Numbers can’t lie. When looking at a spreadsheet or a budget, it’s difficult to sugar-coat or alter perceptions of numbers. In the modern and relatively new world of music streaming, numbers are playing a more crucial role than ever. A band's entire history and appeal can be boiled down to simple digits, and there are few bands where this is more apparent that the Cork outfit Happy Alone.

In the 5 months since the band was formed, they’ve played 3 gigs and released 2 songs on Spotify, and it’s all going towards the one aim, domination. With both songs racking up over 40,000 streams, it’s astounding to see just how quickly the band have gathered momentum and are already over-taking heavyweights of Cork music.

GoldenPlec sat down with the band's vocalist and lead-guitarist Baxter Robot, to discuss the band's formation, their use of aliases, impressive streaming numbers and how important aesthetic and Ableton are to their craft.

Who’s in the band and how did you all meet?

Our aliases would be Baxter Robot, Slee and North-Head. So me and Slee met in Irish college and we me North-head in college. Slee and I were in a band called Joyride, which turned into a band called FoxCatcher that lasted about a day and then the drummer left so we thought we’d try not to use a drummer and use Ableton instead.

Then we got onto North-Head because he was able to use Ableton, so we got together and asked him to join a band, and we do everything through Ableton now. It gives us so much freedom, we can do whatever on earth we want and there are no limitations at all.

When did the Happy Alone project start?

I suppose it was around the last two weeks of November last year. It was after the drummer went off and we just hopped onto Ableton to see what we could do without him, then Colours was born and we thought “who needs a drummer!”.

We weren’t even going to put it out, we just thought “Ohh we need to put out a single” even though we’d only been a band about a week. So we put it out and it just took off, it went viral heading into Christmas and we just thought “What the hell?”

Why all the abstract names and Aliases on social media and who’s in charge of the design and aesthetic of the group?

It was my idea, we decided that by having your own name you’re restricted, you’re just you as a person but by having an alias you can be whoever the hell you want. You can be animated, an extension of yourself rather than being stuck to a name. In terms of our aesthetic, young Baxter Robot is in charge.

Our aesthetic is as important to us as our music, it’s more of an art thing than anything. Eventually, we’re gonna be like the likes of Generic People and have our live shows be multi-sensory explosions, mess your brain, lights going ninety with everything perfectly synced as opposed to just having a band from Cork who play their songs and walk off.

Was it always the intention to release music under the moniker Happy?

It all started from scratch really, now we do play songs that we wrote earlier in the year [Before Happy Alone was founded] but it never would have been finalised, they were just ideas I was messing around with, with drums and shit you know? Then we went back over them, put our own stamp on them and put them out under the Happy Alone name.

What’s the song-writing been like so far, using Ableton, has it been very collaborative?

Sometimes Slee comes in with a bass riff and we work drums around it or I’ll come up with a guitar riff and we’ll all work around that, whereas in Blaming Hannah I’d have written everything and we’d work around that. Now we know we can be collaborative, for example, if someone is playing something shit there’s no fear in saying it, we can say when it’s not working, it’s all about the music rather than your ego you know?

It doesn’t happen often [ Members coming up with bad ideas and other members rejecting it ] but when it does happen we say it, but 9 times out of 10, someone will do something and two minutes we’ll just have the song.  Our main thing at the moment is that we don’t struggle to write songs, we have so many songs and beats, we have a plethora to choose from you know?

How would describe your sound?

Oh, [long pause] I suppose I’d say….. There’s a thing I read online about Aphex Twins called ‘Brain Dance’ which basically says it’s more or less a blanket term that means electronica, trance, hip-hop, break-beats and everything really, our sound is definitely very eclectic, very cohesive and certainly not monotonous. I think our songs are kind of like sex. They start off one place, finish in another place but there’s always this big climax at the end, then drop down you know?

You’ve been a band for the grand total of five months, what do you think has lead to the explosion of interest?

I suppose it’s just great songs really, and we put in the work, even though we’re not around long we’ve put in the work every single day and we use our own marketing strategies, we use our own ploys and that sort of thing.

I think we’re more of a band or an entity than just musicians. We’re able to understand that we’re a creative force rather than just a band that releases songs and we’re able to back it up with a promo-campaign, with photo shoots and stuff like that whereas most bands, definitely locally, just release a song, throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

I think it’s very current, the music. A lot of bands are still stuck in rock, stuck in metal, stuck in pop-punk, but we’re creating something new and I think people react to that and want to be part of the movement.

If you were to release a song next week, what would you need to do before you put it out?

With a week to go… well… We’re in that situation ourselves at the moment, the song’s not done, not mixed, not mastered. I suppose we’re getting the promo campaign down, teasing a few posters, teasing a few snippets, releasing the lyrics, having it all ready to go and when it finally does come out, everything hits the fan.

You’ve your posts boosted, interviews ready to come out, you’ve your press releases. You want the day to come and people not being able to go anywhere without seeing it and that sparks interest, put it as your story, get people to support - people are generally very helpful if you’re trying to do something that isn’t easy. It’s all about hype and having everything together and ready to go.

Has it been difficult to translate the songs to a live set-up?

Initially, it was very hard because we had a Roland SPD-SX that we called  Craig Cash and that was hard because you had to hit it with a drumstick while playing the guitar, so that was very hard, but then we got Ableton Push, who’s known as Paul Push, who’s the epicentre of the live show.

He’s a little box with all your pads in it, it’s all synced to Ableton, so it's much easier, but it’s still hard to do certain things. For example, we had to learn how to sidechain vocals through an inter-phaser - which means we had to buy an inter-phaser - run it off through Ableton, so it’s still hard, it’s not yet at a level that we want it to be yet….

It’s kind of at the stage where things can fall apart very quickly sometimes, it happened recently when we did a gig and I accidentally kicked the inter-phase box and the sound cut out, so it’s still in the early stages.

It’s been a lot better since we’ve gotten Ableton Push, it’s been a lot more steady but it’s still annoying that you have to play with a clicker in your ear and that takes away from it all a little bit.

What are your plans for the next few months?

We’ve a few festivals lined up, there’s an EP coming soon, when we can’t say, but in the summer we’re going to be all moving into a house together and taking inspiration from the likes of BROOKHAMPTON and stuff and just sit and create all day.

Hopefully sometime during the summer we’ll have some masterpiece to release because we’re not here to mess around, we’re here to put our stamp on Irish music, we want everything to be perfect, there are no half-measures any mmore, we have one shot so we want it to the best shot we can possibly give.

Photos by Nicholas O’Donnell.