US-Approved Monks

The morning this interview took place, word came through that the video for the new Monks Of Mellonwah single, Neverending Spirit, lifted off their second EP, Neurogenesis, had been added to their regular playlists by the MTV Networks in the US. That came off the back of the boys winning Best Indie Rock Artists at this year's Artists in Music Awards in LA, and picking up a nomination for Best International Artists in the LA Music Awards.

“I'm not too sure,” Monks lead guitarist Joe de la Hoyde admits with regards to how it all came about. “Our manager was surfing the Internet and an opportunity came through his inbox about submitting to the Awards. We didn't really think… It's one of those things we sort of thought, 'Why not?' So we ended up submitting our song Neurogenesis, and they came back, loved it, they nominated us based on the song and on our social [networking] response. A couple of months later we'd been in contact with the guy who organised the event whose name is Mikey Jayy – he's host of some [online] radio show in LA [The Great Unknowns presents KGUP 106.5] – and he asked us to come and perform over there as well. It was awesome to say the least. We went over for ten days to play the one show – it was insane!”

Based around brother Joe and, on bass, John de la Hoyde and drummer Joshua Baissari, Monks Of Mellonwah started out with Will Maher on vocals but when he was obliged to drop out for a while, singer and guitarist Vikram Kaushik joined, and it was with him they recorded their debut EP, Stars Are Out, off which the track, Swamp Groove, managed to make AMRAP's top 10 most requested songs across community radio.

The new EP is different though, with Kaushik gone and Maher back in the fold. “As soon as Vikram had gone, we had to rethink our whole writing process,” Hoyde explains, Kaushik having been his co-writer in the band. “Me and my brother just started to take over it a bit more with the writing and concentrated more on that 'epic' side of us. I mean it was different from the word go. Vikram had a kind of r'n'b sort of soul voice where Will has this really deep presence kind of voice.

“The first EP, we didn't have many developed song ideas and we sort of went into the studio blind and our producer helped us quite a bit because we'd only been together a couple of months, where on the second EP we really had an idea of what we wanted to sound like and focused songs, that kind of thing. We had a young producer called Ryan Miller, who really gave us some freedom over what we wanted to do. The songs, they're all different, they'll all got something different to offer based on, yeah, a lot of different things.”

The band then took two tracks, the title and Neverending Spirit, and sent them to the States to be mixed by Grammy Award-winning producer Jeff Bova, whose credits include records for artists as diverse as Michael Jackson, Blondie and Iron Maiden. “We saw his ad online and we were happy with the mixes but not too convinced on a couple of things and considered getting them remixed – Neverending Spirit hadn't been mixed – so we thought we'd just chuck Neurogenesis over to see what kinds of differences we'd get – and we were really happy with what came out from that,” Hoyde chuckles.

“So we sent him the premix of Neverending Spirit to go nuts with.”