Rats on Rafts releases new studio album Deep Below

Rotterdam-based band Rats on Rafts will release a new studio album on 7 February: Deep Below. The singles Japanese Medicine, Hibernation, Sleepwalking and All These Things are out now. The album was recorded in their own studio and will be released worldwide via UK label Fire Records and in the Netherlands via their own label Kurious Recordings. To mark the release, there will be two listening parties at Galerie Weisbard on 6 and 8 February.On 7 March, the band will play at Rotown.

Fans can register for one of the two listening parties at Galrie Weisbard via this link. A special audio set-up will be set up using the original master tapes to perform the album Deep Below. This will be done from the master recorder used in the recordings, a 1969 Telefunken M5C reel-to-reel tape recorder. There will be an exhibition of the photographs shot during the making of this record by Jasmijn Slegh. There will also be a Q&A with the band and Jasmijn.

Alienation through the cracks

Deep Below was recorded entirely analogue on their 16-track tape recorder with help from Niek van den Driesschen. With new ingredients such as the Soundcraft 1s mixing console (used by reggae producer Lee Perry) and the Solina string synthesiser. Although Rats on Rafts have kept the songs relatively slow and spare, deeper musings on mortality and alienation creep through the cracks.

Frontman David Fagan: "We didn't live through the '80s, but we look back at the parts we like and more recent music inspired by it. Our music could never have come out the way it did back then.''

On Japanese Medicine, Fagan says: "Japanese Medicine is focused on a former version of myself, that person is gone but occasionally I miss him because life seemed promising and unpredictable."

On All These Things, he says: "The lyrics are inspired by how I experienced things as a child, my representation of the future and the adults you had to listen to. You look up to them and hope one day to be big too and be in charge yourself. They seem so sure of everything, but as you get older your perception tilts a little more every year until you actually long for that time, where in the future everything was still possible."