Start Listening To: Volk Soup
The Leeds six-piece talk fractured sounds, charity shop serendipity and why nothing matters more than the lyrics.
Volk Soup aren’t interested in fitting into a neat box. Formed from scattered English roots but bound together in Leeds, the six-piece deal in chaos, contrast and restless invention. Their debut album 10p Jazz is a ragged patchwork of styles that somehow hangs together, veering from punk ferocity to tender balladry to brass-heavy experimentation. At the heart of it all is vocalist and lyricist Harry Jones, whose words cut through the noise with clarity and intent. We sat down with Volk Soup to talk about how 10p Jazz came together, the strange alchemy of their live shows, and why they’ll always chase honesty over perfection.
For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?
We are Volk Soup, I’m Harry Jones (vocals and lyrics) and we’re based in Leeds and formed of a motley crew of scattered English identities: The Black Country, Bolton, Portsmouth, Northallerton, Essex and York—but we’re a Leeds band in body and soul.
Our music is a knee jerk reaction to every artistic itch we harbour. The music is the result of a great well of diverse inspirations and cultural touchstones. What you hear when you listen to Volk Soup is the vulnerable wish to say everything we desire to say, in every way we know how. Whether you like that or not is another thing entirely.
10p Jazz is your debut album, but it already feels like a bold, fully formed statement. What were you hoping to capture or confront with this record?
It’s a miracle that the album should sound in any way cohesive or “fully formed”, as you say. It is a work of fractured and disjointed pieces that we’ve cobbled together in the hope that it resembles a whole. The album was recorded maybe two and a half years into being a live band. In that time, we managed to cultivate an image that has informed the music we’ve been able to make. Being in a band isn’t entirely what I imagined. We meet up to write music so infrequently that from the outside we seem semi inactive. When it came to the recording of the album, it seemed to me as though we had a job to capture the band as a six-piece, something we’d not done much before then. Our compilation Incompetent Hits was the band as a three-piece, 10p Jazz would have to define us as a six-piece.
The only thing I, personally, ever really try confront with any art I create, is myself; how I’m reacting to the things around me at any one time. There are different means of harnessing that stand point and I think this album showcases our ability to do this in many way. I think 10p Jazz’s sundry stylisations is one of its strongest features. We can’t express ourself in one way, which in turn makes the diversity a method in and of itself.
How was the album produced?
We were lucky enough to have access to Leeds Beckett University studios thanks to Shaene (the album’s engineer and Volk Soup’s most recent recruit). It’s a huge studio space that I believe is modelled off of Abbey Road. As a band with a reputation for being an exciting live band, we’ve always toiled with how best to capture that live energy on record. I’ve been told more than once that our music sounds too clean, which isn’t representative of our live power. I think people in the past have conflated DIY with lo-fi. As it turns out, these two things are not mutually exclusive. Shaene suggested we record at Leeds Beckett because it’s a large room where the sound really carries, and that we should record the songs live. Where previously we’d tracked drums and bass together and everything else was overdubs, this time we played our parts at the same time, as we would in a live session. Then later we added some texture. But this initial recording phase allowed us to capture the energy of the band that has perhaps been lacking in other recordings. Once that was done it gave us room to be more adventurous with the overdubs.
The title 10p Jazz feels both cryptic and cheeky. What’s the story behind the name, and how does it reflect the record’s spirit?
The origins of the name just come from myself and Ryan (bass) being in a charity shop and Ryan, pointing to a box of records that read “10p Jazz”, exclaiming “That would make a good album title!” I heartily agreed and held onto this for three years.
At the time the band was a three-piece and so we weren’t to know that our debut would contain so much brass. Call that serendipity, I suppose. I really do feel like it’s a near perfect title for the album. It sounds, at times, like a cheap interpretation of a more high-brow art form. There’s a desire running through the album to play above our station, to venture into something more artsy, but there’s always a sense of some juvenile instinct pulling us back.
‘Reptilian Brain’ came together just hours before a show in a mostly abandoned warehouse. Do you thrive on that kind of immediacy, or was this one an exception?
No exception at all. We write nearly everything as remote ideas that come together with relative ease when we finally get in the same room as one another. This has been quite an integral part of Volk Soup. Having six members makes the whole enterprise a logistical nightmare so when the time comes, it’s good to act quickly. Nothing is to be scoffed at or deliberated over with too much pretention. If it doesn’t work we move on and it’s always worked that way. We find it a very fruitful way of working. The meat of most songs comes from months of sitting on lyrics and chord progressions or bass lines. When those things are brought to the band to turn into songs, things generally seem to fall into place. Reptilian Brain was borne of a playful spirit and it’s something I’m quite sure we need to maintain.
To be fair to the mostly abandoned warehouse, it was a rather characterful and suitably well-run practice space. Not the skeletal ruins I painted as.
There's a strong sense of contrast across the album. One minute it's full throttle, the next it's unexpectedly tender. How deliberate are those shifts, or do they happen instinctively?
As I mentioned before I think there’s a need to express ourselves without restrictions, we’re artists eager to explore what we’re capable of and sometimes that comes by way of a more instinctive punk aspect of our music but sometimes it’s through a country ballad or a disco epic. I think Volk Soup are stylists more than genreists. I can’t imagine just being a post-punk band or a shoegaze band or a grunge band. Like a director or novelist we don’t necessarily deal in one genre, we deal in the style we give to certain genres or forms. Of course, some film directors deal primarily with either horror or western or crime but actually they’re capable of maintaining their image in a range of settings; this is how I see Volk Soup. Anything can be given the Volk Soup treatment.
In terms of shaping those changes into something that has a deliberate structure in the way the album moves, that felt a relatively natural process. I think we struck a balance with the material at some point. Perhaps that’s when it felt like we were ready to record an album.
On ‘Mass Village Angst’ and ‘Nothing in Tomorrow’, you seem to be pulling apart small-town resentment and social disconnection. How did those themes creep into the music?
I see Mass Village Angst as the small town vision of a changing world and Nothing in Tomorrow as that same view but from the metropolis. I’m from a small suburban town in the West Midlands. I moved out about a decade ago and have lived in Birmingham and Leeds. The way these two places feel is in stark contrast to the way they’re seen by their inhabitants, as far as I can tell. The small town and the village is a place of stagnant comfort and slow change, yet the people harbour deep fears. They see the world’s fluctuations and obsess over an impending invasion of change. Yet whenever I visit it feels the same as it ever did. Living in the city is the inverse. Every day places seem to be closing, livelihoods in a state of flux, every corner of culture dwindling to some crass venture and every ounce of real estate driving out people who cannot afford to occupy it. Yet there’s optimism and desire for change among the people who care about these spaces. These are worlds I’ve been witness to and they’ve inevitably found their way into the music. Neither are particularly autobiographical accounts, rather they’re colourful visions of pre-apocalypse, that stilted sense of the end being nigh, just as it has been to anyone who ever lived.
The album feels deeply rooted in live energy. What’s your relationship with the studio versus the stage? Are they separate worlds, or do you treat them the same?
As I mentioned when talking about the recording process, the two are almost regrettably intertwined, to the point where we’ve felt beholden and duty bound to “capture the live energy”. I personally see the two as separate forms and wish for them both to translate our ideas in alternative ways. Alas, we must sound as good on record as we do live. I hope if nothing else that 10p Jazz puts to bed the phallacy that exciting music can’t sound clean and textured and ambitious (at least for Volk Soup). The energy of the band is something that is all encompassing. It doesn’t move from stage to studio or vice versa, we’re just a band with quite a specify energy.
You’re playing shows with Gaol Bird this December. What can people expect from a Volk Soup gig right now? Are you planning to push the live experience even further?
There’s no pre-planning when it comes to the live show. We’re quite poorly rehearsed usually and mostly try to react to any given environment at any given time. So, in actual fact, I don’t know what to expect with the upcoming live shows. All I know is that every time I go out I lay myself quite bear. If you come and see Volk Soup I intend for you to remember it. I’ll just figure out what that looks like on the night.
I’m hoping what it actually brings is more new music, a space to feel out the next direction we’re going to take. A platform for us to work on the next album.
What do you love right now?
Many things but here is an incomplete list of things I’ve come to know and love relatively recently:
Randy Newman
catfishing.net
Palmaritas
James Ellroy novels
The Turkish Baths in Harrogate (steam room followed by cold plunge)
West Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite
The audiobook of Bono’s Autobiography as read by Bono
The films of João César Monteiro
Half pints
The X-Files
Playing football
Joni (my cat)
The artworks of Cy Twombly
What do you hate right now?
I’m not at war with the world so hate far less things than I love… but:
AI generated films (Artificial Intelligence in general)
New TV shows
Having to cut down on salt to improve my blood pressure
Having to maintain, take care of and nourish my human body
Gigs with four bands on the line-up
Staring with morbid fascination at Instagram paid-for ads of bands with the worst lyrics you’ve ever seen captioning the worst song you’ve ever heard (I assume, I never unmute them)
Checking Wolves’ transfer news
Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?
The Smiths by The Smiths. A band that, despite Morrissey’s declining reputation and the band’s up and down fashionability, I find impossible to outgrow. They are a band that speak to youth, to a time of uncertainty about oneself, a sentiment I don’t alway go in for in art. And yet, it spoke, and continues to speak to me deeply. There is a bountiful cornucopia of vulnerability and honesty in that music that continues to fulfil me as a listener. And as long as it is willing to give I am willing to take.
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them?
The lyrics. Everything else is a waste of my time.
