I Like Trains: ‘It was cathartic to make that big noise again’

“I don’t know that it’s really hit home until this week,” says David Martin, lead singer and guitarist with Leeds band I Like Trains as he contemplates the release of Kompromat, the group’s long-awaited follow-up to their 2012 album The Shallows.
I Like Trains. Picture: Ben BentleyI Like Trains. Picture: Ben Bentley
I Like Trains. Picture: Ben Bentley

The fact that he and fellow band members Guy Bannister, Alistair Bowis, Simon Fogal and Ian Jarrold have only met occasionally in the months preceding the album’s release has, he admits, been strange.

“It would be nice to have that relief,” he adds. “There would normally be a few good, big shows in London and Leeds where you can meet people who are listening to the record and at that point you can start to look back and think ‘this has connected’ and see the immediate reaction, I think that’s where you can gauge the success of a record. We’ve got all these [sales] numbers but that interaction you’re not going to have until maybe next year. It’s frustrating in that respect.”

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With members of the band busy in day jobs and starting “or extending” families in the last eight years, the impulse to make a new album needed to be strong. “There’s a different focus to the band,” Martin acknowledges. “We were pursuing it as a career for a while. In the meantime...there was an element of reassessing what our priorities are. I think that accounts for a lot of the time that was spent.”

Equally Kompromat’s knotty subject matter – about the rise of populist politics, increasing surveillance and the manipulation of information – took time to fully make sense of in song form. What began in 2013 with Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks snowballed with Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and claims of interference by the Russian state in British and US elections. “I thought it was going to be a low-key history of spycraft and espionage and also how that relates to intrusions in privacy in a modern context but then it coincided with current affairs,” Martin says. “No one saw those things happening in the way they did (at the time), but there was a lot happening behind the scenes that seemed to be coming out in the wash, to a certain extent, although the people that benefited from that are still in charge so it’s quite hard for it to be transparent.”

Initially Martin was worried that he “wouldn’t have enough resources to choose from in order to bring the album to completion” but the stream of scandals kept coming. “I was almost blinded by the amount of information I could get through to draw a narrative through that,” he says. “That is also a massive difficulty for journalists to hold these people to account, and I think that plays into the hands of populist movements that can throw a lot of half-truths and misinformation out and it takes so long to disprove or so much energy and resources and what else are they doing in the meantime that we should be concentrating on as well?”

The album’s six-minute centrepiece, The Truth, excoriates the culture of lies that has become embedded in modern politics. Its lyric stemmed from a series of phrases Martin noted on his phone “that eventually turned into a mantra”. These days, he says: “I rarely have time to write in the way I used to, to sit down and see what comes out of my brain, this is more of a snapshot approach that built up. In the studio this was a track that came together very quickly. I remember saying to the guys, ‘This is ambitious, it could fall flat on its face, I have no idea’ and I was sort of hesitant about it, but our producers Lee (Smith) and Jamie (Lockhart) at Greenmount Studios encouraged us and said ‘let’s start and see where we get to’. I had this list and the guys started playing away as I started reciting it and it just happened in the studio. I think the take you hear is the fifth one we did. It’s the sound of us living on our wits a little bit.”

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After the electronic experiments of The Shallows, Kompromat is much more guitar-drive. Martin says: “I think we took a lot of what we’d learnt doing The Shallows on the electronic side but we weren’t afraid to let loose a little bit here. I think the subject matter, the frustration that actually there’s very little practical ways that we can fight what we see happening...it’s frustration, it’s anger at the state of the world, I think that needed a slightly more visceral, noisy approach. It was cathartic to make that big noise again.”

I Like Trains. Picture: Ben BentleyI Like Trains. Picture: Ben Bentley
I Like Trains. Picture: Ben Bentley

The videos for The Truth and Dig In were made by Michael Connolly, renewing a partnership forged eight years ago. “We’d worked with him a little bit on live shows around the last album,” says Martin. “We just got talking. We sent him the record and he was fully on board with the same sort of themes that we were talking about, and the same frustrations. We had a really good back and forth, it felt like a proper collaboration rather than ‘here’s our songs, make a treatment’. It was actually a lot more involved than that and he did the artwork as well so that helped the overall visual vision for the record. We were on the same page immediately on that.”

Kompromat is out digitally today. Physical formats will follow in October. iliketrains.co.uk

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