Review Fix chats with Rox, the lead singer of Shape of Water, who discusses the band’s origin, goals and current tunes.
Review Fix: How did you get involved in music?
Rox: We started a long time ago in our hometown in Italy. San Benedetto del Tronto is a small town where almost everyone knows each other. We formed a band called The Lotus in 2004. Over the following few years, the band had various members step in and out on drums and bass guitar, however we kept the band together and on track. In 2015, the band relocated to Manchester, UK in search of new music experiences and after splitting up permanently, we decided to form Shape Of Water.
Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?
Rox: The creative and writing process has drastically changed over the years. With Shape Of Water we had to take advantage of technology so we composed basically everything on our computers. We were lucky though because we’ve lived together for a long time (actually, even if we’re not living in the same house anymore, we now live a couple of blocks distance from each other so it’s basically the same, LOL) and that helped us create the songs and pre-produce them almost as they are now.
We’ve selected 14-15 songs and we sent them to Paul who helped us choose the best ones.
We recorded the album in Cornwall in two sessions and we couldn’t be happier of the result.
Review Fix: What inspires you?
Rox: We didn’t want to write a one-themed album but then, once we selected the songs that would have been in it, we realised they all had similarities with each other. They all deal with the misconception of human feelings, politics, and society.
Everything however, is related to us, it’s intimate; our personal feelings that relate to the outside world and try to look at it with an objective point of view. And we’ve come to the conclusion that there is no meaning in what humans do.
Review Fix: What does music mean to you?
Rox: This might sound redundant, but music is everything for us. It’s the reason why we wake up every morning and go to bed every night, it’s the reason why we chose to leave Italy and move to the UK, it influences every decision we’ve made in our lives since we started our first band and even before that.
The music and the band is the main topic of our conversations with ourselves, with our partners (sorry, we love you), with our families and friends.
We don’t like posting our lives every day on socials but trust us, we do a lot of work to let all this happen.
There’s a huge work behind the scenes such us setting all the hardware before playing live or before studio time, playing and improving our live performance, late night meetings to understand what we can do better and what we did wrong, video and photo shootings. It’s crazy all the time and effort we spend for music, but we will never complain about it because we love it and we love it when people appreciate it.
Review Fix: How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you?
Rox: It is very difficult to describe our sound because we actually don’t want to be targeted in a genre. Yes, you would say we play rock, but we do also have softer songs and some heavier ones.
We write songs completely surrounded by our emotions and feelings and we try to apply those feelings to the sounds and melodies we create. It’s music as a function of words, not the other way around.
However, if we had to pick some bands we’ve been inspired by, we would say Muse, Queen, Pink Floyd but also Rammstein, Audioslave, Black Sabbath or even Radiohead and Depeche Mode. It’s the variety of sound that makes us unique.
Review Fix: How are your live shows different from your studio work?
Rox: We believe our live shows are the best part of our music. Don’t get us wrong, our music is magnificent, LOL, but playing live is what we do best.
We always tend to be a bit more aggressive whilst on stage and the sound is way more overwhelming and louder, especially the guitars.
What differs us from the others is that we always try to make our live show different from the previous one, we try to involve people with choreography, video installations, light shows etc, even if the venue is too small to let us do all of this. And our fans do love that!
We can’t wait to come back on stage and play as soon as possible.
Review Fix: What inspired your latest single?
Rox: I wrote the lyrics several years ago when the world was about to face another war, created by the same powers that infect us every day with lies about their benevolence and them bringing peace and democracy all over the world.
Review Fix: What are your goals for 2020?
Rox: We’re living in the strangest time in ages so, first of all, we’d say that our main goal for 2020 is trying to be safe and continue doing music. Hopefully things will get better so, as we were already planning before all this madness came through, we will be playing again live first in the UK and then Europe by the end of the year, early 2021.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Rox: What’s next is unknown for the living creatures and we definitely can’t tell you what’s going to happen however, what we know is that everyone needs to try thinking less about what’s happening to the world right now and enjoy the little things that are still happening, like music.
So what’s next for us is our music: we will be releasing a new single in April and in May and finally, our greatest accomplishment ‘Great Illusions’ will be released worldwide for Eclipse Records on June 12, 2020.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?
Rox: Absolutely: watch our new video The World Is Calling Me on YouTube and if you like it, pre-order the album here https://ffm.to/shpf . Please stay home and stay safe and prepare for our live comeback very soon!
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