Apollo Junction: 'We spent a while searching for a home but I think we’ve definitely found that now'
Thirteen years, numerous singles and four albums into their musical career, Leeds guitar-pop band Apollo Junction have decided to ring the changes with their latest record, What In The World.
Having worked with producer and engineer Andy Hawkins at Nave Studios in Armley on all three of their previous albums, which were released on the Guiseley-based Shed Load Records, this time the five-piece elected to move to Chairworks Studio in Castleford, where their recording sessions were overseen by David Watts, who has previously helmed top five albums by Kaiser Chiefs, Richard Hawley, and Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott. The band also have a new distribution deal with Lasgo and their promotional campaign has been deliberately short.
“We tried to go a bit old-school,” says singer Jamie Williamson. “I know a lot of bands these days go for announcing an album months ahead – The K’s did nine or 10 months, which is a long time for pre-sale, and we understand how it works and why they’re doing it – but this time we purposefully decided that we didn’t want to do it. We finished the album and went, ‘let’s just get it out, let’s do it the opposite way’.”
Unlike their 2023 album Here We Are, they have also “gone for a different angle of not shouting about” the album’s chart prospects, with Williamson and his bandmates Matthew Wilson (guitar), Ben Hope (bass), Jonny Thornton (drums), and Sam Potter (keyboards) agreeing that “it’s been done a lot by bands”.
“That’s fine and each to their own,” Williamson says, “but this time we had a conversation and said, do you know what, the most important thing is music, it’s not about trying to shift 58 different versions of the album. It’s about trying to let people spend what they can spend on the album but most importantly, just listening to it.”
Nevertheless, as an experiment, Apollo Junction are also releasing 100 digital copies of the album in the Serenade smart format that allows fans to unlock extra content. “It’s a scan-able item,” Williamson explains. “We’ve got a postcard that’s being specially made (by Matt Grainger at Vinyl Soul) to go onsale at the Doves gig and then into next week at the instores, once you’ve bought the postcard it’s a copy of the album registered to us and they can scan that and it gets you exclusive extra content. If you buy that it gives you the album plus there’s a 15-minute documentary, audio commentary introductions to each song.”
The singer feels that of all their albums, “this is the best one that we’ve done” and that his band is now firmly established. “We spent a while wondering where we belonged and maybe what sound we wanted to make and who were the people that would come and see us. We spent a while searching for a home, in a sense, but I think we’ve definitely found that now,” he says. “Like the synopsis for this album says, we went searching for answers and searching to find our place, but maybe we’re here. We don’t need to be the biggest band in the world, and we don’t need to be chasing the spotlights that some bands chase; actually we’ve got a place and we’re very comfortable where we are, making the sound that we are, with no external pressures, no huge amounts of money being thrown at us – with that (we know) comes so much weight. We don’t have any of that, we can just do what we want.”
For the first time, the band have collaborated with other artists. Brianna Corrigan, formerly of The Beautiful South, adds her powerful voice to the duet Settle Down, and two tracks, Entangled and Satellite, were co-written with Eliot Kennedy, the Sheffield-based songwriter who has worked with Bryan Adams, the Spice Girls and Gary Barlow. “I saw the music video for Satellite today and it’s stunning, this is probably the best music video we’ve ever done,” Williamson enthuses, adding: “We’re really lucky to be able to work with these people. Eliot is such a force of nature and such a force of creativity as well. His musical presence is as big as him, he’s 6ft 6in and he’s such a towering creative bundle, and he brought things out of us which we didn’t expect. It brought new ideas and new melodies and new ways of looking at things. We’ve had conversations about doing more stuff together and I could imagine that could be a relationship that continues.”
Williamson feels that Matthew Wilson, in particular, has come into his own on this album – “His guitar-playing is another level,” he says – but he also senses that the whole band has benefited from playing on festival stages and venues such as The Piece Hall in Halifax and Scarborough Open Air Theatre. ”We’ve really got used to those big audiences and going on tour and playing to packed out rooms.
“I think all that experience has finally come out and made us...I don’t want to say believe in ourselves more because that make us sound like we doubted it, but we’re definitely believing a lot more in what we’re doing and who we are as a band than at the start. I think a lot of bands are chasing their 15 minutes of success and actually, we don’t need to do that. We play these big stages and we sell enough albums and we get to go out on tour. We don’t have to chase this overnight sensation because it doesn’t really exist at the end of the day.”
What In The World is out now. Apollo Junction open for Doves at The Piece Hall, Halifax on Saturday and they are doing an out-store for Crash records at the Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds on Monday. https://www.apollojunction.com/