Eades have been building something out of their northern encampment for a while now, but with their new EP, ‘Fight Or Flight’, they’re ready to leap into the unknown. It’s a five-track whirlwind that blends raw energy with lo-fi charm, all while capturing the emotional turbulence of finding your place in a world that’s constantly shifting beneath your feet.
Born out of late nights and long sessions at their beloved Bam Bam Studios, it feels like the evolutionary point for everything Eades have been working towards. As Harry Jordan puts it, “The EP is a journey of self-discovery and understanding of where we are today as people. We mixed together lo-fi recording techniques, 90s alt-rock guitar arrangements, 60s rock organs, playfully melodic bass lines, blown-out drums, and catchy vocals, all warped with tape machines and distortion units.” It’s a heady brew, to say the least.
From the carefree nostalgia of ‘Liquid Gold’ to the bittersweet self-reflection of ‘Constantly’, ‘Fight Or Flight’ is Eades at their most honest and raw. It’s also a farewell of sorts — the last music to be recorded in Bam Bam Studios before its relocation and refit. But don’t think for a second that Eades are slowing down. If anything, they’re gearing up for something even bigger.
As Eades take us through the making of ‘Fight Or Flight’, track by track, they’re a band promising big things to come in the future. “We’ve been able to take a new approach to our recording process,” Harry enthuses, “and with that, we’ve developed a new sound for our second album that we can’t wait for you to hear!”
Fade Away
Tom: ‘Fade Away’ is the Eades sound distilled into a pop record, or as pop as our sound could possibly be. It’s a reflection on not making a dent in life socially or culturally, making peace with normality and accepting that you’ll eventually fade away to be forgotten, but enjoying the ride nonetheless. Complacently enjoying life and living in the moment to a degree that potentially has a negative effect on the future.
Dan: ‘Fade Away’ is definitely new territory for us as a band. It’s not typical Eades, not having as much distortion to hide behind, but I think that’s why we liked making it so much. It felt a bit more exposed to what we’re used to, making it really fun to make. Tom (O’Reilly) did the classic guitarist thing of writing a really fast and annoying kick pattern, to which I said ‘hell nah’ and simplified it, god I hate that guy.
Harry: After putting it out I realised the bridge and outro is like Eades doing a Queen-style bit. Minus the opera training that is.
Liquid Gold
Tom: I wrote ‘Liquid Gold’ during COVID. I suppose it’s no surprise I had a look back at some fond memories of leaving a friend’s house hungover, making my way through the blinding height of summer, passing friends in a beer garden or a park and joining for a half that became many more than the one half. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was a reflection on longing. I was yearning for simplicity, companionship, and a time before uncertainty. It’s a simple song with a simple message: join your mates for that drink in a beer garden; you never quite know when the next pandemic might be.
Dan: We’ve been playing this tune for a while live now; there’s just something magic about five dudes singing ‘Ooh La La La’ together. We first started playing it on our support tour with Wunderhorse last year; it seemed to get people going, so we’ve kept it in ever since.
Harry: It’s just a light-hearted, fun song that always seems to go down well live. A bit of an earworm!
Constantly
Harry: I think this was the first song written for the EP. I’m pretty sure I wrote it a couple of weeks after the first album was finished. Lyrically, it’s pretty raw, and I was quite nervous about it coming out as it touches on a few stories and experiences I’ve had with some people close to me dealing with issues with drugs and alcohol. I also think it’s the kind of story that a lot of people I know have experienced. It’s also about my desire to get away from that whole scene and world, to be honest. Funnily enough, the chords were originally voiced in Open G tuning when I wrote it, which Keith Richards uses a lot. It seems quite appropriate now, in hindsight! I guess, in a nutshell, ‘Constantly’ refers to that cycle of self-sabotage many artists become beholden to and my personal desire to break away from that scene.
Loose Cliffs Edge
Harry: I think this is my favourite track on the EP. The song came from a time spent on holiday in Australia with my now wife, Sophie. I decided to go for a walk along the seafront and ended up sitting, looking across the beach, watching the surfers, listening to music, and taking it all in. Sophie was sat on the beach, minding her own business, and being there with her filled me with a huge sense of contentment. It made me think how much life had changed for the better with her in it, and I started writing the lyrics there and then. After that, I started to enjoy life at a slower pace, becoming a lot more mindful to enjoy where we are at in life and all the stages along the way. I guess the big ending is meant to feel like this huge moment of realisation.
Fight Or Flight
Tom: Structurally, I wanted to write my own version of ‘Third Outing’ by The Cribs. I grew up going to Cribs shows, and that was a song that always blew me away, screeching to a halt while everyone grabbed their mate to sing the slow chorus, with it quickly firing up the mosh pits again for the much more energetic verses. It’s a song about friendship and a love that never quite happened. It’s about dipping your toes into the honeymoon phase but ultimately being left with a fight or flight response that marks the end, without ever finding that comfortable middle ground.
Harry: The track came from a demo Tom wrote in his parents’ conservatory. It had a really interesting sound to the demo due to the nature of how he recorded it. It was super lo-fi, and his performance was brilliant. It has an amazing rawness to it and an energy that you can’t really recreate—that moment when a song first comes to you, and you really feel the emotion of what you’re saying for the first time writing it. So after a lot of convincing, I managed to persuade Tom to keep the chorus and intro from the original demo, recorded with one crappy microphone in his parents’ front room. We then decided to contrast this with the verses being really full and pumping. For the final section of the song, we took Tom’s demo recording and individually layered loads of noise, harmonies, drums, bass, etc., on top to make this really intense maelstrom of noise over a really beautifully lo-fi acoustic recording.
Dan: You can hear his niece singing along in the background at the end! Singing along to a completely different tune, that is… Harry kept this in the mix, and we built the entire ending around that original demo – a bit of low-fidelity rawness at its finest.
Eades’ new EP ‘Fight Or Flight’ is out now.
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