Brothers Tom and Ian Griffiths, aka Icarus, have already had a pretty massive 2017 playing a raft of summer festivals and an extensive UK headline tour, and now they’re adding to that with the release of brand new track ‘No Sleep’. We caught up with the pair to hear how it came together.
Where are you and what have you been up to today?
We’re both in our hometown, Bristol. We’ve spent today in the studio working on new music and making plans for next year.
How does being based in Bristol impact on what you do?
Bristol is a exciting place to live. Whilst there’s always something to do here, it runs at quite a relaxed pace, which is nice to come back to when we’ve been away travelling. It’s such a creative city, its easy to get inspired here.
Your new track ‘No Sleep’ marks a return to a more underground sound after two crossover tracks, what prompted you to move back in this direction and why?
To be honest, nothing we do is ever that calculated. We usually just go on gut instinct with each piece of music we release, as we’ve found that if we start to over think things, it ends up restricting our creativity. The underground sound of Icarus is always at the core of what we do, it comes naturally to us when writing and is something we’ll always maintain. We do feel like we’re getting better at writing “happier” music though!
You also run a label Fly Boy – how do you find balancing this with producing and playing your own music?
Running our own label has always been something we’ve been passionate about doing and it’s enabled us to put out some great music and work with some very talented artists over the past few years. Sometimes it can be difficult juggling a busy artist career alongside running a record label but thankfully there’s two of us, so that helps!
What are you listening to at the moment?