Relighting The Fire

“I’ve taken to it like a fish to water,” she says of parenthood. “There’s so much information now as a young woman becoming a mother, [so] it’s not like any of it was a great slap in the face. Yeah, it’s tough, yeah, at times it’s shitty, but for the most part it’s the most exceptionally glorious thing you could ever experience. If anything it’s been, I believe, a brilliant inspiration for the music.”

As well as fuelling her artistic pursuits, becoming a mum has also given Stein – and by association her bandmates – perspective, encouraging a healthier music/life balance. Because of this, what was once a sometimes laboured endeavour has now become a genuine release, allowing Howling Bells to rediscover the joy in writing songs together.

“In life, a lot of the time when you let go the most profitable work occurs, and I mean that in the artistic sense,” Stein clarifies. “Things tend to flourish when you let go of that control factor a little bit.”

Working off their impulses perhaps more than ever before, the quartet have steadied the ship with Heartstrings, following the hot and cold response given to their third record, 2011’s The Loudest Engine. Notorious bandwagon drivers NME hammered that album in a 2/10 review that insinuated Stein’s vocal was no longer “as hot as her”. With a 7/10 handed out for their latest long-player, there is some validation in the turnaround, as much as the frontwoman wouldn’t like to admit it.

“I want to say to you I couldn’t give a shit, I really want to say that, but c’mon, how can you not [care]?” Stein levels. “Imagine every piece you put out as a journalist was reviewed by ten people, and they pulled [your work] apart? So a lot of you is, ‘Go fuck yourselves,’ but a lot of you takes it in, because the nature of an artist is the sensitive person. The bits and pieces I do read [though], I take it way, way better these days than I [did] when we first started. Now I literally do take things with a pinch of salt, but it does go in.”

Stein goes on to add, however, that she doesn’t think the iconic British music rag is nearly as influential as they once were, admitting that the band were more interested in seeing what the blog world had to say about Heartstrings than any of the major publications.

“Most of the people I know that are in bands or listen to music don’t buy print magazines anymore, which is a shame, but they’re all about blogs. So we were stoked with a few online reviews we got this time – we [had] more anticipation for the online reviews rather than the print reviews.”

Written and recorded last autumn in Stein’s basement, Heartstrings was born from an explosion of ideas, a moment of time, the ten songs captured at London’s Assault & Battery Studios almost immediately after they were penned. The result is the most instinctive album Howling Bells have made, one which drifts along almost poetically, even though it’s stripped of all the fat.

“I didn’t realise how short the record was until somebody... some dickhead from I don’t know where wrote this spiel on the internet about how he wasn’t going to buy the record because it was only 30 minutes, and it was like, ‘Dude, isn’t the quality more important?’” Stein questions. “But people obviously have a lot of time on their hands.”

But no matter if some faceless haters hate or not, as a self-professed “huge fan” of short records, short live sets and short films, Stein stands proudly behind Heartstrings, Howling Bells’ musical kiss for fans and the industry.

“I want everything to be really succinct, tell a story and then finish, and hopefully leave quite a profound effect on you. I don’t like things to flounder,” she says. “The most immediate reaction I can think of in my head is in a relationship – it’s a lot harder to tell someone ‘I love you’ for the first time than have a four-hour conversation about how you feel about them. It’s the same kind of thing for us with the record; this is our ‘I love you’ to the music world.”