How’re you feeling about thirty-five right now? Anyway, Ryan was freaking out about that and his friends got in touch asking if we could do a message for Ryan’s thirtieth. Basically, Ryan was freaking out over turning thirty for four years -Įh. Obviously I know why it’s named ‘Post Ryan’, but can you explain that for the readers at home. That’s where the lyrics come in after that. It scared me, and because of it not working, when it did work, it made me want to push something different out. It could’ve been a b-side or saved for the next record. That track, we just saw a lot of potential in it, but it was this one decent part. That can be a really scary time, and it was in lockdowns as well. The album in general for me, the majority of it was written when I was twenty-nine to thirty. It’s not unusual that Gilla Band songs take a long time to develop, but why do you think this one in particular eluded you for so long? It basically brackets the making of the album as a whole. I hadn’t seen the guys buzzed that way in so long. Once we found the ending, it felt really good. The start of the track is that dreamlike thing, and then it crashed into reality, but it’s still the same tempo, which adds tension to it. It was still in the same world as an idea of a dream at the time. When the guitars come in at the end, I had a version of it where I just repeated the same melody over the end and did this whisper-shout thing, because I can’t shout when I’m working at home. I think we were so determined to finish it, and we tried in so many different ways. Was this song part of where that goal was crystallizing over the years? It has these various catchy bits, but it’s also not verse/chorus it’s very direct, and doesn’t spill over into noise and screaming. There are ways in which ‘Most Normal’ has these hard cuts and disorienting moments but is also a lot more compact and controlled than ‘The Talkies’ - shorter, punchier. It did come from that idea of A Flock Of Seagulls in terms of pace, but it’s very far from it. It’s like an upside-down cymbal on a wooden case with these triggers. There’s some shakers, and Adam bought this weird thing.
We could tie it in to how we were doing things at the time, which was - if Adam wasn’t there - looping the drumbeat and working over it. It was more the pace of it rather than the beat.
Īs you know, it’s one of the best songs ever. It started with an inspiration from the beat in ‘I Ran’ by A Flock Of Seagulls. It took literally two years to get what it is.
Melody-wise, it was there, and the first half of it. The last two years are so fucking blurry, but from what I remember it was one of the early ones. This song goes back to the earliest stages of writing the album. In a lot of ways, it feels like the album they were always meant to make - adventurous, but controlled and accessible all at once. It is at once fragmented and direct it feels chaotic and disorienting on first listen before you realize most of its songs get stuck in your head over and over. There are garbled, far-out experiments that sound like the wildest moments of ‘The Talkies’, and there are bold, catchy hooks that harken back to the ‘Early Years’ EP. It is synthesis and evolution simultaneously. But their latest, ‘Most Normal’, comes with a strange extenuating circumstance - its closing song ‘Post Ryan’ happens to be named after me.Īs a critic and as a friend of the band, I’d tell you the same thing: ‘Most Normal’ is their best album. Over the years, we became close friends, and you don’t exactly want to be reviewing the albums released by your close friends. After covering them way back in early 2015, I ended up driving them on tour in America several times.
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