Denver band Houses opens up
The up-and-coming group releases a new EP, admits they're not as good as Prince
Photo: Lulu Deville
Houses in narrow stairways.
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What happens in the studio doesn’t always stay there: Denver-based Houses talked with Decider while in the midst of recording the first of four EPs slated for this year. The seasonally themed series (the foremost, We Are Houses, is being released tonight at the Hi-Dive) is an ambitious undertaking, an attempt to capture on disc the cyclical changes of the weather—and the mood swings that come with it—through mild folk riffs, fuzzy rock guitars, and other distortions. Husband and wife Andy and Kinsey Hamilton, two of the eight members in the band, told us about recording their new EP and how much better they’d perform with a studio audience.
Decider: You have four EPs planned for this year and each corresponds with a season.
Andy Hamilton: As a whole we’re just trying to write songs that reflect that time of year. We’ll put this group of songs together that may be a little more positive and make that the spring album. We have our poppy kind of songs—that’ll be summer. And fall and winter will just get darker and more depressing.
D: A few other bands have done something similar. Switchfoot, for example.
Kinsey Hamilton: I showed that to him just the other day! I was all upset about it.
AH: I had no idea.
D: So how will this be different than Switchfoot?
AH: Well, it’ll be better.
KH: That won’t be hard.
AH: Yeah, because it’s Switchfoot. Number one, we’re not a Christian band, so that’ll be different. And number two, I don’t know how these other groups have done their seasonal EPs, but I think what will set ours apart is that they’re intentionally being written so that there’s an obvious progression. The first album is going to be folkier, but it’s not really just folk music; it’s starting off that way, then it’s going to get a little more upbeat and rock 'n' roll, and then by the end it’s just going to be really heavy. My intention is that with the spring and the winter albums, if you were to play those back to back, they’d sound like two different bands. But, at the same time, it’ll sound like us.
KH: And you’ll be able to play them from the first album through to the last, and there’ll be a continuous progression. At the end of the last album, you’ll see things hinting towards the start of the first again, so it’ll be cyclical, hopefully.
D: A year is a long time. Where do you see yourself as a band at the end of this series?
AH: It’s kind of daunting because I’ve essentially booked my entire year. But I think it’s a good challenge for us. Who knows? By the December album, we could be an electro-house band.
D: What else is important to you as far as the recording goes?
AH: I really want to release something that’s going to be reflective of who we are as a live band. At our shows, people are just totally stoked on us, and getting that kind of reaction from the crowd—you know, we just feed off that, and it makes us more excited, and of course we just become more flamboyant, and then we go nuts. But it’s kind of difficult to capture that in a studio setting. Maybe we need to have a studio audience while we’re recording, behind a glass partition, dancing away and cheering. And, of course, they’re listening to Prince on the other side.
