The Rifles discuss their new album

30 July 2008

The Rifles

With a as-yet-untitled new album out in October, The Rifles are determined to better their 2006 smash which brought them a immense four top 40 hits. I caught up with the charming Joel Stoker, who is in charge knocking out jaw-dropping vocals, to get the inside gossip on the new album, why they are different from all the other bands at the moment and whether they prefer The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.Your 2006 debut album gave you four top 40 singles, are you nervous about trying to replicate that success with your new album?

Well we’re going to try and better it really and hopefully we’ll get a bit more press which we were lacking with the first album. We’re not nervous because we’re pretty happy with how the new album turned out so we’re pretty confident but you never know…I’ll still have my fingers crossed.

You were unsure what to call the album, have you decided on a name yet?

Not yet, there’s a few floating about but we had a meeting about it last night to sort it out, but we will now the album is done. We wanted to wait until we finished recording and seen what was on there because we thought that might sway what it’s called a little bit. So within the next week we’ve been told we have to have it done, but we always leave things to the last minute.

How would you describe the album?

It’s a little bit more grown up whereas the first album was pretty straight down the line with three-minute catchy songs. On this album we have a few strings and trumpets on certain tracks so it’s grown as a sound.

Has this album seen you move out of your comfort zone a little bit more?

We never really had a comfort zone, we’re all into different sorts of music so it didn’t feel like we were going on ‘a mad one.’ We just spent a lot of time in the practice rooms just jamming we weren’t really trying to make it sound like anything, each song is played however we thought worked so it’s definitely a lot more interesting.

Do you have a favourite track?

There’s a few that are quite different; For The Meantime is really slow and has strings and a piano and that’s good but then there’s a song called The Great Escape which will be our first single, which is good and has strings on it too. I know it sounds stupid but we like them all, quite a lot of them are different each other, it just depends what mood you’re in, what you’ll like.

Who do you look up to within the music industry?

There are loads of bands really. Paul Weller has been a big help to us recently, we have always listened to him and really liked him but he has said he liked our first album so he’s taken us under his wing a little bit and let us support him here and there and we’re playing with him again on Saturday on the Isle of Wight.

If you could collaborate with any other band, who would it be?

If it was someone dead it would have to be The Beatles but I think everything The Arctic Monkeys have released has been brilliant and I think the Kings Of Leon are really good, they are two bands who I think are at the top of the tree at the minute.

What makes you different from all the bands who are on the scene at the moment?

I think we are not an NME-type band which a lot of bands out at the moment are, we just try and concentrate on songs we like and playing them. There aren’t many people writing three-minute pop songs that much. Everyone is trying to be a little bit different, whereas I suppose we’re different in the fact that we’re not that different!

We like bands like The Jam and The Beatles and they’re all just brilliant pop songs at the end of the day.

Where would you like to be in 10 years?

Sittingbeside my own swimming pool! For us success hasn’t been an instant thing, we’ve had to build it up over time and in a way that’s more rewarding so we just want to keep building it and see where it takes us, but we’ll probably all want to kill each other 10 years from now.

To return to 2008, what’s in the near future for you?

We’ve got the album coming out in October so everything at the moment is just building up to that really, and then we’ve got the tour in October and November.

In the New Year the album will have been out a while so we might go to Europe and do a bit more there because we’ve toured a lot there but we haven’t done any of the new album over there. We did a lot of touring with the last album and it really pays off because you go back again and there are a lot more people listening to you.

We didn’t really get much press or radio coverage on the first album so for us to have got the fan base we have is really because we’ve toured so much.