The Amazons bring tour for How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me? to Hampshire | Interview

Frontman for the British rockers Matthew Thomson recalls: ‘It was one of our first big support tours. I think it was the first venue on the tour, so it was the biggest venue we'd played in the UK at that point, and we were like: Oh. My. God! we're going to get lost out here – this is crazy.

‘It's amazing to come full circle and do it on our own terms.’

The four-piece return there on Tuesday (October 11), touring in support of their recently released third album, How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me?

In fact when Matthew speaks with The Guide via Zoom, they are in a ‘non-descript service station’ on their way to get the ferry over to Ireland for the tour’s start. It’s their first headline tour since 2019.

‘It would be doing a disservice to say we're merely looking forward to it,’ says Matthew, ‘it's so much more than that! This is what we do this for. Making records is great, but to get out and meet people and communicate with people and soak up the energy, it's such an incredible thing that we are allowed to do.’

While their first two albums dented the top 10 of the charts, How Will I Know…? made a career-best number five on its release last month.

After two long years of lockdowns the band wanted to reconnect with people through their music. The result is less heavy-sounding and contains more obvious anthems than second album, Future Dust.

As Matthew explains: ‘A lot of these songs, we wanted to celebrate and custom-make the music for communal experiences. It's something we've always done, but this was done with even more purpose and a real focus.

‘A lot of it was recorded in lockdown when we couldn’t play shows and that was a fundamental part of our existence. That was really on our minds.

‘It really crystallised what we wanted to do and the kind of music we wanted to make. It was a challenging time for everyone for a myriad of reasons, but it really crystallised who were are as a band.’

As for the changing sound from their second album Matthew elaborates: ‘It wasn't like we had to prove a point, we were just making music from the heart and exactly how we wanted to make it. It was certainly less heavy and dark than the last record, but I feel like Future Dust was not really a record which was defining us in the long run, it was just a part of our sound we wanted to explore at the time.

‘Even when we were finishing recording some of the stuff on Future Dust, in the studio, I would say to the boys, this is the darkest and heaviest we're going to get, I have no interest in taking it any further. A song like Fuzzy Tree, that was like: “We've found our limit, I don't want to go any further”, and we didn't.

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‘Hopefully people understand Future Dust, the more distance we have from it, it's place in our discography and as part of our creative path.’

Another major influence on Matthew’s lyrics for the new album were his long-distance relationship with his girlfriend who lives in Los Angeles, and how the pandemic enforced their physical separation.

‘It's something we'd not really had in The Amazons with our lyrics before. It was essentially a scattergun approach to like the themes, this was a lot more focussed in what I wanted to talk about. There were so many facets and dimensions to the experience that it took a whole album to piece it together and work it out. Ultimately it's a means of me working the situation out in my head, but also a means of communication between me and that person. Writing a song is just another way of communicating on top of quite limited language.

‘The thing with time zones was nothing new to us because we've always been long-distance, but what was difference was the length of time we spent apart from each other. It was hard.’

On a more practical level this meant Matthew spent a lot of time trawling Facebook groups with names like ‘Couples separated by travel bans’ or ‘Love is not tourism’, swapping stories and tips.

‘All these countries were changing their policies pretty fluidly, so you'd get these windows of opportunity to visit Mexico, for example, so we took it, we spent a couple of weeks in Mexico at the end of 2020, which meant I could enter the United States legally – I’d effecitvely quarantined in Mexico. Then I spent a couple of months there with her. It was crazy – but it provided a lot of inspiration!

‘We got a great album out of it – it's about squeezing something productive out of what was a challenging and dark situation.’

Tickets are £22.95, Doors 7pm. Go to academymusicgroup.com.