London’s geekiest cool kids are on the verge of releasing their fourth studio album, One Life Stand, and are poised to show the world Alexis Taylor’s amped-up songwriting and the introduction of new sounds like Al Doyle’s flugelhorn. Previous records like The Warning and Made in the Dark produced hit after hit, and Joe Goddard says he is proud of this new addition to the repertoire and the quintet couldn’t be more excited to start performing. It’s been ten years of making addictive dance floor tunes and winning videos, and it sounds like these guys still have their priorities right. Before the holidays, URB spoke with Goddard to hear the good word.

URB: Let’s talk about the new record. What’s the album process like? You guys have been in the studio many times. Do you go in there knowing what sounds and lyrics you want or do you go in and play around?
Joe Goddard: I think it’s a mixture of those things. A couple of the tracks on this record were written before we went into the studio, so you know, the words and music, the structure are already kind of done and we just went into the studio and recorded them nicely. Tracks like that were “Hand Me Down Your Love” and “Slush”—

URB: I love “Slush.”
JG: Yeah, yeah. Alexis [Taylor] kind of wrote that basically by himself. You know, I didn’t really have a hand in writing it, we just kind of mixed it and added a few kinds of instruments. Al [Doyle] learned to play this instrument called the flugelhorn, and recorded that on that track, so most of it was done already. It was fixed in stone: Alexis knew what he wanted that song to be like. Other songs came together as we worked on them in the studio and they originated from music that I wrote at home in my bedroom and then I brought them to the studio and we kind of worked up a structure and recorded music together.

URB: It seems rare for people to work together in the studio. Do you e-mail back and forth or do you need to be together in one room to bounce ideas and sounds off each other and work off that dynamic?
JG: Hmm. Alexis and I use that method of e-mailing. For instance, on the track “Keep Quiet,” just towards the end of the record, I wrote it in my bedroom one day. It was an incredibly quick kind of process where I wrote the basis, wrote the words, and just kind of sent it to Alexis, just to his house, where he has a small recording [studio] like mine, where he added his words and drums, and sent the song back, and it was kind of finished in that way, over, like, two days. We do that quite often. I don’t feel like we have to be there, but, other times, that kind of thing—working on music as a group, altogether—is really, really nice. Sometimes, it makes making decisions about tracks quite straightforward; you know, if everyone in the group thinks that someone has a good idea, then it’s pretty safe to say, you can just go ahead and do it. Yeah, we all have a really, really good, enjoyable time when we’re all in the studio together. Essentially, we’d have one person sitting at the computer recording, another one playing chords on a synthesizer, another person modulating the sound of the synthesizer, you know, another person working on drum rhythms and it was a really happy [and] creative kind of time. A lot of the fruits of that made it onto the record.

URB: How long did it take to make the record?
JG: Well, during our last live tour, at the end of last year, we started playing the song “Alley Cats” live and that song has been around for a couple of years now—from the first demo that Alexis and I made quite awhile ago—and the last songs were finished in September this last year, just before the album was mixed and mastered. So, overall, the process has been a long one, but the majority of things happened in a two-month period at the beginning of this last year, April and May, pretty much. We went into a studio in east London owned by Alan Felix did the majority of the work at that point. We spent a lot of the rest of the time—June, July, August—kind of reviewing what we’d done and which recordings were essential and mixing, and editing, that kind of stuff.