“You Say I’m Too Much, I Say You’re Not Enough” is the debut album by the alternative welsh band Estrons, and two days after the release, I talked with Rhodri, the guitarrist, right after an intimate and energetic live in-store performance in Rough Trade Nottingham and chatted about the new album, touring and aliens
You guys have been touring a lot, how’s that been?
It’s been great! Just came back from a european tour, it’s good to be in cities I’ve been to before. We were here in Nottingham last time with Garbage, which was fantastic, it was a good match for us and now we’re doing an in-store tour, busy.
How was playing with Garbage? Have they always been an influence on you guys?
Definitely! I remember the first time I saw Shirley Manson in a music video in a really cool, pink, neon-ish mini-dress. It was so different from the rock and the grunge at the time, so like, loud rock music can have pop sensibility and that’s pretty much what we’re doing so it was a match made in heaven and she’s been fantastic to us, they’ve all been.
You played with Pussy Riot too
Yes, we did a residency with Pussy Riot in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and it was awesome, lovely guys. Pretty crazy stories that they have, it’s important for people to hear their voice in an age like this in Russia.
The album just came out, I want to talk about the writing process.
The album was songs that we’ve written over the past three years that we felt were good enough to put together and embodied us to where we wanted to go. So it wasn’t in one stretch that we wrote it together it was kind of wrote in pieces in years of touring, writing and recording. Some of the songs are really new, Killing Your Love was written a week before we went in and Aliens is perhaps the first song we ever wrote together and it feels like that song wraps up what we are as a band, especially as the title of the album comes from the lyric of that song. So it’s a bit mixed to be honest. For the next record I guess we would be probably going away and just trying to write off that time period.
I was just gonna ask about the song Aliens, because Estrons means Aliens, right?
Yes so Estrons is an anglosized form of “strangers” or “aliens” in welsh, which is out first language. So we were always kind of outside this a little bit because we were in communities in Wales where we would listen to heavier music so we always felt like a little bit outside of the welsh language scene.
Will we see a song in welsh in the future?
At some point we were singing in english and welsh, we don’t do that anymore although I would like to. I think a couple songs we’ve written recently are in welsh.
Do you prefer shows or festivals?
Personally I prefer shows, I like sweaty hotboxes full of people just rumbling around. And when you’re playing big stages in festivals and the wind catches the sound the wrong way, it kills the vibe a little bit. You never know when you’re gonna get a good sound on an outside festival, but obviously I love festivals, right? Who doesn’t?
I love the album’s artwork, how’d you guys come up with that idea?
It’s kind of a mashup of a couple of things, it portraits opposites like fire and ice. One is something with a lot of action on it so we had a little boy and we threw a water balloon at him and blew up on his face and we’ve got a volcano on the other side and that’s a represettacion of the music and chaos. We wanted something that was immediate and visually portraits what one can experience when listening to our records, I think it does the job.
What is your go to Halloween song?
Good question, I’ve gotta go with Michael Jackson’s Thriller, I love that video.
Do not miss Estrons on November 9th on The Bodega, Nottingham. It’s gonna be loud.
Featured image photographer- Imogen Forte, in interview image photographer- unknown
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