Inside the making of Heirs by Rory Friers

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Making Heirs

Thought id just put up a small selection of photos from the making of our album Heirs and tell you a bit about the process. The album came out of a lot of ideas, something like 30 songs in total I think, our filtering system was pretty brutal, only our absolute favorite parts and songs made it through. It was hard to leave a lot of what we’d written off the album but what it meant was we ended up with something where all four of were in love with every little nook and cranny. We were invested in every second of sound on there because every part and nuance had to justify its own existence and it had to fit together as an album, so we have a bunch of left over tracks that we’re going to do something with at a later date.

It was a really intensive process; On the third floor of an old Linen Mill in West Belfast in our rehearsal room we spent the first week in January clearing out gear and building a small make shift studio set up to demo everything as we went, then spent all day every day just chipping away at songs for 6 months.  We had blackboards on each wall where we would write all the working titles and songs in progress, then each song would migrate onto the next board as it got to the next level of completion, like a little factory belt, it was always exciting when a track made it onto the last board.

Sometimes it got very intense, It was like being underwater for a few months, like anything that wasn’t album related seemed to be muffled and a bit distant, i think thats why it feels so emotive to me when i listen to it, like all the songs absorbed that tense drive we all had making it and we wanted to create very strong feelings when you listen to it and for it to have a journey like feel from the first note to the last, like its meant to listened to in one go.

We just wanted to make sure we continued stepping out of our comfort zone, making new sounds, approaching how we arranged things differently. Our last album All Hail Bright Futures felt so good in terms of shedding that worry about what people were going to think of us and just embracing that experimental mindset and progressing ourselves, we really wanted to keep that mentality in what ever it was that was going to come out when we got in the room for Heirs.  It feels like this record wouldn’t exist with out what we did on All Hail, but Heirs has taken another step towards something new again. Its sort of like the same chocolate bar but this album has a way higher cocoa content! All Hail was covered in popping candy and multi coloured sprinkles and Heirs is like an 85% bar of Green and Blacks.

I'm very very grateful that i got to make this album with Johnny, Chris and Niall, they have so much ambition and drive and passion to do and make and see more and more its impossible not to stay inspired and excited for the next thing and the thing after that and the thing after that.  

We hope you like it.

Rory Friers - taken from his own personal blog HERE

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