aaamusic | On 24, May 2012

Bear Driver will release new single ‘Enemy’ on May 28 through Adventure Club Records, ahead of their debut album Bear Driver, due out on June 11. The band has already secured a much sought-after spot on Daytrotter’s newly launched UK sessions, plus radio support from Radio 1, XFM and a 6Music Record of the Week pick for previous single ‘Big Love’.

 

Propelled by band’s characteristic dual vocals, the earnestly swoonsome ‘Enemy’ provides one Bear Driver’s most accessibly ‘pop’ moments yet. Named after a star constellation, Bear Driver’s roots stretch back to the slightly less celestial origins of Leeds, where members Oli Deakin and Harry Dean gravitated into musical partnership- ‘We’d always played in other people’s bands and said we should start our own. Then we lived in a house together and said we should start a band. Then we booked ourselves a gig and we had to start a band’.

 

The key moment for Bear Driver came last year following their SXSW appearance (playing alongside longstanding heroes …..And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead), when through a stroke of good fortune, they secured a live show at New York’s legendary Mercury Lounge.  Having traipsed the winding paths of Central Park by day, the band came entirely by chance upon a Yo La Tengo charity gig, which included performances by David Byrne and Glen Mercer. Galvanised by these encounters with two hugely influential bands, the band returned to London intent on recording their debut album.

 

Bear Driver is a ‘live’ band in every sense of the term. Each and every track on Bear Driver blisters with the hiss of an album recorded entirely live, and in some cases, in a single take.  Last summer the band relocated to a studio in the Lake District to thrash out the material that would come to form the album, with a view to recording live once back in London. It is a ballsy approach but one that is integral to the immediacy of their material; says Oli, ‘Harry and I will make a crap demo of an idea, which we then take to the band and try to breathe some life into. Normally it involves a lot of wine, and making a lot of noise till we get something we like’.