Newcastle’s synth-pop duo Drive have released their new single ‘Old Cassette Tape’.
The new single comes as the band work on their debut album, due out next year.
To celebrate the single release, we caught up with Drive to discover 5 tracks that influenced ‘Old Cassette Tape’.
The Velvet Underground – Pale Blue Eyes | Listen via Spotify
Jake (Vocals/Guitar): I was listening to this song religiously when we were writing ‘Old Cassette Tape’. There’s something about how direct and honest Lou Reeds lyrics are that I really wanted to try and replicate. I ended up writing a bunch of different drafts and cherry-picked the most simplistic sentiments.
The Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey | Listen via Spotify
A lot of our music is inspired by important moments in film, and this song appears at the end of ‘Lost In Translation‘. The way this song impacts the feeling of the scene was something that we tried to recreate in the conception of the song. We love how sparse and intimate it is, which influenced the approach to ‘Old Cassette Tape’.
Alvvays – Not My Baby | Listen via Spotify
We started writing the song to a loop built on a drum machine. Normally, we’d look at replacing the sounds with real drums, but we love the DIY aesthetic of Alvvays and the nostalgia it brings when using a piece of gear from an earlier decade, so we decided to run with it.
Clairo – Pretty Girl | Listen via Spotify
Andy (Keys/Guitar): In general, Clairo is a big influence on our music. Like Alvvays, we take a lot from her minimalist approach to making records. We wrote and recorded this song in Jake’s bedroom which we think influenced the sound of the production. If we wrote the song in a studio we feel that we might have lost the intimacy you can hear in the Clairo song.
Bleachers – Wake Me | Listen via Spotify
The structure of ‘Wake Me’ is something that we often tap in to. We tried to add subtle elements in each section that develop the song in an interesting way. We really like how ‘Wake Me’ starts with almost nothing and takes you on a journey that builds until you’re completely drawn in.
Listen to all the band’s influences and the single via their curated Spotify playlist: