On October 18, 2024, New Hope Club sat with our Director of Social Media, Vanessa Chan, for an exclusive interview! With their latest release, “Swimming with Sharks”, the boys sat down to chat about their latest projects, their move to LA & what life is like on the road. Finishing off their UK & US leg of tour, the band’s last stop is in Sunny San Diego! Get your tickets now for before the show sells out!
Hi, guys! Vanessa here with KCR College Radio & right now, I’m sitting with British pop group New Hope Club!
New Hope Club: Hello!!!
Thank you guys for taking the time out of your busy schedules to sit down & chat! This has been in the works for a while, so it’s really nice that we get to do this.
Reece: Thank you so much for having us.
No, thank you! This is honestly such an honor. I started listening to you guys my freshman year in high school, & now I’m a junior in college! Such a full circle moment.
George: It’s lovely to see you again.
Let’s jump right into this! We’re gonna talk about your latest music, talk about tour, & everything in between. How are you guys feeling this morning?
Reece: Great, yeah! This is an exciting day for us. We’re playing a show in LA. We’re playing at the Teragram Bowl Room. It’s gonna be an amazing show. We’re coming off the back of our UK & US tour. We just did New York, Chicago, Minneapolis. Now, we’re kind of doing all of the West Coast shows. So yeah, it’s great. Very exciting.
George was saying you guys have 10 days off, right? Or something like that?
Reece: Yeah, it’s nice! We came from the UK, so we’ve got over our jet flag. We’re able to give 100% at our upcoming shows. It’s always nice to have that little time in between.
Blake: It was also good because me & Reece both got COVID in New York. So we had five days to heal before the, what was it, Chicago show? So, that’s also been a bonus.
How about we start with everyone introducing themselves & what their role is in the band?
Reece: Hello! I am Reece. I play bass & I sing in the band New Hope Club.
Blake: Hello, I am Blake. I sing & play guitar in New Hope Club.
George: Hello! I am George! I play guitar, I play a little bit of piano, & also sing in New Hope Club.
Blake: I thought you were going to do the John Lennon thing there George – the “I play better guitar…”
George: Ahhhh that would’ve been better. That would’ve been good.
You fumbled, you fumbled.
George: I fumbled. Can we do that again?
Collectively, you’ve been New Hope Club since 2015. How did you guys get your start?
Reece: We were kind of just doing our own thing, to be honest. In England, there’s a really big pub & music scene. So, they kind of go hand in hand. When you’re a kid, you have a lot of venues to start playing live shows at. We were kind of just doing that whilst also posting on YouTube & Facebook. Through social media, we met in a very modern way – online. We’ve always wanted to be in bands & grew up being massive fans of bands. We started meeting up on the weekends in between school & just started writing songs together. We became friends really quickly. We have so much in common, like, our favorite films & sports. It was super easy to become best friends. I think the most important thing was becoming friends. The music came naturally to us because we’ve just been playing music since we were kids. Writing songs & covering songs was obviously how we got our start, but the ball didn’t get rolling until we posted covers on YouTube. Then, we got to go on tour. I think 2017 was when we went on tour for the first time. We’ve been touring ever since. We’ve been very lucky to be able to travel across the world, playing our own shows, and do some support slots. We just love it, you know? This is our dream.
Were there any other names you guys thought of before New Hope Club? How did you guys stumble upon that name?
George: You know what? Honestly, I think coming up with a band name is possibly the hardest thing.
Yeah! It’s not talked about enough.
George: Once you make the band name, you’re kind of not stuck with it, but that is your own identity. I also think it kind of comes back around where your music then is your name, you know? I mean it’s kind of like it doesn’t really matter what the name is. Your music represents you & who you are represents you. We had a lot of ideas for names & some worse ones than New Hope Club. But, I still love New Hope Club. I think it’s great. I think it sends out a positive message. It’s kind of in the name & I think we still live up to that name with our new projects & stuff coming out. It’s also a very exciting time for us even though we have been a band for so long. I feel like this is the start of a new era & although everything that has come before us has led us to this moment, we’re so grateful for that. I do think that this is like the new New Hope Club. We don’t want to add another word to the name, but it’s the new New Hope Club.
Each era you guys go through is a New Hope Club.
George: It’s a New Hope Club, yeah, & obviously the fans as well are part of the club. That’s a really special thing for us. Anyone who likes the music has been a fan whether it’s been for 30 seconds or like 10 years almost, they’re part of the club. We’re extremely thankful for them & all the support that they’ve shown us over the last nine, ten years.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but you guys are now based in Los Angeles. What was life like growing up for New Hope Club in England? Was it difficult moving away from home?
Blake: It was fun. I mean, we spent like the first, I want to say three years of the band living in a hotel room, just the three of us. There were two single beds & a sofa bed.
George: You got the sofa bed.
Reece: *Laughs*
Blake: It was like, it became a thing. But yeah, I don’t know. We just had so much fun. Me and Reece are from Manchester, so even going to London as a kid would be like going to Spain. It just wasn’t like a thing you did often. We had to adjust to that world & then being around labels & guys in suits. That was quite a bit to adjust to. We’ve been going to LA for two months out of the year since we were 15 so we’d already gotten a vibe of it. We’ve made some friends out here & some songwriter friends too. It just felt like it was the time to do it & move out here. I mean the weather obviously is incredible. Our label and management is all out here. It just made the most sense to us. It’s tough not being around family though. It does feel long at times & it’s tough going back & seeing like my dogs & things like that. You can’t explain to them where you’ve been so that for me is probably the toughest bit. At least I can speak to my mom on the phone. But, I think we’ve really settled in & I think we’re honestly happier than ever because we’re not stuck in London.
It’s nice because you guys already kind of built that foundation before jumping into moving to LA. So it wasn’t too much transition, it was just the part of physically moving there.
Blake: Yeah, we all have our own houses now too & it just gives us more normality in a way than being stuck in a city in a hotel room.
How would you say your sound has evolved in comparison to when you first started making music together? Do you guys ever clash when it comes to crafting music for New Hope Club?
George, Blake & Reece: *Laughing*
Reece: It’s definitely a challenge when you start a band so young. We were like 15 when we first started making music. I think that it’s always a challenge progressing & changing your music. Over the years, we’ve always challenged ourselves & made sure that the next release is something different for us. We’re not the kind of band that sticks to one sound & has that sound forever. We like to change it. We like to experiment. I think that our recent releases have shown that it doesn’t sound like anything else that we’ve done. On our last record, we really wanted to go organic & get in the studio, plug in guitars, & see what happened. We’re so proud of what we made. We love making music so it’s pretty easy for us to just keep making music & seeing where it takes us. We don’t wonder if people are going to be upset if we do music this way, because we just want to put out music that we’re happy with & that we’re proud of. Ultimately, when we look back on it in years to come, we just want to say we were happy with that at the time. We just released a song called “Swimming with Sharks” & it’s a completely different sound for us. We’re always wanting to tell a story through our lyrics & every choice that we make, especially in the last two years of the band, we’ve made ourselves & we’ve made sure that we’re a part of every music video discussion & every song. Everything that we do has a piece of us in it. We care so much about the message we’re trying to put out there. We care so much about the whole process. I think it’s most important that we enjoy it because that’s the reason we’re doing it in the first place. “Swimming with Sharks” just came out. Go stream it! Go check it out! We’re happy with it & we’re excited to see what everyone thinks.
You have to be passionate about what you’re creating. Also when you create something as a band, you kind of want everybody to be involved. I mean guys are in a band for a reason, so that’s beautiful that you guys have these different elements of essentially each other in your music.
Reece: Yes! I think that it’s not as simple as going on our Spotify page & clicking the first song you see under New Hope Club. If you dive deeper into our music, you’ll hear our range and see how one song can sound completely different from another one. From Simon & Garfunkel to like the Arctic Monkeys. We like to just mix it up. I think there’s pretty much something for everyone in our music & if you like it all, then, that’s a bonus.
I don’t know how to explain it, but in my opinion, a good artist is when they’re versatile with their sound. I’d say you guys definitely have mastered that because, as you said, there’s a little something for everybody. So, if you listen to one song & don’t care for it, you just move onto the next one.
George: Exactly! Like just skip through and see what you like.
Reece: Wow, thank you. You can hear the progression & you can hear what we were doing at that certain point in time. It’s almost like a timeline where you can see our progression. You can see how we’ve evolved over the years & I think that’s so cool.
I know you guys make pop music, but I’m sure you guys listen to many more genres than just pop. What other music & artists do you guys listen to that might surprise your fans?
George: We always listen to a lot of different stuff I’m really obsessed with right now with a few UK bands. There’s a band called Blossoms that has a really good album that just came out. I really like that. There’s this other band called Wonder Horse that are a little bit heavier, I guess, I want to say they’re more rocky. I like to lean more into the guitar rock stuff, right now. That’s where my head’s at. I always end up gravitating back towards the Beatles. At some point, I don’t even know, just like a random day at like 9am. I’d be like, yeah, I kind of want to listen to this Beatles album right now. Then I’d be like, okay, great. What song can I try to write a song like today from the Beatles? It changes every day. I think, like Reece kind of said, we’ve got such a wide range of favorite artists that when it comes down to us writing music, we’re not easily distracted, but I feel like we can get easily distracted & be like, oh, hang on. This sounds like so & so, let’s do something like this right now. Then, we kind of go in that direction for like two songs & then we’ll go, oh, hang on, I actually really think we should do this. So then you end up just having this big amalgamation of songs that end up becoming New Hope Club because we’ve written them. We obviously put our own spin on it every single time. I think that’s what’s important for us. We don’t just want to copy people whenever we write these songs.
Blake: I’ve been listening to a lot of Yacht Rock at the moment. It’s been my bread & butter for about two weeks. I’ve been really focusing on the production & things like that. I do some of the production for the band & whatnot. It’s just something that’s really a nice escape for me. I think I was getting too obsessed over how modern pop production is made. So, I’ve kind of just done a 360. Now I’m like, how did they make yacht rock? That will just feel so easy. It’s about the arrangement & it just makes you feel good. So that’s why I’m on at the moment. New Hope Club yacht rock album.
Oh yes, a yacht rock album coming up next. Reece, how about you? Any artists you’ve been listening to recently?
Reece: No, just, uh, just Chappell Roan, Charli XCX & Sabrina Carpenter to be quite honest.
I’m wearing my Sabrina Carpenter merch right now!
Reece: Wow, I love it.
2024 has been a year of music for you guys! 3 singles & a new album! What was the biggest challenge working on this music & how did you overcome it?
Blake: I think honestly the the biggest challenge has been from when we wrote the songs to when it comes out. We’ve written a lot of these songs just after COVID. We evolve as a human every hour, every week, every month. We like kind of putting ourselves in the shoes of who we were when we were writing these songs. I think that might be one of the toughest things for me personally. We’ve always been one of those bands where it’s like once we’ve done something that we’re proud of & the label likes, we want to move onto the next thing. These artists all the time will release an album but don’t allow themselves to sit in what they created. What’s old to them is new to their fans. There were some songs that we did on the Getting Better project collection of songs that were completely different to when we first created it. For example, “Whatever”. That song was originally written as a swung song. It’s completely different to how it is now. Those challenges of completing a song but not feeling complete is always tough. We knew we could have arranged that song better, and we did. We made it something we’d want to play live & that would connect with our audience more. It completely changed the song & now on stage, that song is a song that we get the whole crowd dancing & having a great time to. If we kept it how we initially wrote the song, it would be a completely different experience live.
I was gonna say that Whatever is actually my favorite off of the album. It’s just so sonically refreshing.
Blake: Awe, thank you!
I’m excited to hear that one live.
George: It’s gonna be so fun, yeah. I wish we could play that one in a roller skating rink. Everyone would be just skating around to that song. That would be so sick. Just for that one song though. I’d be like, “Yeah, follow me everyone!”
What are your personal favorites off the album? I know, I know. It’s like having to pick your favorite child…
George: Oh, I know.
Blake: I think “Don’t Go Wasting Time” is a really nice moment on that project & I just think it’s like the musicianship of it when the chorus comes in. It feels like you’re falling with the music. I kind of love that. I think honestly “Walk It Out” gives us that Blur moment that I think we’ve always secretly wanted. So those two for me are quite special. I enjoy it.
Reece: I always love listening to “Go, It Is Both”. I sometimes forget that we did that song & then I listen to it & I fall in love with the song again.
George: Yes, like a “we did that” moment.
Reece: I love the lyrics & I love the story that it tells. I also love the music video we did for it because it’s just tied with such good memories of traveling with our songs.
Blake: Yes! That was so much fun.
Reece: Yeah, I love that one.
George: You kind of stole my one, Reece. Yeah, I love that one. I mean, I love them all obviously. But I feel like “Call Me A Quitter” is like a really special space for me. I think sonically it’s really, it’s in a really cool place. It gives that sort of Vampire Weekend spin. The lyrics are amazing. I remember when we first sort of started writing that song, we were in the back of a bus. Wait, not a bus. A taxi in London. Man, a bus would have been cooler. But yeah, we’re in the back of this taxi & we were just opening up to each other about feelings which obviously is really important. We just got really deep with each other & then we went to the studio the next day & wrote that song. I think that’ll always have a sort of like a special moment for me in New Hope Club’s discography.
You guys are no rookies when it comes to the music scene. You’ve toured with the Vamps & Sabrina Carpenter, you’ve sold out shows overseas, & you’ve gained a huge following through covering songs. How do you guys stay grounded when it comes to the pressure that comes alongside this career?
Reece: Honestly, being a musician & being a touring artist is so stressful. You’re stressing about everything. I think from the outside, it looks like, oh, it’s so easy. You turn up, you do the shows, & it’s so fun. But there’s so much stress that goes on behind the scenes. Everything, you’re stressed about. The show & the overall logistics of everything. The merch, the f**king merch. All the boring stuff is so stressful. Just making everything right. Then also, you’ve got to concentrate on the actual show itself & the songs & learning everything. Yeah, you’re balancing a lot. Then, touring. You’re traveling around, you’re getting sick, you’re doing all this. But honestly, we love it. It’s our favorite thing to do. It’s what we do it for. It’s what you get in the studio & make live music for. You get to travel around with your best friends. You see new cities, meet new people, & what better circumstances to do it under? You’re playing live music. Our favorite thing to do, other than play live shows, is to go to live shows. To be at a live show, watching your favorite band, singing along in the same room. There’s some magical feeling, & I just love that that’s our job. I love that people come to our shows. I love that right now, in LA, there’s a few hundred people that are getting ready, & knowing that they’re coming to our gig tonight is awesome. I just love it. It’s the best feeling ever. It all pays off. It’s the payoff of all the hard work. It’s the payoff of all the stress, all the everything, all the crap that you think about all day. When you’re on that stage for whatever it is, that hour & 20 minutes, all you’re doing is just being in the moment. & that’s just magical.
I actually had someone explain to me that life on tour is basically survival of the fittest. I mean, I can only imagine…
George, Blake & Reece: *laughs*
Reece: Yeah, it is.
To end off, what’s next for New Hope Club? Any goals or future projects in the works?
Blake: Yeah! I mean we’re we’re always writing &I think to go back to your point of how do you keep your feet on the ground, I think we are always gonna, I’d hope, be able to do that. I think the three of us are perfectionists & also just very driven to always be better & to improve so the feet can never really leave the ground. I think we’re always looking to improve. How can we do something better this time? How do we mix it up? How do we change this? Did we connect with the audience as well as we could have done? All these things go into our brain. We also have each other. So, if one of us, for example, when George gets over the top about stuff, we can pull him down & calm the boy down. We’re very excited about the stuff in the works. We did spend a lot of this year on music. The San Diego show is something to look forward to.
October 22nd at House of Blues Voodoo Room! Be there, or be square!
Blake: It’s the last show. I’m thinking it’s gotta be the loudest one, right? Last one is always the best one.
George: Stay classy San Diego! We’ll see you then!