Friends of Buzzkill - have we got a treat for you.
The Backfires are a transatlantic indie rock band who are slowly but surely inching their way into the mainstream. Emma and Emily were able to chat with frontman Alex Gomez about aspects of their band we thought potential listeners would be interested in learning about them. Scroll all the way to the bottom to see Emma's full gallery from their set in Boston, opening up for Courteneers!
If you had to describe your music to someone who’s never heard of you before, how would you?
The kind of music you’d want to hear live.
What did your schedules look like being on opposite sides of the Atlantic and in such drastically different time zones? I’m interested to know what collaboration for y’all looked like when you weren’t in the same place. I’m also interested to know how the music scenes you grew up in separate countries affected how you approached making music of your own.
There were a lot of Zoom and FaceTime calls. Most of the time it would start with Harry and I (Alex) talking about a song idea on FaceTime, then I would send him a Zoom link and we would write for a couple of hours. Usually, it would be in the afternoon on the East Coast so it would be late at night for Harry. Occasionally though we would work on things when he woke up in the morning and if I was still up from the night before. It got strange for sure. When we would all work through things we would have to find a time on the weekend and plan the week before, so it would be challenging to be fully spontaneous in those settings.
How did you get your name?
We had a different band name at first…Qualia Noir. It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and it was particularly hard to say in a British accent. None of our friends could say or remember it, really. It just became a bit of a joke. You could say it “backfired.”
You’ve said before that ‘Reflections On My TV’ “feels true to the live sound [you’ve] been developing” – why did you decide to turn to that live sound? Why is it important to you to continue cultivating it?
When you’re a 4-piece rock band, you’re not necessarily reinventing the wheel every time you write a song. With the first songs we put out, we hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking of how we would play it live, and we spent the first part of this year getting our live set ready and we found that our early songs didn’t fully translate. “Reflections” was originally more similar to our earlier songs, but we reworked it over the summer and made it more of a guitar-forward track. As far as continuing to work on our sound..none of us are easily satisfied people and we always want to evolve.
Who are some artists making music today that excites you?
Sam Fender, Fontaines D.C., Idles, Secondhand Sound, Sophie May, The Mysterines.
Which artist would you most like to be in the ‘Fans also like’ section of their Spotify page? / If you were given the opportunity to record and release a Spotify single, which song would you cover?
Landing in Sam Fender’s “Fans also like” would be pretty cool. As far as a Spotify single, we were covering Lorde’s “Royals” for a while this year. We reworked it to sound like us, so it ended up having quite a bit of energy. Doing a pop song like that and challenging a listener’s expectations of what a song can sound like would be cool.
Coolest or weirdest tour experience?
Matt broke a bass string in the first song of our set in Boston at Brighton Music Hall with Courteeners. That was a first.
What’s up next for The Backfires?
We’re currently recording new songs to put out next year, and we just announced shows in London and New York in January and February respectively! We’ve grown a lot in 2022 and look forward to doing even more next year.
YOU CAN FIND THE BACKFIRES AT:
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