Photo by Álex Amorós
A five-piece of twin brothers and close friends, Duck Wax are able to mould genres into attention-grabbing new forms, sprinkling their music with unlikely combinations for a unique sound. Performing in London at The Windmill, MOTH CLUB and Jaguar Shoes Collectives, as well as a packed release party at Hackney’s Oslo, their funk-rock fusion experiences are steadily gathering attention on the local scene, whilst their Scotland home-studio singles build up their streaming presence.
After returning earlier this year with the commanding energy of their single ‘Blue Tiles, White Tiles’, Duck Wax are now back with their second release ‘Haircuts’. Unorthodox, slightly bizarre and endlessly infectious, the track opens with a simple guitar laid bare, before the track steadily acquires layers of vocals and sparse drums. These are enough to ignite the track into a bubbling melting pot of saxophone licks, grooving riffs and a playful lead vocal performance. As the lyricism charges through a list of barbershop instructions, the instrumentation fuels a fire of indie-rock, punk and old-school funk. Cheeky and charismatic, you can’t help but go back for one more listen.
Diving into the new track, the band explains, ”We set a target of writing a song that treads the balance of punk and funk, the two genres that we draw a lot of inspiration from at separate points. Our guitarist, Hector, had the song formatted and structured before he brought it to the rest of us, with all the lyrics too. When playing it together, he was very firm on stopping anyone from trying to play any fills or flourishes as we tried to work out our parts. His aim from this was to get everyone to really feel the rhythm of this song, and then work backwards from there. It was a new approach to writing that we hadn’t tried before, and it all really paid off. We were then able to find the spaces/gaps for fills a lot easier, and keep the drive of the song going.
The song was recorded in our homemade studio in Scotland, the 3rd year we have gone up there to record. Each time we go up to Scotland there is a strong conscious effort to build from the techniques we did the time before and make sure we improve each time. This time round we stepped away from our “everyone in the room” live-style recording, which we had done before, and recorded each instrument in stages. This gave us a lot more clarity in the takes, giving us a much better sound. It took a lot more time than our previous techniques, but the production sound we got from it massively outweighed all of our previous releases.”
Listen to ‘Haircuts’ below…
