Last year saw Shale establish themselves as one of the most exciting young guitar bands in Wales, with single Work Dog becoming a radio favourite and a place in the final of the Green Man Rising competition giving them a slot at the festival. Fresh from the release of new EP With Love From and with a short UK tour next month, band members Samuel Hale and Austin Critcher hopped on a call with Emma Way to discuss the band’s rise.
You started Shale as a school project, correct?
Samuel Hale (vocals): Yeah, I think I was 16 when I recorded Green Light Red Light, which was the first song we put online under the name Shale. I sent it to a few venues in south Wales, and we started getting offers to play gigs, but the first recording I ever made was actually for school. I always had high hopes, of course, but I thought I might as well put it out there. I kept on getting better, and I found new people who liked the music and wanted to help.
How old were you when you started writing music?
Samuel: Probably about 15. I spent a couple of years writing before we released our first EP – which came out about a year ago and was made up entirely of songs I’d written over those two years, before we started playing as a band.
The new EP is a mix of those older songs and things I’ve written since we’ve been a band. We still play most of them live. They’ve evolved over the years as the band’s changed and different people have come in, so it’s always interesting to hear how the songs have developed. Our latest set is a nice mix of songs we’ve written together with our drummer [Will Fooks] in London and songs we’ve written individually at home.
Austin Critcher (guitar): It’s nice to be co-writing now as well, as you can come at it from different angles.
What’s the biggest difference between your old and new material?
Samuel: The songs I wrote when I was younger feel quite distant now; I don’t really remember writing a lot of them. I still like some of them, but they feel quite fixed because I wrote them so long ago now. It doesn’t feel like I can go back and change them.
With the newer songs – especially the ones we haven’t released yet – we’re still figuring them out. They don’t feel as set in stone. When it was just me and my guitar, I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off. I’d write something, and that was it. Now we can take a song on a whole journey before we do anything with it.
What do you find yourselves doing between shows when you’re on the road?
Samuel: We’ve got one of those whistle rockets, so every time we stop at a service station we end up throwing it around. By the end of it we’re launching it across the whole car park. And then we’re too tired by the time we get to the gig. We listen to loads of music too. We all want to be playing music, all the time!
Austin: It’s nice when Sam puts on 2010 pop bangers at 9am.
What kind of place were you in when you wrote new EP, With Love From?
Samuel: We wrote a lot of it when we first started playing together as a band. Instead of writing songs acoustically and building them up in the studio, we played them live before we recorded them. It’s really fun trying to get a song exactly right in a rehearsal space and then record it after.
Everything we’ve released over the past two years has been about giving people an idea of the kind of music we make and where we want to go. The next project feels different; we’re focused on making something really special with a load of time and effort put into it. We’re excited for what we’ve got coming up.
Shale, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Sat 5 Sept.
Tickets: £10. Info: here
words EMMA WAY
