Having released two acclaimed singles on Moshi Moshi, supported the likes of Foals, Two Door Cinema Club and Esben and the Witch as well as performing on Channel 4’s, Abbey Road Debuts, Trophy Wife’s eagerly anticipated EP, Bruxism, will be released on October 17th as the inaugural release on Blessing Force’s newly launched label. Trophy Wife saw this EP as a means to take themselves out of their comfort zone. Having previously written and recorded in a very insular way, the trio instead took an experimental approach by using a different producer for each track. They travelled to Berlin to work with acclaimed electronic artist/producer Ewan Pearson, then collaborated with Oxford acolytes Yannis from Foals and Andrew Halford. The title track has been produced by James Yuill whilst the EP’s opener brought Trophy Wife together with one of their longstanding musical heroes, Plaid.
Bruxism – the title and a running theme of the EP – is the habitual, involuntary grinding or clenching of the teeth that usually occurs during sleep. Each member of Trophy Wife suffers from a different sleep disorder, and the lyrics on Bruxism reference sleep and dreams as well as the often chemically induced moments in waking life that feel dreamlike. Sleeping disorders are at once both universal and highly personal, everyone suffers from them in one way or another yet they are only really shared between the sufferer and their sleeping partners. They exist in a strange silent world between your dreams and your waking hours and often define how both feel.
The EP has also allowed the band to discover the extremities of their sound and Bruxism feels markedly different to their past two singles. ‘Canopy Shade’ and ‘Wolf’ are both about moments in singer Jody Prewett’s life that felt like waking dreams (chemically and Sri Lanka-induced respectively); ‘Seven Waves’ is about delirium and the EP as a whole alludes to the half fictional, half factual space that exists between wake and sleep and how sleep disorders are often the
gateway between the two.
Surprisingly, the process of working with five different producers wasn’t as difficult as the band first anticipated, “We kind of thought that putting something like this together would never actually happen, but as all these people came back to us saying they’d like to be a part of what we’re doing we realised how inspiring collaboration can be. In our minds it’s given each track a sense of equal importance and that, for us, is exactly what a record should be.”
Oxford’s Blessing Force is an ever growing community of artists, musicians and writers staging multimedia gigs & exhibitions, releasing records, managing bands and publishing literature. The label arm is run by Andrew Mears (Pet Moon) and his former Youthmovies bandmate Al English.
Trophy Wife (who play live as a four-piece, incorporating Andrew Halford) played a string of festivals this summer including Latitude, Field Day, Standon Calling, Truck and Lounge on the Farm. They will follow the release of Bruxism with a UK tour in October.
Tracklisting:
1. Canopy Shade (Produced by Plaid and Trophy Wife)
2. Bruxism (Produced by James Yuill and Trophy Wife)
3. Seven Waves (Produced by Andrew Halford, Aidan Laverty and Trophy Wife)
4. Sleepwalks (Produced and mixed by Ewan Pearson)
5. Wolf (Produced by Yannis Philippakis)
