Episode 9 – Pop Guilt: Don’t Call it a Comeback

In 2015 we’d been touring again, promoting the vinyl re-issues of our earlier albums, and our manager encouraged us to start writing songs again. We released the first single, Alone In A Crowd, and ended up recording a dozen more, which ended up coming out as our 7th album Pop Guilt.

In retrospect the album was a weird one to return with after a 12 year absence. Tim and Kellie explain their mixed feeling around the songs, their recording and production. They discuss how being involved with other bands during the Screamfeeder recording hiatus meant that they came back to the table as different people and different songwriters, as well as how bizarre, challenging – and fun – they found being in bands with other people.

A lot of Tim’s songs were written in England in 2016 after he won the Grant McLennan Fellowship in 2015, and he explains how this played out and the immense challenges he was faced with, more or less from day one.

Kellie dives down a rabbit hole trying to work out why so many of Tim’s songs feature the phone, and we come to the realisation – late – that almost every song on the album is hugely influenced by Dinosaur Jr (and/or Sebadoh). Some things never change!

Pop Guilt was a first for us in that we got to pick from our “dream list of hero producers” to mix the songs. It was also a first in that we used crowd-funding, asking for assistance from our fans to fund the recording. Both these experiments paid off hugely in ways we could never have expected.

We chat about the culture of the late nineties and early noughties which was still such a huge influence, namely The Rat by The Walkmen, The Sopranos, and Seinfeld.

We also have a laugh about I Might Have Some Regrets: how Tim pulled his classic move of pushing it through super late in the game, and how Kellie “Chucked a ‘nana like a little baby” in the studio.

Check out our album All The Other Times: A Pop Guilt Companion and download it for free!