Austin, Texas’ SPEAK is an art rock band with versatile and monumental music. The band composes sweet and seductive songs, such as the single “Gates,” that sweep the listener right off of his or her feet. Even Ellie Goulding endorses it.

Gearing up for Tuesday’s release of the brand new LP, Pedals, SPEAK is fresh off of an appearance at last weekend’s Firefly Festival and just wrapped up a tour with Gemini Club and The Griswolds. Pedals is a gripping and emotional record, while not diluting any of the artistic effort in the process. Parts of Pedals are visually stimulating, beautiful and moving, while other parts are sonically jaw-dropping. This band is a must-listen for your summer.

Jump on board now — it’s safe to say SPEAK is moving fast. Check out an Under The Gun exclusive interview with SPEAK’s Troupe Gammage by clicking the “Read More” button now.

Hi, Troupe. Thanks for the time today. You dropped a lyric video for “Peaks” last month. I really enjoyed it. Can you tell me a little more about that video?

We are actually doing all of our own video stuff, which was sort of unintentional. When we were on tour we brought a little camera with us and started getting into that as a tour occupation [laughs]. The “Peaks” video was just some crazy lights in downtown Austin at night edited and manipulated in strange ways.

Talk to me about the new record. What do you think has changed since your last release?

It’s hard to say. Honestly, I feel like the context in which this album is coming out is so different, in terms of the outside world and for us internally. It’s hard for me to even draw comparisons. I think we’re all a lot more satisfied in this album, for sure. We’re a lot more confident with our place in the world and with who we are as writers and musicians and everything. I think we have a lot of anticipation. We are excited, and also anxious to see how everything goes. We’re so proud of the album. We’ll see, fingers crossed.

Where were you pulling your biggest influences from for this release?

The writing process has been a very lengthy thing. For the bulk of this recording process, which was the past year or so — internally it had to do with us trying to find who we were. We all had a lot of self-discovery going on from being on the road and the stress of having what you feel is you being creative turn into a business. Trying to focus back in on the creative side of the thing is difficult for us. A lot of the record is us re-discovering just making music and not worrying about demographics and markets and all that kind of stuff.

With that being said, how do you try to balance the business side of your art without giving in to things you may not agree with?

I think what we’ve ultimately discovered is we’re just not a band that can play by the traditional rules very well. We realized on this record that the best business decision we could make was to be 100 percent artistically true to ourselves — just be that kind of band — weird music and weird videos. If you have an uncompromised album, then you can promote it and you can feel comfortable. Th work itself is uncompromised, in my mind. We didn’t have to sacrifice anything artistically.

Where’d you go to produce the record?

It was all done here in Austin. We basically did 100 percent of it ourselves. I have a little home studio and we slaved away mixing, mastering and engineering and everything. We weren’t totally experts at first but we worked our way up to being competent.

Was there any internal struggle with doing the record yourself?

Our manager’s the one who suggested us to do it ourselves, and in retrospect he vastly overestimated my ability as a mixer, or he was willing to let me suffer [laughs]. Either way, I respect him for it because he just threw me into the trenches and I had to do some pretty difficult soul-searching to come up with any decent results. But really, it’s extremely difficult, I think. We had to talk…a lot. Ultimately, we got really good at communicating without stepping on people’s toes or being insulting. It took a long time. Because we didn’t have a budget or timetable–we were able to do it ourselves. If there were either one of those or there was pressure to get it done or a bank account being drained somewhere I don’t think we could have gotten the results we needed.

Do you think not having a deadline made the process last a bit longer than it normally would have?

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that the songs were even ready to be recorded at a certain time. Everything came together organically. It couldn’t have come together any other way and I’m not sure we would have been as satisfied with the results if we would’ve just gone into the studio and had a producer come in and whip-crack it all together.

Were you putting any extra pressure on yourself because you were playing multiple roles in the process?

Oh, yeah [laughs]. That was definitely the most strenuous activity that I undertook on this record. The worst was when there was a deadline in the mix and it had to be delivered. At the time, I just didn’t know what to do and there’s only so much your ears can take. You start getting to a point where you just cannot hear any more. It was pretty brutal.

What are you most excited for people to hear?

“Gates” was a pretty big one because that was the oldest track on the record. It’s relieving that it’s out there in the world now. Honestly, it’s the stuff that we’ve barely even heard — the stuff that we did at the very end of the recording process. There’s a song called “Trials” that was brought on by another band member and we just did it all in the last week of the recording process. We haven’t lived with it as long so it’s still fresh to us so I’m excited for that — for the world to hear something kind of in the same context as us. We lose perspective on stuff that’s been around for like five years but this has only been around for five months so we’re kind of hearing it with the rest of the world. I’m excited to hear what the world thinks.

What else can we expect from SPEAK this year?

For now I’m just describing it as the “yellow brick road.” Just stay out and travel the globe promoting the record. We’re excited to just really be out playing shows for hopefully a year or more and get to live that for a while.

Thanks for the time and good luck with the release!

Thanks a lot!

Interview written and conducted by Matthew Leimkuehler (@callinghomematt)
Pre-order Pedals here.
Stay in touch with SPEAK by connecting to the band on Facebook and Twitter.

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