British rock duo Royal Blood blew up so suddenly in the wake of their self-titled debut album, released in 2014, that they found themselves unprepared for just how in-demand they had become.
Every time their tour looked set to conclude, drummer Ben Thatcher recalled in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, another opportunity came up. Want to support Metallica in Brazil? “OK, let’s just do that one.” Want to open for the Foo Fighters? “Let’s do that one.”
The ride was fun, but Thatcher and bandmate Mike Kerr eventually knew it was time to take a break, difficult as that might prove.
Royal Blood<br>Opening for Queens of the Stone Age<br>When • Monday, Oct. 9, 8 p.m.<br>Where • The Great Saltair, 12408 W. Saltair Drive, Magna<br>Tickets • $39.50-$45; Ticketfly
“We were continually just getting offers to do things. … And it just went on and on. Eventually, we did finally wrap it up — we’d been on the road for 2½ years,” Thatcher said. “And when we went back home, it was mildly disconcerting doing things like taking your rubbish out to the bin for the dustman to collect. Just things like that. But it was also really necessary and great to catch up with some friends and just be based at home and not be based out of a suitcase and whatever.”
Normalcy proved appealing for less than a month.
“After about three weeks we were both like, ‘That’s it,’ and we were ready to get going again,” Thatcher said with a laugh.
Royal Blood have been going “pretty much nonstop” ever since. They soon set about crafting their sophomore effort, “How Did We Get So Dark?” which was released in June, and are now supporting it by opening for desert-rock stalwarts Queens of the Stone Age, including a show this Monday at The Great Saltair in Magna.
The concert was originally slated for the 2,500-capacity Rockwell room at The Complex in Salt Lake City, but was moved to the 4,600-capacity Saltair due to, well, high demand.
Having extra attention focused on them has become no less surreal, Thatcher said.
“It was strange. The day-to-day had become like, ‘Wow. Really?’ But it became so normal quite quickly that it was only when we took a break that we were able to sit back and kinda go, ‘Wow. S---. We just toured with the Foo Fighters.’ Or, ‘We met Jimmy Page.’ Those are the kind of highlights that, in the moment, you don’t necessarily think consciously about. It’s all been a little bit mad,” he said. “I don’t know … I don’t think we ever expected things to go, perhaps, this quickly.”
Of course, “quickly” is not necessarily a word that applied to making the follow-up album.
A good deal of the initial interest in the band stemmed from the knowledge that such gigantic sound was being generated by just two men, and, further, the discovery that Kerr’s colossal, eviscerating riffs were the product of playing a bass guitar through an array of amps and effects pedals, rather than on a standard six-string.
So Royal Blood were meticulous in trying to ensure “How Did We Get So Dark?” didn’t merely replicate its predecessor.
“I think we just wanted to have it feel like a progression. It was never an intention to go and make the first record again, to make Part 2 of that. We wanted to push ourselves and try a few different things. We worked in different keys, we did some interesting things playing around with the vocals. Really, the songwriting, we just wanted to make it a bit more groovier, a bit more sexier, more darker,” Thatcher said. “The process went on probably a minute longer than we’d have hoped for, but we were pretty sensitive in terms of what we were gonna put on this record and what made sense in order to get it right. So we spent a lot of time writing, spent a lot of time writing in different places, getting inspiration from the locations — we went to Nashville, a lot of time we were in Brighton, our hometown, we did a lot of stuff in London, in Brussels, where we went to record. I think it was more about feeling like it was a step in our maturity had been added, that we were on to the next phase.”
Thatcher is particularly proud that some of the hip-hop undertones he brought to the table have caught listeners’ attention.
“For me, personally, on drums, it felt like it was almost some mad collaboration at some point that I expected to come from marrying up those two worlds. That’s exciting — it’s nice to know that people have caught on to that, ’cause, yeah, yeah, there are big riffs and it is a big rock record, but we didn’t wanna make it so linear that it would be as specifically defined as that,” he said. “I think to have those other influences come out in flourishes people recognize is great and leaves us in a position where we’re moving forward. It’s an exciting time — we’ll see which way we go next.”
He conceded that, in between gigs playing with QOTSA, there have been a few ideas already tossed around for potential future use.
Which is not to say they have any specific grand plans as yet.
“Not at all, not at all. No. We’re kind of at that stage where we might be recording something on an iPhone in soundchecks, or jamming some sort of riff, seeing if some jam might stick. Basically recording things that are popping up,” Thatcher said. “We’re trying to use this time on this Queens run, with the mobile studio on the tour bus, to firm up a few ideas. But it’s early, early days yet.”
Early enough, anyway, that it may prove only mildly disconcerting to treat those snippets as rubbish to be put in a bin for the dustman to collect.