Despite (or maybe even because of) being in a band with no lyrics in their music, Overhead, The Albatross’s Joseph Panama does a lot of talking. “The whole day I've been going through worst case scenarios,” he jokes at the start of his conversation with GoldenPlec. “You know... things I shouldn't be talking about.”

The bassist has a tendency to mouth off, to rant, to enjoy a general session of giving out, but that’s not what this chat is about. There have been plenty of trials and tribulations for the space-rocking instrumental six-piece, but now they’ve got something to celebrate.

After a truly epic production time (and a little bit of gentle slagging here and there from this site over delay after delay), the debut Overhead, The Albatross LP is ready to drop. What has been for some fans literally years of waiting will finally come to an end with the release of ‘Learning To Growl’ on 13 May.

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This undeniably lengthy process of album construction has been “one of the most interesting and difficult things I’ve ever been a part of,” Panama explains. Part of the reason ‘Learning To Growl’ has taken so long is that Overhead, The Albatross have been working their way up from scratch, making it up as they go along in the truest sense of the word, doing everything they can to find a style that fits them and then to find a way to translate this onto the tape in the recording studio. “All the releases up to now have been a case of finding our feet,” says Panama. “I think even the first album will still be a case of finding our feet… So maybe next time it'll be easier. but maybe it'll be harder again, I don’t know.”

With such a perfectionist attitude to their music, it can be hard to accept that a piece of music is really finished and ready to be released into the world. But now, finally, “relief is creeping in slowly,” Panama explains, “it's not like one big happy sigh, more like a balloon slowly being deflated… We're happier than we thought we would be about how it sounds, but even still every time you listen to it there's a thousand things you could change. We're past that now though. No more changes, it's all way out of our hands thankfully.”

So while it may be a case of a piece of art being abandoned rather than truly finished, Panama is ready to admit that, “the album we're putting out is the closest thing to the album we wanted to put out that we're able to do at this stage.”

But let’s wind it back a little bit. The first time the six members of Overhead, The Albatross (Panama, Vinny Casey, Stevie Darragh, Ben Garrett, Luke Daly and David Prendergast) all came together in the same room was the band’s first impromptu jamming session. The lads mostly knew each other from school, college, or previous bands, but that first sessions was, as Panama explains, an exploration, a case of six different people trying to measure each other up and find a way to collaborate. “In the first day we jammed we wrote Jonah in the first couple of hours. It just kinda happened. Ben just walked in and played a beat and we were like okay, this is interesting, this might work.”

Right from that first day the band have embraced a free-wheeling, exploratory approach to composition. As opposed to having a set in stone plan, Overhead, The Albatross embraced an approach that was as free of restrictions as possible, just to see what would happen. There’s no front man, no main songwriter. The band’s first EP (‘Lads With Sticks’) “just came naturally to us,” Panama explains.

This approach is also necessarily a little chaotic, and is one of the reason getting things to a point at which they can be called finished takes so long. “And that's also why our songs are so long,” says Panama. “We can’t put and rein on them. We can’t be like, let’s write a pop song with a chorus. None of us know how. If we could write pop songs, we'd probably be writing pop songs, and maybe we might be making a living out of it.”

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In the case of ‘Learning To Growl’, the ‘getting it finished’ part has now literally taken years. Overhead, The Albatross decamped to a tiny studio in the Czech Republic back in 2012, with the intention of recording the whole album in one concentrated burst, but as soon as they got over there, “We realised, no, actually, this needs a lot more work,” Panama explains. “We came home from Czech with the album written, and then spent months and months and months laying the tracks together – tracking the whole thing live, figuring out what worked and what didn’t – and so basically, all of the Czech Republic stuff was preproduction.”

But there’s a whole other side to the music too. Away from the technical side of arrangement and figuring out how to capture a certain sound, there’s the question of what the songs actually mean. Does music without any lyrics have a narrative? Does it need one?

I think there's a narrative to it,” Panama explains, “but that narrative is completely subjective. And that can be a good thing. If there are no words and there's no written theme, then the narrative should be completely up to you [the listener]. If one of our songs makes you feel sad, then that's fine, but it could also make the next person feel happy and the next person feel nothing. and that's fine.”

Even within the band, “Some of our songs mean different things for each one of us… A lot of the time you pick up an instrument, and you're like, I'm in a really shitty mood, I want this to be disgusting, and you bring it to the band and that bit gets dissected. and all of sudden somebody else is playing it, and all of a sudden the song has a completely new form and new context and new meaning.”

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In other words, the music is something private, subjective, an interplay between each of the band members with the potential to mean something completely different to each new listener. And maybe this has something to do with Overhead’s inability to write pop music.

Or to even know when something is really finished, since without relying on a template like the verse, chorus, verse, structure or one set end goal about what a song should unequivocally be about, it can be a hard to have a clear finish line.

And even now, with the album all wrapped up and ready to drop in May, Panama admits that “We've never managed to record ourselves as well as we'd like to, and we've never managed to perform as well as we'd like to. Neither have ever been the way we want them to be. They're representations of a sound we haven't attained yet.”

That’s not to say any of the band aren’t proud of what they’ve achieved so far. “With the help of Phillip Magee, who came in late to mix most of the album for us, we've brought these songs on this album to the best place they could be. That's not to say we're happy with where we are musically – there's oceans to explore for us – but Phil has mixed these particular compositions to a better standard than we ever could. I think we still have a lot of room to manoeuvre in terms of finding our sound, there's lots to learn.”

On the live side of things, Overhead, The Albatross have set the bar similarly high for themselves. “We're constantly trying to improve it,” Panama says, “and in the coming months the live side of things will be experimented with and overhauled to a point that we're able to tear it down and start improving it all over again.”

With that in mind, Overhead, The Albatross have their sights set on some relentless touring on the back of their debut LP. “Hopefully we can tour the bejaysis out of this one,” says Panama, “and by the time we're done with that we'll hopefully be off again to some other beautiful place to start writing the second one.”

Their first step is a jaunt to Canada to play at the illustrious Canadian Music Week in May. Before that Overhead, The Albatross must pay a visit to The Workman's Club to finished what that started – a reprise of their last show there which was cut short by a power outage. Entry for the show is pay-what-you-like, and proceeds of the show will fund the band’s trip to Canada. As another part of their fundraising drive, Overhead, The Albatross will be hosting a very special and intimate ‘Learning To Growl’ listening party (also in the Workman's) on 7 April – details here.

‘Learning To Growl’ is out 13 May.