Real Estate discuss new album ‘Daniel’ and a 15-year career: “We’re just getting started”
On what would typically be considered a mundane Tuesday, a day often seen as unremarkable, I found myself headed to Hoxton to meet indie mainstays, Real Estate. They were in town for a performance at London’s Rough Trade East that evening, showcasing their new album, Daniel. This marks their sixth release in a career spanning 15 years, during which they have firmly established themselves as one of the most influential contemporary guitar bands.
Released on February 23rd, the record emerges as a strong contender for Real Estate’s best work yet. It sees the band returning to musical basics while, somewhat ironically, pushing beyond their comfort zone by collaborating with country maestro Daniel Tashian in Nashville. Like their previous albums, including 2020’s underrated The Main Thing, which regrettably faced overshadowing due to the onset of Covid-19, this latest offering is a refined body of work. Frontman Martin Courtney’s songwriting remains as sturdy as ever, and the band explores new territories.
After a brisk walk up Hackney Road, I sat opposite Courtney, who was quickly refuelling on a small croissant after a busy morning. Normally, catching an artist in such a flurry of interviews and other industry requirements might have been fraught, but not today. The band’s leader seemed relaxed, and the conversation was off without a hitch.
“I’m feeling conflicted,” Courtney chuckles pensively. “I’m super excited for the record to come out. I’m really happy with it. I’m excited to have a chance to share it with people, which we didn’t really get the last time because the last record we put out was in February 2020. We had to cancel everything, which was a bummer and a big letdown. I don’t think I realised how much getting to tour and play the songs for people and talk to them after the show every night was so wrapped up in the whole process of making a record until we didn’t do that. So, I’m so excited to be able to do that with this record and see what songs start to stand out. It’s always like, you think you know what the singles are, but then there’s the weird fan favourites that emerge, so that’ll be fun.”
Daniel is a fascinating record because there are songs that point to a new direction, such as the baggy-inflected closer ‘You Are Here’. There are also tracks like ‘Flowers’ that have a vintage Real Estate feel due to the exquisite lead guitar line. All this amounts to a record that signifies the band’s maturity, a group confident that their essence will remain intact no matter what they welcome into their wheelhouse.
“When I wrote it, I thought it sounded like Tom Petty,” Courtney explained. “We were joking, saying it sounds like Shania Twain or something, in a cool way, obviously, but it’s got this sort of Heartland thing that I was really not going for, but then it just kind of emerged.”
As the band’s last album, The Main Thing, came out four years ago, and Courtney also released his brilliant second solo effort, Magic Sign, in 2022, I wondered if the time away had given them a different perspective on their career up to now. Understandably, various factors changed the band in this period.
“I think making that solo record reprogrammed or reset the way I approached songwriting,” Courtney replied while wiping away the croissant crumps. “Having done that, I didn’t really take it as seriously as I had been taking the past few Real Estate records that I made. I felt like songwriting was getting increasingly like trying to one-up myself and seeing how complex I can get, trying to come up with new chord progressions and try new things. Making the solo record, I was just having fun, doing what came naturally, I guess,” the Real Estate leader noted.
Clearly, the band are more comfortable with themselves than ever before. This also fuelled the desire for more simplicity on Daniel. Their recent efforts have made their sound more intricate in a bid for artistic viability. However, they’d seemingly scratched that itch and it was time for a change of tact. Courtney maintained that this was a product of the notion that the band “don’t really have anything to prove at this point”.
He adds, “We also worked extra super hard on the last record and felt like it was this big special album. We’d been a band for ten years; it was our fifth album, and we just felt like that record needed to be our best album ever.”
I mentioned to Courtney that I first came across the single ‘Water Underground’ while listening to Radio 6 and loved its refined sound. At that point, I didn’t know they were making a return. As we discussed the track, bassist Alex Bleeker, who had been in another interview, came over to the table and added: “It feels like a comeback record, even though we never went anywhere. There’s a kind of wisdom in the simplicity of it.”
Pointing to how Real Estate aimed to strip away as much stylisation as they could, Courtney noted that he almost exclusively plays acoustic guitar on the record, with a touch of piano and organ added for good measure. This was a manifestation of the band dressing the songs differently. Bleeker maintained that all the instruments are “serving a purpose” and that there’s a meditative simplicity to the new record, where the quartet stripped themselves back to their essence.
Given that the group have such an extensive history behind them, I wondered how they feel Daniel stacks up against the previous work, an oeuvre which includes some of the finest indie records of the past 15 years, whether it be their 2009 self-titled debut or 2017’s In Mind.
Courtney contended that their latest is their best to date and drew a spiritual connection between it and their influential 2014 effort, Atlas, a record containing staples such as ‘Talking Backwards’ and ‘Had to Hear’, which occupies a specific nostalgic mental space for many of us, not just the band. He said: “I do think it’s our best one; we’ve gotten better at making records, and we’ve learned things over the years. But I think this album, to me, is most similar, spiritually, to our third album, Atlas, because the way we made it is similar. We really rehearsed these tracks, and there’s not a lot there other than us; we went into the studio and just did it.”
The band live-tracked Daniel in Nashville during their nearly two-week stay in a process similar to Atlas. Courtney revealed they had almost 20 songs for the 2014 record, and because they had little time then, they had to go full throttle with the recording, and many of them didn’t make the cut. On the other hand, 2017’s In Mind was captured within a two-week time frame, just like its predecessor, but as they only had ten songs, they spent more time on them, allowing for more ornamentation.
Bleeker, listening intently, explained that over the past couple of days’ worth of interviews, it had constantly come up that Daniel might be Real Estate’s best effort yet. “So, I think that means that at least there has to be a perception that it could be ranked among them,” he starts this trail of thought. “I keep finding myself thinking this thing of best is so subjective, and there is no best record. I think you’re always reacting to the record you did before, like, ‘Our last one was wrong because of this, and this one is right because of that’, which is what we were doing the last time we talked about our last record.”
He laughs: “But there will be folks like, ‘Oh, have you heard Main Thing? It’s like the Covid record. It’s the weird one. It’s the Tusk to Daniel’s Rumours, or whatever.'”
There’s a salient point beneath the joke, though. For many fans, an artist who has put out many records over the years will have a definitive one or two releases that pip the rest in significance. The bassist says that up until this point, and probably even now, 2011’s Days and Atlas are the two that stand out for themselves and the fanbase, as they occupy a “heralded space” that it’s not possible to recreate due to the times being so different.
However, as there is a direct reference to Neil Young’s album Harvest Moon in Daniel, his point lay within. Many posit that Young’s best period was in the 1970s with efforts such as Harvest and After the Gold Rush, but Harvest Moon, a record from 20 years later and a much different cultural time, stands out as one of his finest to date. Bleeker believes greatly in Real Estate’s new LP and hopes it can live in the same cerebral pantheon as their most cherished releases.
“Our Harvest Moon is gonna come in, like, 2038,” Courtney chimed in jokingly, but following his bandmate’s path, he had a sobering point to conclude with as well. “Dude, 15 years is a long time. It’s a long time for most bands. A lot of bands don’t make it this long, but then a lot of other bands do, like Neil Young,” he laughs alongside Bleeker. “What I’m saying is that in the course of a lifetime and a career, we’re just getting started. I don’t need to think about ‘We’re so far into our career…'”
