Let’s take you from the hectic, noisy streets of South London to the humid climbs of Barcelona. This is the same journey Jamie Taylor took after leaving indie 5-piece Photophobes to explore a fresh vision: Suntrap.
The electric, visceral project is the love child of Jamie and Barcelona producer Martin Canales. Their first EP, Cul-De-Sac, features three tracks that pay homage to eighties synth legends New Order and Pet Shop Boys, with textures akin to Gorillaz, while still delivering an entirely distinctive, individualistic vision that is sleek, stylish, and effortlessly cool. Frankly, we cannot wait to hear more of it, but for now, you may have to put this triad of tracks on repeat. For many, the opening song, “Main Ingredient,” will be the first impression of Suntrap’s work. The instrumentation is in some parts nostalgic but in other ways ominous and nightmarish, with the driving force of a chilling hook: “Feed me something I can believe in”. As for why he chose this as a natural starting point for the project, Jamie says the placement came very naturally.
“We worked on it a lot more after the initial spark of inspiration, but we knew from the first session it was going to be a good song and production. We spent three or four hours rehearsing, and if it doesn’t work, we put it straight in the trash. It’s got the weirdness and weird chord structure that people will come to know from us.”
Jamie first worked with Marti on an experimental solo record a few years back. Although Jamie’s strengths lie in the songwriting, and Marti’s in production, they were keen not to make this a project where the work tipped in one particular way or the other: “Rather than having separate roles, we decided both to be artists,” Jamie adds. “Marti is very good at music production and songwriting, so he writes beats and gets the groove going, while I come with the song, but that’s not to say the song’s completely changed by Marti or I don’t have suggestions about what the drums should be. We have a similar imagination about what needs to go where, and what needs work.”
In the intermission between Photophobes and this new project, Jamie never stopped writing, so picking things up again came quite easy to him: “Things just changed around me,” he says. “The songs changed, and you’re doing the same thing in your head, but before you know it you’re writing music in a new city.”
We shift then onto the epic six-minute-long title track, Cul-De-Sac: “Marti sent me a snippet,” Jamie says. “I cut it up in a loop in a sort of David Byrne-y type thing. I went back to my friend’s place in South London near where I grew up, and I do carpentry work, so I was staying there, renovating it, and it was strange being in this cul-de-sac where he lived, and I’d never been back to where I lived for 20 years because my parents moved out. It’s about how cyclical life is, going round in circles and finding a way out.“
“We thought about cutting it to the usual pop song, and Marti, who’s usually like, ‘let’s chop this up’, was like, let’s let it breathe, and leave it as an album track, which usually means a s*it track, but this one is an album track in more of a good way!“
“It sounds cheesy to say it’s about breaking through from the cul-de-sac, but it’s about slowly growing up and winding out of your orbit where you grew up in.”
They save the best track until last with Take Me Anywhere, once more stricken with an urgent production, though with creeping tinges of hope. “It’s actually a song from that project I was producing with Marti, and we had another version of it. The first incarnation of Suntrap was just me and a load of different musicians who would add different layers and studio productions, making a tapestry of different people’s inputs. I love these slow ballads on albums sort of grouped.”
The EP is available now, wherever you get your records, so you too can break out of the cul-de-sac, just for a few blissful minutes.
