We sat down with the amazing Shadows of a Silhouette at their sold out show in Derby the other night. (We also reviewed it, find that here). We chatted about their set that night, their plans for the future and the local scene. Check it out below!

How would you describe your sound?

Indie’s way too broad of a statement now. Some people include themselves in indie and they’re more like… there’s this shoegaze coming about now, and everything’s being branded as indie. We’re closer to rock. We have an indie lifestyle, to a certain degree. I’d say alternative rock. We’ve got a few songs that are heavier, we’re definitely not indie pop.

We do try to make each song a bit different from what we’ve done before. We’ve got a sound, but each song is different in its own way. Our motive is to keep making songs that we can’t play, practice them until we can play them, and then essentially we’ve made something we couldn’t come up with ourselves!

We are different to other indie bands as grunge does have more of an influence on us. We don’t follow what’s trendy, we just follow our own hearts and ears. We try to make something that sounds like our lives at the time.

What’s it like to be playing two back-to-back sold out hometown shows?

Brilliant! We spoke to the guy about putting gigs on here (Blessington Carriage, Derby) again. We came here and supported Public Eye with their two shows not long ago. I think it just shows that there’s an appetite for it. A lot of people may not have heard our music but heard about us and we present ourselves in almost a grungy way. We’re authentic, let’s put it that way. We focus on being ourselves, and the fact that we’ve sold these shows out while doing our own thing is a privilege. We just want to do more!

How would you guys say the scene is, currently?

It’s been driven underground, but it’s coming back. What goes underground will one day come back to the surface.

There’s a lot of great groups in Derby at the minute. And Derby’s never had that proper scene, but it’s always had the people. Derby’s always been a city of music listeners and lovers; people from Derby will go anywhere in the world to go and see music they love. It’s not a musical city like Manchester or Sheffield. But there’s something brewing, it’s definitely developing.

It’s good to see places like The Bless starting to get back into being a venue and taking gigs on. They took a bold move. Normally management in bars these days are a bit complicit and aren’t interested in the potential of the business that they’re in. I imagine it’s hard time for a lot of pubs and venues these days, but I have a remedy for that: get your fucking bands on!

We’re at an age now where bands are so caught up in streaming numbers, but I’d sooner sell out this place two nights in a row. I still think the best way to do it is to perform live.

It’s just so tough to break out. The people who know of us, I speak to them after gigs and everything. They love our music and are really passionate about it and it’s really inspiring. For me it’s more of a case of it being so impenetrable now to reach a wider audience. You’re having to deal with booking adverts for Tesla or vacuum cleaners, everything’s advertised at the same place: your phone. On the Internet. Everyone fights for that ad space and what it does is drowns everything out. When it was done face to face it almost felt less obstructed.

I heard you were working on new music, anything you can reveal?

We’re working on our debut album! We’re playing two songs tonight that are brand new. They’re pretty much studio ready so the next step after these live shows is to start getting back in the studio and getting these songs done. Getting some single campaigns and stuff.

We’re not not clued up and we don’t have the professional ability when it comes to selling out. That is a professional ability these days, believe it or not!

But now we do have management. It’s an outfit now. Exciting times ahead. Taking things to the next level professionally, from where we are. Social media wise obviously we still need to do our bit, but we can focus more on the music.

I think people will be surprised to hear that since 2019 we’ve already got 33 songs out. We recorded them off our own backs. There aren’t many bands at this level that have close to that. We’ve had to learn a lot of lessons from that. To try and save a bit of money the first time we went to the studio we recorded eight tracks in one day!

I assume it was a conscious decision to do a few singles and then an album?

Yeah! We’ve been thinking about it for a while. What I started to notice is… a lot of them may go unnoticed because we’re bringing out a lot of singles. When people will click on one of our artworks to go to the single it’ll have the one track there. They may assume that every one is like that, as they all come up in singles, while some are EPs with six tracks on them. So we thought did we have to go back and put it into a collection, so people know it’s there? People are in a rush when they’re on their phone so if it’s not right there, they won’t see it.

But then again it is hard to grab people’s attention for an album these days. But then again, who’s making decent albums? I think we’re ready for a debut album, that’s the next step. But you only do your debut album once, so we want to take our time with it!

And have you got a pretty busy rest of the year?

Festival season is coming up so we’re waiting to hear about some of that. We’ve been shortlisted for Truck Festival which is cool.

We want to see what we’re capable of at the minute with our live shows. There’s no use waiting for promoters to come to you. You’re better off building an audience. Now we have a professional involved and she’s gonna put it together for us. We know the places we want to play, we know what we’re capable of, but what we’ve neglected before is the social media side of it; getting the event known. But we’ve got s great photographer and all. And a great graphic designer. We’re building a team around us, and it’s what every band needs! It’s bringing our vision to life! We’re professional musicians, but we’re not necessarily professional beings!