PINS are a Manchester based post-punk/garage rock guitar band, whose debut album ‘Girls Like Us’ was released this year. We checked in with guitarist Lois MacDonald before the band’s show in the Workman’s on the 6th of December.
The band decided to self-produce their album, and the girls used a lot of analogue equipment. Lois explains the creative inspiration for this decision; “Well, we had loads and loads of ideas about how we wanted it to sound ourselves. We tried a few different things beforehand and we demoed it a lot. We usually have quite a lot of control over the recording anyway, and we just felt we had the opportunity to go to a studio that had all this gear we’d never used before and this basically helped us work out how we wanted it to sound.”
With a style of music that harks back to the sound of post-punk bands from the 70’s and 80’s, and a fondness of using older analogue technologies, we ask Lois what she thinks makes the band’s sound current and modern. “Well, we like to take influence from loads and loads of different places, and using analogue gear is an influence taken from the past. I don’t think our sound is meant to be that modern sounding anyway, we have a lot of garage/retro-y influence anyway – bands like the Velvet Underground – and I think that comes through in some of our music. Maybe not all of it. We also have the advantage of living now, forty years past the 70’s, and we have access to all the music of the past few decades and we can be influenced by that. We are able to use sounds on certain instruments from different eras and just pull in all these different influences and styles together. We do use some digital equipment, it’s not entirely analogue, but we do like to use it as much as we can and record live and take techniques we like and use them.”
Manchester is renowned for its rich musical history. This could prove to be either an advantage or disadvantage for an upcoming band; on one hand there is an audience already familiar with the band’s style of music, but there is also the risk of being pigeon-holed. “I think it’s great coming from Manchester where there’s such a rich history of bands and different styles of music as well, and there’s loads and loads of people making great music and it’s really inspiring to be surrounded by that. People do call us a Manchester band or say we sound like Joy Division, but we do get compared to loads and loads of bands. I don’t know, I think there is something about Manchester that inspires a certain sound, definitely. It’s a wonderful place to live.”
Savages, a band with a similar sound and ethos to PINS, achieved a significant level of success this summer with their album ‘Silence Yourself’. Lois responds to the idea of Savages being something of a trail blazer for PINS; “We both started at around the same time, they had done something a different way to us. We actually played a show with them, one of their first shows in Manchester. We really love them, and we’ve played with them a few times and it’s great that there’s another awesome band like us doing really well.”
The next topic of discussion is whether the all girl band ever find that people’s perceptions of the group are ever influenced by their gender. Lois replies; “That’s a difficult question. It influences the press’ perception of us, they seem to ask about that quite a lot. But I don’t how much of a deal it is for people who want to see us play. Personally I love female bands, especially when they play some good tunes as well. Personally I hate to focus on the fact we are a female band. I think it’s a great think we are, and there are loads of female bands popping up as well. You know, I think we’re all equal.”
Always an interesting question, we asked Lois whether she considered the live aspect of the band’s work more or less important than a nicely produced album: “I think that it is important to do both things, we think how we can do both these things in great ways. I think we’re a lot more confident now then when we started out because when we started out we were such a new band, and the first thing we released was after we played five gigs and obviously we needed a bit of time to get into that. But we all love touring and playing gigs wherever it is, it’s just always great fun. We’ll maybe work on it in the studio, adding layers and putting in little intricacies. When we play live we think they sound great, and we try to capture that live band sound in our recording.”
The band might be on tour right now, but it already seems the girls have their next moves planned out. “We’re working on new stuff now. We never really stopped at any point; we’re always writing and writing. We’ve got our tour in October and we’ve had three weeks off. We’ve just been working on what we already have and some new things. We’re always writing, sometimes you’d be walking on the street and you’d get an idea and think ‘I’ll just play this to the girls.’ After this tour we’d like to do more tours and just record stuff and keep it all moving.”
Keeping it moving indeed – the band are showing no signs of slowing up despite the successful release of their debut album, and the future looks bright for this exciting act. Head down to the Workman’s this Friday to see them in action.