Picture yourself in a boat on a river with the youthful lyrics of adolescent discovery akin to MGMT or Neutral Milk Hotel. Replace the jittery electronic sounds from the former two bands with a folky optimism and you have Grouplove, surrounded by tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Grouplove sound, converse, dance and play music like the children of the children of the sixties. Considering that the band members met on an art residency in Crete, we can’t be far off. Amid a musical market saturated with vast arrays of house-turned-mainstream, it’s refreshing to relax to the cheerful sounds of a plain old guitar. The lack of production plays a revitalising role for tired, incessantly bass constrained ears, evoking the folk and rock classics of yesteryear.
This video for ‘Tongue Tied’ exemplifies their band name, Grouplove, and their mission as musicians. They’re just a group of people brought together by a mutual passion for jamming to solid music (to put it into their language). It almost seems like they’ve forgotten they’re on camera in this live rendition recorded exclusively for i-D online. Lead vocalist and guitarist Christian Zucconi indulges us with his modern hippy persona, winning us over with these thoughtful, extremely well adjusted answers that suggest Grouplove’s musical purpose aims to help make peace with modernity in a poetic way.
What’s ‘Tongue Tied’ about? Tongue Tied is about the essence of youth – going out with your friends, screaming at the top of your lungs to your favourite song as you all drive in your car a little too fast, the fleeting and complicated emotions of young love, and leaving your problems behind if only for a night.
Could you describe your music in a haiku form?
Sky dive with your friends.
While the earth stands still, let go
Weightlessness survives.
How would you like to make an audience/listener feel upon hearing your music? Inspired and alive – the feeling that nothing is out of reach
Do you have any ambitions left to fulfil? How do you define success? I will have ambitions left to fulfil until the day that I die! Success is all a state of mind – it’s too subjective to define, but for me success is love, the ability to share and receive it, and to be able to fall asleep and wake up with an overall sense of happiness and satisfaction in how you live your life, and how it touches others.
What would you be doing right now if you weren’t making music? I’d be a super depressed New York City tour guide. If only these walls could speak!
Grouplove’s album Never Trust A Happy Song is available here.
Text: Lily Avnet
