Crows frontman James Cox on the new album ‘Reason Enough’, politics and lyrical nuance: “Is this one big joke?”
Since they first burst onto the scene, Crows have been fan favourites, constructing an ardent following in the UK and beyond. An excellent live outfit, whose first two albums, Silver Tongues and Beware Believers, captured their narcotic, punk-leaning grooves with great verve, they have always had a broad scope and seemed destined for big things outside the cult circuit. Their third album, Reason Enough, is another confirmation of this immense substance that sees the quartet fine-tune their sound, add a newfound sheen courtesy of Andy Savours, and keep pushing on.
I caught up with frontman James Cox over Zoom. He was in Portugal for a rare weekend break with his partner, hoping to catch the last of the summer before it quickly turned to autumn. It’s only been two years since the London band released their previous album, so from the outside looking in, it appeared that they had moved fast in burnishing their sound on Reason Enough.
Despite seeming like a relatively short turnaround since the last record, Cox asserted that it’s not been as simple as that. It’s demanding to get a record out when your band isn’t your full-time employment, and you’re not able to pay your rent doing it; he qualifies, “We still work full-time jobs, and do other things. So finding the time to write a full record, a good record, is quite difficult, unless you’re putting your all into and it is your be-all and end-all.”
Understandably, it felt like the band had started work on it a long, long time ago because they’ve been concertedly chipping away at it as well as leading lives outside of music. Furthermore, the group don’t tend to write on tour; they prefer to get together in a room and jam it out, starting with an idea that someone brings in, instead of just one songwriter shouldering the burden, meaning it’s hard to write on the road and they have a set approach.
Their process has produced many fruits, and it’s what makes Crows who they are. Cox maintains that the group writes best when they take a weekend away from the city where there are no distractions. They can go at their own pace and break the day up by going to get food or something similar rather than cramming it all in their small Homerton studio space on a Tuesday night after work when they’re all knackered.
It will never not be shocking that established bands such as Crows still have to finely balance work and music, a job itself. “It’s strange how normalised it is,” Cox says, before commenting that having a work/life balance is not conducive to making any a decent wage out of a band, as touring and playing live is really the only way to do it now.
To work on their third album, and as a deliberate effort to mix things up, Crows swapped their Homerton studio for a former nun’s convent in Stroud, Gloucestershire. While being in such a space is perhaps the most Crows thing the band could do, taking this time away from the city offered a more relaxed approach, meaning they could refine their sound and explore new textures and tunings. Naturally, the relatively haunting setting played into this darker, heavier sound on Reason Enough, and when the band returned to London, they had more than enough ideas to finalise and take to the studio.
Pointing to the new space Crows are in and the perennial work/life balance struggle, Cox explains that they chose Stroud for more practical reasons, too. Bassist Jith Amarasinghe is originally from the nearby Cheltenham, so it meant his daughter could stay with his mum, and they could have no distractions and crack on with album three.
Alongside his vocals sounding massive in the empty church hall, Cox sensed another opportunity. “It was partly necessity, partly practical. It just worked out really well. When we were doing it, I was like, ‘This is going to look great on a press release,’ because it’s Crows, it’s in a crypt, it’s going to be fucking cool,” he laughs. Despite being in such an atmospheric environment, Crows didn’t experience any Black Sabbath-esque apparitions. “We were pretty well-behaved. We would write all day and then go home and play Monopoly. That’s the mid-30s Crows vibe now.”
Several aspects make Reason Enough feel like a band invigorated, and one of them is the explicitly political nature of some of the lyrics. While several of their older tracks have had a political nature, such as the excellent ‘Garden of England’ from Beware Believers, it certainly feels like their new one has a heightened political edge than the others.
Cox concedes that several people have told him the record is political, but he thinks otherwise. “I’ve not thought of this record as a very political record, just because there’s some quite deep personal stuff on it too, which I think has taken the forefront of my focus, especially the songs that we chose.” The band wrote around 15 tracks for the record, and five got cut, so Cox suggests he was considering the ones that didn’t make it on with this statement, but couldn’t be sure about this perspective’s origins.
He then explains the nuance behind his lyrics and the more general, everyday inspirations that being from such a strange little island offers. “I think with lyric writing, the ones that aren’t about weird personal stuff, I take from whatever’s inspiring me at the time, it might be watching a film, the news, reading the newspaper, whatever’s on Instagram, and I’ll see something, and it’ll stand out to me, and I’ll make a note of it. I’ve got like 100 fucking notes on my app that make absolutely no sense.” He’ll revisit the eclectic jottings later and build on the subject, refining it as he goes along.
However, Cox thinks much of Reason Enough came from the perennially depressing news cycle in the years before the election. “Boris Johnson to Liz Truss to fucking Rishi Sunak, it’s hard not look at everything and be like, ‘Is this just one big joke?’ The undemocratic process of it all was really grinding me. Because of how our political system is set up, there’s no room for anyone to do anything about it, which I think was driving me mad about it.” He then changes tact, “The more I think about it, it is more political“.
Reflecting on the record’s political aspects, Cox mentions that one of its highlights, the anthemic ‘Land of the Rose’, is mostly about a general dismay for where you’re from. He says you’re supposed to take some degree of pride in where you come from, and taking pride is a nice thing, but “it’s quite hard to take pride in something that you’re so ashamed of and embarrassed by.”
These feelings about Britain are where a lot of that particular track came from. Generally, though, the frontman likes to be “a little bit more nuanced” with his lyrics and is reticent to discuss them, “I quite like that mystique.” Most of the time, his songs are probably not about what you think they are.
Working with Savours also proved instrumental in refining the band’s sound. He “massively changed” their approach. Crows knew they wanted to take a different route, and although Cox accepts that it’s not as stark of a departure as some artists go on the third time around, they were specifically aiming to still sound like Crows but make it more “elevated.”
“I think elevated is the keyword here,” the frontman smiles. “We were like everything but elevated, Jith kept saying elevated. I was like, ‘Alright, everyone needs to stop saying elevated.'”
Regardless of the lexical discrepancies regarding the new sound, the band knew Savours would bring “a really shiny indie gleam” to the fore and, out of pure curiosity wanted to hear what that would sound like. His work is immensely forward and clean, and although Cox doesn’t like clean-sound records per se, Savours’ distinctive sound just feels more expansive, which has benefitted his band greatly. “He’s made it sound better than we wanted it to – better than we could have even imagined – and he’s a legend, a real nice guy,” the vocalist creases up.
In true form, Crows don’t know what direction they’ll go in with the next album; maybe it will be a hardcore album, or maybe it will be a straight-up indie record. They don’t know. What is certain, though, is that Reason Enough is an incredibly accomplished record that will surely boost their status further, and needs to be pushed fully before the fourth one takes shape. To be fair to them, this industrious nature has always been one of the quartet’s greatest advantages.
