"The rulebook was miles away…" Royal Blood discuss their new 'AC/Disco' sound

Following the release of their absolute banger of a new single Typhoons last week, Royal Blood have opened up about what's to come from their upcoming third album of the same name.

The duo – Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher – joined Allison Hagendorf for the Spotify show Rock This to reveal how the pandemic affected the making of the follow-up to 2017's How Did We Get So Dark?, with the duo having to pack up and leave in the middle of recording once lockdown hit. But it definitely worked out for the best in the end…

"We ended up going home," Mike says. "After about a week I guess it just became really boring really quickly and, because I don't drink anymore, boredom arrives a lot quicker. I'm a big believer in boredom; I think is really, really important because I think for me, that's where creativity comes from. And that's kind of how I found music."

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The frontman explains that his boredom during quarantine led him to "pointlessly" start working on new music, with the mind that Royal Blood's new material was already in progress so these tinkerings wouldn't necessarily be for anything.

"And as a result of kind of making music from that perspective, it was just a lot more carefree and I was just being a lot more vulnerable with my lyric writing," Mike continues. "And the rulebook was miles away. And suddenly these songs started forming and Ben came down and then we were like, 'Hang on a minute, these are really, really good.' So by the time we were allowed to go back into the studio, we had like these three brand-new ideas that were just like, 'They're all going to be singles.' They were just, like, the best we’ve ever made. So from a kind of creative and musical standpoint, we had this whole experience of being forced to not being able to play live and being isolated has been really, really positive. And if anything, it's just thrown us deeper and got us more involved in the kind of recording process. It's been really, really good."

Using lead single Trouble's Coming as an indicator for what's to come from Typhoons as a whole, Mike says, "It definitely isn't like a cookie-cutter for the rest of the record, but it's definitely informative in the sense that it's the beginning of that concept, really, of what we were talking about, where Ben called it 'AC/Disco' in the studio."

Listen to the full podcast below:

Typhoons is due out on April 30 via Warner Records.

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