TRACK BY TRACK: New Zealand Indie Outfit Mako Road On Their Brand New LP

Go To Bed

We wanted to have an intro that reflected the different feels of the whole album. When we first put it together it was intended to be an instrumental, but by the time we got to the recording studio we had managed to somehow turn it into a full song.  

Surfing On Mars

This is one we had in the works for a while. We wanted to write something kind of psychedelic and disco at the same time and this is what we ended up with. We wrote this with the intention of making it as fun for an audience as possible. 

Helicopter

This is another track we had cooking for a while. It was originally called Doobs In The Delica, affectionally named after CJs old Delica van that we tore around the country in during our early days touring. We wanted to capture the atmosphere of our live shows in the music video. So we shot it at a live show. Who’d a thunk? 

Velvet Pinata

Probably the chillest song on the album. We hadn’t quite finished this track by the time we got into the studio, so we did it on the fly a wee bit. But it went down sweet as. 

Don’t Keep Me Waiting

This is another we had cooking for a while before we did the album. We like to think of this track as an apology letter for making our fans wait ages for an album. Usually we are terrible at coming up with music video ideas, but it was rather easy to settle on a montage of waiting for things for this one. We try not to take the music video thing too seriously. As you might notice. 

Lost My Tongue

This one is definitely a bit more instrumental than what we’ve got on the album or what we’ve done previously. Rhian had some cool riffs and bass line ideas that we fleshed out into a jam. Didn’t feel the song needed many lyrics cause, ya' know, lost my tongue. 

Stranger Days

We wanted this to be the title track of the album because everyone has been through some pretty strange days the past couple of years. This one came together pretty smoothly. We leaned into our psychedelic and bluesy tastes a little harder here. We thought this track would suit animation and we’ve always liked that kind of stuff.

Anywhere You’d Like To Go

We wanted to finish the album on an optimistic note and thought this one has a nice message behind it. We weren’t sure how to end the song though and we were getting towards the end of our writing session. We settled on moving the chord progression up a full step and speeding up the song as well, which musically makes no sense and sounds rather terrible. But we decided to stick with it because writing an album is a big effort and at times you feel stressed or second guess yourself. So we decided not to take ourselves too seriously and released all our tension and frustration into the end of this song. The music video is a nice wee peek into our lives on tour. 

Stranger Days is out now. To check out the full album, have a listen via the player below.