Over a decade of making music together and God is an Astronaut don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon according to Torsten Kinsella who was just finished getting his phone fixed in time to talk to us.
Hailing from Wicklow, God is an Astronaut, for those not in the know are one of Ireland’s most prolific post rock outfits, with seven albums under their belt, they’re selling out shows everywhere from Russia to Paris and beyond that. Following the release of ‘Origins’, their seventh and latest album, the band have just come from a tour of Europe before playing some Irish dates then jetting off to Moscow again.
“Origins was just released there two months ago and we tried a little something different, obviously we’ve put brass and added some vocals and featured some bass lines, all things we’ve never really done before. We changed it up so you don’t get the calm before the storm feeling, making it that much more immediate.”
With this somewhat drastic shift in sound the band have shown a lot of progress, unwilling to grow stale but not to everyone’s liking.
“Overall its going down really well with most people but some people obviously prefer that we keep it the way we did before but you can’t make everyone happy but the only thing you can do is keep yourself happy, and we’re phenomenally happy with the record… Overall its a more optimistic record and I think that’s the attitude for God is an Astronaut to have in their tracks. It was an emotional change and it made sense.”
God is an Astronaut like so many acts doing something different have been boxed in with every other alternative post rock band out there. But like so many acts, they don’t like to define themselves to one specific genre, fearing it will stifle creativity.
“We just fell into this post rock category when our live show consisted of guitars and drums and we kind of included that sound and were just thrown under this title, which was cool at the time because people at the time were saying that dance music was dead and any form of dance music was dead so it was great to break into post rock which was an escape at the time, I think there’s a lot of rules that go with the post rock title and a lot of people suddenly compare you to all the other bands out there under that genre, and I think whilst we have those similarities I think overall we have something different now.”
So when it comes to recording and writing their own music God is an Astronaut don’t appear to have any real formula for bringing an album to life.
“I just got a lot of weird experimental guitar pedals and just started making noise and from that we’d just start to sculpt our tracks from it. In previous albums I would have sat down with a piano and a guitar and try to craft a song but this time we started with the weird sounds and then tried to come up with the rest, you can hear that throughout most of the record, where it was kind of written in reverse.”
With their record only released, the band are beginning to feel revitalized again and are already looking forward to their next record where they can experiment more with their new sound. They don’t appear to be slowing down yet though with several live Irish dates lined up and a potential US tour next year alongside releasing a live EP featuring three tracks from the latest album.
“People seem to be quite speechless following the live sets, considering how powerful the whole thing sounds, they’re a lot more monstrous and energetic whereas our old sets felt more ambient so now we’re really able to push the ferocity and we’re about to lead into something bigger.”
God is an Astronaut play The Academy next Saturday. Tickets for the show are €22.50 inclusive of booking fee and tickets are on sale now from Ticketmaster.ie.