Zola Blood have released their new single ‘It Never Goes’.
The track is a hauntingly dark electronica-infused release that intertwines you in its soundscape. It arrives ahead of the group’s forthcoming album and their European tour kicking off in April.
To celebrate the single release, Zola Blood shared with us 5 tracks that influenced ‘It Never Goes’.
Lawrence Hart – Surrender Yourself | Listen via Spotify
Lawrence Hart is a good friend of ours and we’ve worked with him loads on production stuff over the years. He’s a font of knowledge when it comes to synths. One of the many things he does really well is sampling and manipulating vocals into a rhythmic element of a song – like on this tune. We used this technique a fair bit on the album. The sample loop on ‘It Never Goes’ is taken from the lead vocal on another track on the record, cut up and played back via a software instrument. That and the beat were basically the starting point of the song.
Portishead – Machine Gun | Listen via Spotify
Portishead have long been a source of inspiration for us. Their beats are amazing. I love the rigid stabs of the electronic drums in this tune – they’re so in your face, everything else in the mix sits behind them. We wanted to try and create a similar motif on the electronic toms that run throughout ‘It Never Goes’. Taking this part into the live show is going to be fun – we want to make it huge!
Bruce Springsteen – Streets of Philadelphia | Listen via Spotify
This is one of those strange songs that has just always stuck with me since I was a kid and really left an imprint. It’s so simple and stripped back. When we were writing ‘It Never Goes’ I realised the vocal melody I was hearing had a similar kind of tumbling delivery as this tune. It doesn’t really come up for air until the chorus and is kind of hard to sing without breathing in the right place. The synth pads aren’t a million miles away from the sounds we used either – although I think maybe he used a CS80 and ours are on the Moog One.
Massive Attack – Angel | Listen via Spotify
We really like blending live drums with electronic programming. It can bring a different energy and human feel to tracks that are primarily made from electronic instruments. The halftime drum beat in ‘Angel’ is iconic, really powerful, and foreboding, but still with a nice groove. We wanted to lift the end of ‘It Never Goes’ and take it to another place with a similar idea by throwing in the halftime rhythm on live drums.
The Mole – Chimes & Bells (Trentemoller remix) | Listen via Spotify
When we first heard this Trentemoller remix we got so sucked into the simple hypnotic repetition of the bass part. It anchors everything down so there’s space for the more experimental instrumentation to take you on a bit of a journey. There’ve been a few of our own demos where we’ve tried to get this kind of bass line in but it never felt right until we wrote ‘It Never Goes’. The outro just took a left turn and everything locked into the beat.
You can listen to Zola Blood ‘It Never Goes’ via Spotify below: