Hollow Parade have made the same record four times

There are four chairs in the rehearsal room and four coats over the backs of three of them. Before the recorder is on, the drummer asks whether we are going to ask the question. We say yes. He says good, because they have an answer and nobody ever lets them finish it.

The question

The question is why Hollow Parade have made the same record four times.

It is not an unfair characterisation and they do not treat it as one. Four albums in eleven years, all between thirty-eight and forty-three minutes, all nine or ten tracks, all built from the same four instruments played by the same four people in the same room, all recorded live over about a fortnight with the same engineer.

"You say the same record," the guitarist says. "We say the same question."

The distinction matters to them more than it will to most people, and it takes about twenty minutes to get to a version of it that lands. The version that lands is this: they are not trying to make a different record each time. They are trying to make the same record better, and they think the reason most bands stop doing anything interesting after their second album is that they get bored before they get good.

"Everyone treats a band like it's a career with chapters," the singer says. "First one's raw, second one's the difficult one, third one you go to Berlin and get a synthesiser. Why? Nobody asks a bricklayer to change what a wall is."

Repetition is the work. It isn't what happens when you run out of ideas, it's what you do instead of having them.