Up-and-coming British rock act Nine Black Alps is plotting a spring North American tour with Giant Drag and the Cribs, lead singer Sam Forrest tells Billboard.com. “We know both those bands really well, so that would be ace,” he says. An appearance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in late April in Indio, Calif., is “on my schedule, but I’m not sure if that’s confirmed,” according to Forrest.
Nine Black Alps will be out behind its full-length debut, “Everything Is,” due Feb. 28 via Interscope. The set has been out since last fall in the band’s native land, and in the ensuing months, a number of new songs have taken shape.
“Hopefully on the American tour we should get a few new songs out there,” Forrest says. “In England, we have to do hour-long sets on a headline tour, but our album is only 30 minutes long. We have to play B-sides and things nobody really knows. I actually prefer some of the B-sides to the songs on the album.”
Forrest says the time lag between the album’s American release has allowed the band to “correct all the mistakes we made the first time around in England. We were so new to it. We didn’t know what we’re doing. Now we can relax and hopefully take control and rely less on other people’s wisdom.”
Later this month, Nine Black Alps will be back in the studio to begin work on its sophomore album. “I’ve got tons of songs written — over 30, I think,” Forrest says. “Most of January we’ll be in our rehearsal space in Manchester, bashing things out and seeing what works and seeing what direction it takes. That’s the most exciting time for us — when you actually realize what you’re trying to achieve or how good you are.”
The band will return to the road Feb. 9, when a two-week U.K./Ireland trek kicks off in Belfast. Asked how closely he’s following the much buzzed-about new wave of young English acts that have emerged of late, Forrest says, “We don’t have much in common with them musically. I don’t really see any of them as our contemporaries, really. It’s based on geography rather than musicality.”
Source billboard.com.
