The Cheap Thrills – Smile When You Sleep
ARTIST NAME: The Cheap Thrills
SONG TITLE: Smile When You Sleep
RELEASE DATE: 26th April
GENRE: Synth Rock
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The Cheap Thrills are a garage pop-rock band from Liverpool (England).
The group consists of primary school friends Lewis Pike, Terry Eaves, Callum Fitzpatrick, and Anton Eager.
The band has more recently been renowned for producing sonic pop songs with catchy hooks and melodies crafted and recorded in Parr Street Studios. Self-proclaimed ‘Scouse’ vocals meet jumpy bass lines, spacey guitars, and synths.
As of 2018, the band has racked up a total of 390,000 Spotify plays and DJ John Kennedy of Radio X describes latest single “Codependence” as a “Modern day anthem”.
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Tell us how to refine a demo to a mastered song.
It’s usually through trial and error, we play the song over and over until it’s about halfway there, then we do an extremely basic recording of it. A single mic or an iPhone usually does the trick.
We then listen back to it and see if there is a need for chopping and changing.
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Discuss the processing involved in creating a song.
It usually starts with one melody or hook that Lewi (singer) brings in to the practice room.
The whole band will try to expand on the idea and take it from an acoustic song to a full band song.
After some drum beats and bass have been laid down Terry uses his magic to put some synth noises on top of it. This opens the song up a lot more and different melodies pop out at us which are usually used for different sections such as middle eight etc.
We have found recording our demos into Logic has helped us a lot as we can edit sections and try different parts of the song much easier.
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Elaborate on the themes of most of your songs.
A lot of the lyrics are about life experiences through the eyes of a 24-year-old. You’ve got to think about them though as some of them aren’t too obvious what they are about, almost cryptic. I suppose you’ve got to draw your own interpretations.
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Tell us your greatest musical works up to date.
How you define greatest is hard, in terms of number crunching our track “Saint Or Sinner” has just reached 140,000 Spotify plays, which is the most we’ve ever had for a track.
But I think the entire band agree “Codependence” is our best song…It was added to music playlists of radio stations like Radio X and BBC 6; which is great.
When we play this song live it’s what the crowd really connect to.
It’s got this anthemic chanty chorus that we imagine thousands of people singing back at us, people on each other’s shoulders, flares the lot.
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Tell us those behind your music process.
The band are Lewis Pike (singer guitar) Anton Eager (drums) Terry Eaves (guitar synth) and Callum Fitzpatrick (Fitzy) (bass guitar).
Lewi starts the ball rolling with a melody or a concept and the band add flesh to it.
Once we get a version of a song we are happy with we take it into Parr Street Studios.
We currently work with two different producers Chris Taylor and Alex Quinn as they know what sound we are aiming for and are both sonic geniuses. They offer useful suggestions to us about parts and song structure and it is extremely beneficial. They act as a third party listening to the song and offer improvements to make it better.
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Tell us how you are handling the promotion of your music.
Social media mainly.
We try and create engaging and top quality artwork and content.
Playing as many of the right gigs as possible also works.
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Tell us your future goals and how you aim to accomplish.
We want bigger crowds more radio play and more streams. We just want to grow. We are aiming to do this by creating the best music possible and being ourselves, it’s worked up until this point.
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Tell us what you think has changed in the music industry.
I think the way we consume songs it’s so disposable in this day and age. I remember when I was a kid and I had CDs I would listen to the same CDs over and over again. Nowadays we’ve got every song on the planet at our fingertips, you sort of become desensitized and great songs pass you by and are taken for granted.
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Tell the greatest mistake to avoid while making a song.
I don’t feel like we are in the position to be giving this advice out. The song should be whatever you want it to be. I can only tell of our mistakes, but our mistakes mightn’t be a mistake to other people’s songs depending on what they are going for musically.
We’ve recorded at cheap recording studios and released music I think too early, that music sticks in people’s mind and leaves an impression about the brand. Don’t release poorly recorded material.
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Tell us how you boost your performance.
Enjoying what you do.
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Explain the structure of the song.
The Cheap Thrill’s song structures are easy. A couple of verses a huge chorus and a little change. Maybe we should start mixing it up so it doesn’t become too repetitive.
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Discuss how the instruments come together for a song.
It usually starts with bass and drums laying a foundation/feel for Terry (synth) to play with over the top. Once Terry has his lead part we base the whole song off that and jam things together until it feels like it works
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Tell if you consider acting in a movie.
I honestly don’t think I could, I’d laugh too much. I’d make a good blooper reel though.
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Tell us how you eliminate noise in your recordings.
We use hum debugger pedals which work great. You’ve got to be conscious of standing too close to mics and remember to hold your strings when you aren’t playing as well.
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List the name of artists you cherish most.
Tame Impala
Oasis
Arctic Monkeys
The Strokes
David Bowie
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Tell us how you get inspiration.
Just listening to music – We’ve been listening to a load of 80s synth-pop songs as of late and they are brilliant.
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Elaborate on the song.
‘Smile When You Sleep’ lists our problems with sleep in various different ways but I think it highlights the beauty of sleep too.
It also questions how you feel sleeping with someone else as opposed to sleeping alone.
It’s always about progression with songs for us. We want people to connect to these tunes and sing them back to us.
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Elaborate on your artist name and the title of the album.
“Cheap Thrills” is a line from The Sex Pistols song “New York” we’ve been in this band since we were kids and it summed us up at the time. It still does in a way.
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