With their pulsing mood music, Brighton’s Mirrors have embellished the current retro-synth pop sound with an added layer of darkness. Andrea Fox grabbed a chat with the band’s vocalists Ally and James at Loop Festival, to learn more about their new sound of pop-noir.
XYZ: You’re Brighton boys, so how far have you travelled to play today?
J: Round the corner!
A: About three minutes, we’re representing the Churchill Square area of town.
How does it feel to play a big Brighton venue like the Corn Exchange?
A: Yeah, it’s exciting, we’ve seen some really great acts up there, so it’s nice to join the club, as it were. Most recently we saw the Horrors – oh sorry, I should say Jarvis Cocker and the Horrors – but I enjoyed them more if I’m honest.
J: He’s a great performer, but we’re big fans of the second Horrors record.
You’ve already been compared to most of the ‘80s artists that even looked at a synthesiser (OMD, Depeche Mode, etc). Do you take issue with any of the comparisons?
A: I wouldn’t say we take issue, though we don’t agree with all of them. We have been compared to a lot of people, but obviously we’re doing our own thing.
J: I think we sound a little bit denser, there’s more stuff going on in the tracks and living in the 21st century we’re inevitably influenced by things around us at the moment.
How do Mirrors go about putting a track together?
A: The songs start quite traditionally with a riff, a lyric idea, or a melody and we use the studio as an instrument to put the song together.
J: Yeah, we layer stuff up like Lego blocks.
A: It’s not THAT like Lego blocks! A song manifests itself in many different ways before we’re happy with it and think it adheres to the Mirrors’ aesthetic.
Why did you come up with your own genre of ‘pop-noir’?
A: It’s a phrase we coined just because we felt we didn’t want the music we were making to be pigeonholed, so by labelling it ourselves we could have control over it.
J: We wanted to make sure we use the word ‘pop’ because we write pop music and it’s easy to forget that when we’re doing extra stuff around the music.
A: We just try to straddle that line of a pop song with a melody that you’ll remember into that ethereal otherworldliness of cosmic beauty!
And you attach a lot of meaning to the name Mirrors?
A: I think it’s just a short, sharp, word and we try to make clean precise music and the image reflects that and everything we do… oh, I can’t believe I just said reflects!
Mirrors’ debut single “Look At Me” is out now
myspace.com/mirrorsmirrorsmirrors
