Van She

With their long awaited debut album 'V' just months away from its release in June, Van She drummer Tomek Archer is feeling a little reflective. The band is currently on the road with label-mates Ghostwood, and Archer notes that he can see some interesting similarities between the two bands' trajectories.

"They've just got their EP out not long ago," he says, "and they're doing all the same touring that we did two years ago. It's great to see them get all the hype and then get signed and go and do some hard work and get on the road and find their feet, as a band and as a team. It's actually kind of funny - where they're at is exactly where we were at. Watching them, we know it's going to be a long road."

Van She were signed to Modular Recordings just over three years ago and released their first, self-titled, EP within six months. After touring in support of that for another six months, the band have spent two years working on 'V' at London's Konk - the studio owned by Ray Davies of The Kinks. "That's probably about a year longer than we were expecting," Archer comments sheepishly.

All the same, he adds, the end result is stronger for that, because the extra time allowed the band to think through what they wanted from the album. "It sounds a bit different to what we'd expected when we started out," he muses. "For better or worse, it's a bit more complicated. It's got more of a richer sound, and there's a lot more stuff going on. It's not so simple - not so much of the synth based, sampled 80s throwback kind of thing. Which is totally valid, as a really fun thing, but this is just a bit more thought out."

After demoing around 40 tracks, the band took the time to work through each and every one of the songs. "Some were good, some were rubbish," Archer says. "And along the way we refined some, and reworked some, and there are tracks on the album that have been through five or six incarnations, with totally different melodies and different lyrics."

Spending that long recording can be a double edged sword - it allows for more thought, but the danger of over-refining the album was something that Van She were conscious of. "We listened back to some of the stuff we did ages ago, and we realised that sometimes your first idea is your best one," comments Archer. "After being in a studio for ages and going through all these different writing processes some of the earlier ones have ended up being the best ones, because the ideas are clearer."

"There's that saying about it being difficult to see where you are in the context of a field while standing in the middle of it. Sometimes it's good to be able to step outside and look back, or look down at what you're doing. After being involved with different projects before this, we thought we knew what we wanted when we stepped into it. But after doing this for so long, it gets to be an internalised process, and after doing things over and over, you start to wonder whether it's right. Now we can look back and say, 'Oh...it is alright!', because we've come so far."

The highlight for Archer is the feeling that the group have recorded something that doesn't feel stamped with a date. Though he's notably reluctant to use the word 'timeless', he does note that the album will more than likely "last the test of time better" than the self-titled EP. "At least we're not going to go, 'Oh God, that sounds so much like it was recorded in 2007'," he laughs. "Especially because it's not being released in the US until the beginning of 2009. That's not what we wanted to do. We didn't want to make a milestone - like, this is 2007, and this is what was happening in the world. It's more like, this is the record we were working on. It's our thing."

Prior to its release, there are plans to release a single from the album, along with a number of remixes of the upcoming material. That includes efforts from the band themselves - who have made something of a mark as remixers of others material in the past - as well as a few guest remixes. "I guess it exposes us to a completely different market," Archer says. "Particularly with the new record, we didn't want to make a techno record. It's a record of songs."

Alistair Wallis

Van She play at the Edinburgh Castle on Sun 16 Mar.

The single Cat & The Eye is out now through Modular and 'V' is expected in June