Extradition Order – You’re On Mute: A Lockdown EP

Description

FULL COLOUR CASSETTE AND BEAUTIFUL ARTWORK WITH SPECIAL STICKERS AND ALL THE JOY YOU NEED TO GET BACK INTO THE NEW NORMAL

Tower Records talking about it

It isn’t meant to exist. In January, Extradition Order sold out the Lexington to launch their album American Prometheus. They had plans for more shows, a tour, a bunch of singles to promote through the year before they got down to recording their next album about food writer MFK Fisher.

Instead, they were told to stay indoors. So they did. They didn’t practise. They weren’t allowed near each other enough to play. They tried to House Party once but, as in normal life, it felt awkward and they just hung in the lobby for a while until it had been long enough to politely leave.

This EP is a diary of what the fuck just happened to us all. Written chronologically over weeks locked down, it gives the authentic feeling of those different moments the whole world experienced together, apart – the somehow tentative optimism at the start of the world shutting down together to flatten the curve, the uncertainty and paranoia for a disease that came from nowhere and made us all fear we couldn’t smell or taste, the inappropriate pleasure sometimes felt of not having to be in the world anymore and not wanting to go back, and then the frustration and anger at seeing who the rules applied to, who they didn’t, and the demand made that what happens next isn’t the same as what was before.

Musically the band worked on the basis that they make things work or they don’t make anything. None of them had a set up with a home studio or even the ability to plug in a guitar into anything that could properly record it. But they did have smart phones that contained free music apps and standard issue earphone and mics.

They started to record ideas they would WhatsApp to each other, a bassline played in an app, a string arrangement played in an app, a lyric sang into an app. Entirely done over apps and WiFi, vocals recorded around locked down families with as little background noise as could be avoided. The frustration when a sequence is finally perfectly played only to not be on airplane mode and an unexpected call junk the whole lot. One band member would kick off one musical idea, another would be working on another, messaging them to Alastair who tried to arrange the threads together, sat in the bath with a water proof phone, figuring out how to edit a chord sequence. Each track was then sent to Ian Button for a final dusting down before being released when finished throughout lockdown – until the last two were held back for this complete EP.