Apocalypse music on a Hip-Hop code
Meet our clients who trusted Mind The Wax to press their music on vinyl!
Lazy Habits is a band from London, UK that keeps alive the code of Hip-Hop through the use of live instrumentation. The result is a potent blend of contemporary and classic, with orchestral strains married perfectly with heavy hip hop drums and brooding bass-lines. They managed to achieve their own unique formula for success.
That formula has already earned them a lot of achievements, including the release of three acclaimed albums, a remix project, and a selection of singles and EPs.
The band have a thirst for collaborations too, as demonstrated with the inclusion of a full string section and a harpist on each album. There are also collaborations outside the band, with features on recent albums from Joe Publik and More Like Trees, as well as past alliances with Miss Baby Sol, Ambush Tactics, Dizraeli and The Hackney Colliery Band.
I had the chance and luck to personally meet them on 2018 at their concert in Krakow. It was a time when Mind The Wax was just starting with vinyl pressing services and Lazy Habits were looking where to press their debut album for first time on vinyl. That’s how a friendship and collaboration started!
Fast-forward to 2022, Lazy Habits dropped their third album “Vermillion Sands” and I had the honor to be trusted once again to bring the vinyl to life via Mind The Wax.
“I’m inspired by everything that surrounds me. We’ve always written apocalypse music so when people say that album feels like it was written for what happened over the last few years.. it wasn’t. Every lyric for this album was written before 2020. The general inspiration for the album, other than the general downfall of society, is the writing of J G Ballard. Both the Atrocity Exhibition and this album, Vermillion Sands, are based on books of short stories by him. I take the essence of each short story and use this emotion as the base feeling for each song, the collection of these together creates something whole with a different meaning.
With Vermillion Sands, a collection of disconnected stories set in the same dilapidated beach resort for the rich. The reflection of broken dreams, greed, solitude and the search for something actually real.”
“The production on the album is 99% live. We used an 8-piece brass section, including the introduction of French Horn and Tuba across the album.
We have always used live strings and for this album we were lucky to work with some of the best in the world. After originally talking to a quartet in LA, where we mixed a lot of the album initially in December 2019 with John Hendicott, we started to get affected by lockdowns.”
“We tried to move this to the UK and then that was cancelled too. We eventually reconnected with Lachlan Radford (More Like Trees, High Cross Society) who works with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, so we worked and recorded with him remotely.
During this time I had been stranded in Taiwan with all planes in and out of the country canceled. I landed some work composing and singing on a film and was working under an incredible composer called Lu Luming. With his help we put together a 13 piece string section, headed up by Lu Szu-Chien, that we got to use on CTRL and All Worked Out.”
“The features on the album are mostly all old family members we love working with. I never want to make an album that doesn’t have Miss Baby Sol on it. Everything about Baby is amazing and I love writing, working and performing with her, as well as just spending time in her company.
We also got to work with Joshua Idehen for the first time, despite knowing each other for over ten years and constantly talking about working together.. I think this will be the first of many things with him.
Also on the album is Joe Publik who was on the Atrocity Album, his tone and lyrics work perfectly on the song we worked on. Also on the album in young British/Turkish singer Onur, and there are also production bits with Nutty P and Benny Aves.”
The album is pressed on rose color, 140 grams vinyl and it comes on a 300gsm jacket cover and shrinwrapped.
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Vinyl pressing by Mind The Wax