP, Show Your Teeth, and topping the Hype Machine charts with single To You, Cork duo Young Wonder are set to release their debut album, Birth, on local label Feel Good Lost. Totally Dublin caught up with one half of the band, producer Ian Ring, who told us about the upcoming album.
I was interested in the recording process yourself and Rachel [Koeman, the other half of Young Wonder] use. Do you make the beats and she writes the lyrics or how does it work?
We really worked on our songs a lot on this album and there was a lot more mixing work on it. The process was the same as we use with the EPs, but there was a lot more back and forth. So I would come up with a demo beat and send it to Rachel and she would send it back then I would send her some vocal ideas and we would keep going back and forth. Then when we had the song almost ready, I’d come in and give it some vocals and work on the song more. So it was a very back and forth thing, which I think is the way a lot of music is being made in the world today. Everything is shared over the internet because it’s so easy.
Rather than physically moving it back and forth.
Yeah, because some people are more creative in their own space. The second you’re told to sit down and write something that’s great right now, it becomes hard to do! So I think it’s good that you’re able to work that way because you can have your own space and think about what you really want to do with it.
You were saying you sent vocal tracks back and forth so obviously you both work on them but are the lyrics a joint effort as well?
Rachel writes 90 percent of the lyrics. I helped out with some of the lyrics on this album like St. Verena and Sweet Dreaming, and some of the singles I worked on, but I usually just leave Rachel to do the lyrics because she has a certain style of writing.
Which I was going to comment on. There are certainly some dark lyrics on the album, especially the single Sweet Dreaming (‘Break my bones for/I try and break my bones for you’) which are at odds with the music and melody which is quite joyful and uplifting.
That’s true and Sweet Dreaming is the most poppy song on the album. We like pop music, but there’s good pop music and bad pop music and we were just trying to create pop music that doesn’t sell out in a way. Like, I’m not just going to drop a big EDM crazy drop on it!
So it’s Young Wonder’s version of pop music?
Yeah we try to just stay true to our sound and the sounds that we use while creating a pop song because the main thing we didn’t want to do was scare off our fans from the EPs.
I read an interview in which you said you came from a hip-hop background. How has that influenced you?
Well Stevie G, a Cork DJ, is one of my best friends and he put me on to a lot of hip-hop growing up, and I started making beats for some groups in the hip-hop scene. It was always a progression of learning because hip-hop is one of the more accessible ways to start making music because a lot of it is sample-based – it’s really fun because I couldn’t write very well back then, so it was just easy to sample some records and make something with them. That’s still with me, because if I’m ever stuck writing something that’s still where I would go. If I’m at the piano and I’m tearing my hair out over something, I’d go back and I’d sample something and build ideas around that and sometimes in the end the sample doesn’t even get used. I got that from the Neptunes, they used to do that. They were huge for me growing up.
Is there any connection between your sound and growing up in Cork or are you completely separated from it?
I don’t know really. I mean what’s the Cork sound? Some people say we sound Icelandic or from the Netherlands. Rachel’s father is Dutch so she has a bit of that in her. But I wouldn’t think there’s a connection. I look more to ethnic sounds when I’m producing, a lot of Asian influences. I’d buy a lot of Asian records and would be influenced by that. Everyone thinks that sound on To You is an Irish bagpipe or something, but it’s an Indian instrument.
It’s funny because I’ve seen reviews in which your music is described as electronic dub-pop and electro-pop but you obviously take influences from various places. How would you describe your music?
You know I had never even heard of electro-pop until somebody called us that! The one thing I do like is that people have all different names for it, because I think the best way to be is to have no genre of music because you can get caught in a genre. You know, ‘These guys make house. These guys make drum and bass’… I suppose our music is kind of poppy but I think it comes from a range of different influences. Me and Rachel don’t really listen to the same music at all. Rachel grew up in choirs and I had my hip-hop, so we had different influences but we just seem to get on when we make music together.
What made you and Rachel decide to do the last track on the album, Táim Tuirseach, as gaeilge?
I’ll tell you honestly, Rachel came up with the idea and at the start I wasn’t sure of it. I didn’t think it would work right. We wanted the intro and the outro to be like a story on the album so it would start and end the same way. We wanted a bit of coherence to the album because we didn’t want any songs to be skippable. I’d rather people listen to the whole album rather than one big single. But anyway she was listening to sean nós singers and she laid a demo down and it sounded great, and we were thinking that we have such a beautiful heritage and our language is so nice and bands from other countries sing in their own languages. We should be proud of our heritage too and it’s a beautiful language. I did Irish in school and all that but if my Irish teacher found out that out of all the people in our class I did a song in Irish she’d be very impressed!
So what’s next for Young Wonder? What are the plans for after the release of the album?
We’re writing already again. We’re going over to London next week and we’re working in the Red Bull Studios over there. We’re just interested to see how people take the album and how it gets received because we’ve found our sound. The EPs were just us testing and trying to find our sound but we feel like this album is ours. But you can never rest on your laurels. When you finish you have to keep working because it’s ongoing.
Young Wonder’s debut album, Birth, is out now from Feel Good Lost on limited edition white vinyl and digitally from www.youngwonder.me.
Words: Cian McKiernan
Images: Sarah Doyle
