If You're A Black Mile From The Surface It's Time To Trust Your Instincts

For well over a decade now Andy Hull - frontman and founder of Atlanta, Georgia outfit Manchester Orchestra - has forged a reputation as a songwriter to be reckoned with; one who'll go to any length in the service of his craft. 

Setting out on his creative journey at a tender age, it was Hull's high-school musings that formed the basis of the band's early work, their 2006 debut I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child combining abundant hooks and thought-provoking narratives in a manner that placed them firmly alongside bands like Brand New and Death Cab For Cutie at the emotional, nuanced end of the indie-rock spectrum.

From there came a series of subtle reinventions: follow-up Mean Everything To Nothing (2009) increased the angst quotient to great effect, 2011's third full-length Simple Math found Hull delving deep into his own personal back story, while 2014's Cope was the sound of the band exploring the post-hardcore realms with raucous-but-rewarding results (they even released a companion piece, Hope, reimagining the same songs in stripped-down, acoustic mode).

Now this willingness to shapeshift and experiment has manifested in Manchester Orchestra's acclaimed fifth effort A Black Mile To The Surface, tying together all of the disparate threads of their past into one ambitious and cinematic quasi-conceptual piece. The songs are both literate and emotive, nestling amid grandiose structures and arrangements that took the band over a year to fine-tune in the studio, with Hull admitting that album's change in tone was completely pre-planned

"It was super-conscious," he concedes. "Cope was the last time I think I was comfortable enough to try and attempt a punk-rock record, what Manchester Orchestra's punk-rock record would be like. I really realised that I was at the last moment for my age that I could try that, I was 25 or 26, and just thought, 'You know what? This will just be really lame if I try this later'.

"That one was the 'rock record' because it felt so visceral and real, and I had a blast making that record and Hope, too: both of those albums coinciding with each other was a really great experiment to see all of the different places we could go, but it was also a cleansing of the palate. It was, like, 'Alright, these are all the places we actually now how to get to, what do we do next?', and then this [new album] came from that."

Hull also freely admits, however, that he wasn't precisely sure where he wanted to go until firmly ensconced in the project. "There were a couple of broad statements at the outset, like 'futuristic folk record' or 'folk soul rock record'," he laughs. "No, there was a lot of aiming for the unknown and aiming for something better than we knew how to achieve and working and working and working until we got close to that, or somewhere close to this unmarked goal. 

"So there was a lot of failing and a lot of adding on and subtracting - it was a just a really long process - and also just making sure that we weren't doing it for the sake of doing it, and making something that was just convoluted or pretentious. 

"That was a big fear of mine, I just didn't want it to seem like it was super-forced, like, 'Here's our intellectual album! We've grown!' We wanted to show that naturally and let the music speak for itself. But it was also about following instinctual ideas that probably would have been given up on in the past: instead of questioning everything we were like, 'Fuck it, let's do it!'"

And despite being rapt with the results, Hull recalls that the album's genesis proved occasionally unnerving. "The whole time we were aware that it was definitely going to make a better memory than an experience, and it totally did," he offers. "But a lot of it was just worry and anxiety, and hoping that we didn't screw up the whole thing, really. We just really cared about it a lot, and so - like with anything that you're really trying to get right - there's a lot of unknown about it and that's uncomfortable."