“Honestly, it came from being in bands with four members and having two guitarists,” says Kerr via phone from New York, where the band was prepping for a tour that brings Royal Blood to the Agora on Tuesday, Sept. 19. “I noticed that some of my favorite moments being in those bands were when we all played the same riff. One day, I had this thought of making that kind of sound on my own. I liked how we were all doing the same thing. It was just a question of how to get that sound. That’s how that thought process started.”
Other duos didn’t necessarily inform Kerr’s approach.
“Obviously, there are connective tissues between a lot of rock ’n’ roll duos,” says Kerr, who cites the Beatles, Queen, T. Rex, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana as influences. “I think the blues has something to do with that. I also I think there is just a common primal energy for bands that play that way. It’s like similarities by default. We didn’t look toward other two-pieces. I think others are the same. We weren’t looking at each other.”
After moving to Australia for a short time, the group returned to England and posted the Queens of the Stone Age-like “Figure It Out” on its SoundCloud account. The tune caught the attention of Warner Bros. which signed the group and has issued all four of its studio albums, including the just-released Back to the Water Below.
The new single, “Mountains At Midnight,” carries with it an intensity thanks to its pounding drums and distorted guitars.
“That really came from soundcheck,” Kerr says of the track. “We had these upside down sounding beat and that riff locked in with it so well. It existed like that when we were on the road. When we came off tour, we knew we had a great riff, but we needed to turn it into the song. The riff was just the starting point.”
The other songs for the album also began to come together while the group was still touring in support of 2021’s Typhoons. Overall, Kerr says the group took a slightly different approach for this outing.
“I think initially it was clear that we had quite an array of different types of songs and genre,” he says. “From the very beginning, it felt eclectic. We didn’t want to commit to one thing. We wanted to keep it wide open and allow the songs to inform the record rather than the other way around. I would say this one was very song-led. Typhoons was much more of a studio album. This is piano and then layered with melody and lyrics all in one.”
For the live show, the group will tour with a keyboardist to flesh out its sound. But Kerr says the group doesn’t use any backing tracks.
“We have a keyboard player who comes on for six songs, maybe,” says Kerr. “Everything you hear is live. For us, it’s important to have a human being playing all those parts rather than a MacBook. I’m looking forward to [returning to Cleveland]. Touring the U.S. is where I’m happiest. I just think America is like a big playground. I get off the plane and get on the bus here, and there’s a song with a guitar solo on the radio. I’m like, ‘Ok. This place rocks.’”
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This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.