Since they got their start in 2016, RIKAS surely has built up a collection of stories. The alt-rock band from Germany has been up to quite a bit lately, including working on a new EP! I got to catch up with guitarist Chris and bassist Sam and hear some of their own personal stories of major moments that have unfolded over the past year.
THE GUYS ARE FINALLY PLAYING IN FRONT OF AUDIENCES AGAIN!
RIKAS have played a handful of shows in Europe, although the crowds definitely look a little different now. Here’s what Sam and Chris had to say:
“It’s amazing. It’s still (at least in Germany) not the same as before because we still have restrictions concerning the concerts. We have to play in front of people sitting down mostly, so it’s not really ‘rock and roll.’ It could be cooler, it’s not your typical festivals… it’s kind of stiff sometimes. Still better than no shows, but we’re hoping for regular concerts to be back again in the winter. It’ll be a great relief.”
(Despite the fact the fans have to be seated at all their shows, the guys are still able to feel and feed off their energy!)
“I think it’s more work. You have to work harder to get the people going, but you can still feel a connection. Definitely.”
THEY’RE STILL KEEPING THE PARTY GOING… ON THE ROOFTOP
The guys recently released a song titled “Party on the Rooftop,” and they had mentioned that it had a long backstory. By long backstory, they literally meant long! Sam and Chris elaborated:
We wrote that song last year actually. Pretty much during lockdown, we wrote a hundred songs. This is the song that took us the most time. We recorded it with a friend, a producer we know named Alex, and he made over 100 takes to record the song. It was just insane, because he’s like a sound nerd and he was like okay, we need to have the perfect sound since we worked on it so hard. I think we worked on it longer than a lot of songs we’ve had before. It was a long process, and it didn’t feel like… sometimes you have a song in a day, and it’s like oh it feels good, let’s get it out there! This one was more of a song in a half a year.”
“Also, we tracked it live as a band, so we did not do single tracks. We were playing a lot of takes, and it felt really good. We thought we had the final one, and he came in and was like yeah, it’s great, but let’s do another ten like this! But it was worth it, it sounds really good and it was really interesting working like this. We rarely do it like that.”
HALF A YEAR LATER…
Sometimes feelings can change about something you wrote a while ago. I wanted to know if Sam and Chris still had the same level of enthusiasm towards the song as they did while they were helping to assemble it.
“I think we’re really happy with it, but I think it’s not always a good thing if it takes so long for something creative to be put out. Your mind always changes and develops, and if something takes to long (like the process) then you start overthinking too much and question something you already decided. It gets to a spiral of doubt and questioning things you already committed yourself to, so yeah. I guess, yes, we would do some things differently if we would record it again, but we’d do that for every single song we put out. It never stops, but it’s fine. We thought about a feature maybe, but we didn’t really find the people we wanted to. We’ll postpone that for something in the future.”
THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE (NEAR) FUTURE
Sam and Chris admitted they have a TON of music that RIKAS has been sitting on. However, they won’t be sitting on their new EP Short Stories for much longer! The guys will be dropping the project in October, but here’s a few things to know about it ahead of time!
“It’s a really diverse EP because of the way the songs came together. It was a very different approach for us. For each song, we worked with different producers. The approach was less of a ‘band approach’ as we usually do, and more of us as songwriters approach. It was fine and nice at the time, but I think we were already evolved from that and grew with it. It’s a bit different than the things we’ve done so far, but it’s still RIKAS.”
“I think that’s why it’s called Short Stories, because every song has a different backstory to it. The first album we made, we recorded everything in Spain in the studio. All of the songs have exactly the same vibe, but this one is more like… maybe fragments of the spare time we had in corona, since we were not on tour. We worked with different people, and did stuff we probably wouldn’t have done if we didn’t have corona. That’s why I like to call it Short Stories, I think that’s a good title to it.”
The situation may have not been so pleasant, but RIKAS made it work in their favor! The guys also mentioned that it was the first time they really had time for songwriting and for being in the studio without such a huge time crunch. They thoroughly enjoyed it, and realized that an opportunity like this may be rare in the future.
Keep up with RIKAS on Instagram and Twitter @Rikasband!
