Taken from their upcoming EP, 'Sideways, Sometimes', the new Cymbals track reflects the band's colourful sound both musically and visually. As the four-piece stand in front of the camera; jolting and yelping in true indie pop fashion, they emanate a refreshing wholesomeness. Fresh faced and never taking themselves too seriously, their vivacious urgency makes them a crowd pleaser, guaranteed to provoke even the most self-conscious witness to break into an inspired shuffle.

Less of a band, a more of an all inclusive collective (including their designers and their managers), their optimistic sound has earned them a support slot alongside Temper Trap throughout May, as well as a place at this year’s Camden Crawl. Dazed caught up with the singer, Jack Cleverly, to ask about the video, 'No Bad Decisions', and what to expect from the record.

Dazed Digital: Is there a concept behind Sideways, Sometimes?
Jack Cleverly: Yes and no. We try not to think too much about what we’re doing, to limit the amount of reasoning. ‘You look sideways sometimes’ is a lyric in the song Intense Kids which is about unintended and hidden messages in music, in the most innocent possible way. Actually after I wrote that line I remembered a book published by Phaidon called ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’. It’s basically an encyclopaedia of the great designer Alan Fletcher’s brain – pictures, words, anything, that is very intentionally disorganised.

It moves autonomously from one thing to the next. No over-arching picture emerges, but that’s the point. When we were putting the record together everyone was like ‘yes, that just fits – I don’t know why’. That was how it felt for the instrumental parts. A couple of us made those using samples from the songs, stripping them out and remixing them and trying to make something less linear. 

DD: Tell us about how the Dan Brereton video came about?
Jack Cleverly: Daniel made our last video for 'Totally Over' in his studio in one day, with no budget and it was amazing. The little resource we had was directed towards animating the video and it is very much Daniel and his collaborators’ artwork that makes it what it is. I think they used an ‘exquisite corpse’ method so that each person didn’t know what the next was doing – that fits with the idea of the record.

DD: Why did you choose to record your new EP on Lightship 95?
Jack Cleverly: Our manager arranged for us to record with Ben Phillips at Lightship 95 – the songs were recorded in a week and then mixed by Ben. We were really attracted to the place, and recording there was like going to a separate little world every day (on the DLR). Some of the writing happened during that week too, so the songs all capture that particular moment in time and fit together, which is different to our first release, which was a collection of disparate moments from our first year as a band (That record was genuinely our first year together, by the way, written as we were getting to know each other.)

DD: You enlisted the help of Robin Hulme to create a one off design to feature on the record’s cover: do you believe that art is a particularly important part of your music?
Jack Cleverly: The artwork is as important as the music to us. It's not as if Robin has done some really representative artwork that is like a picture of what the title says. But in a way he has, because the idea is that there's no idea, that you don't know what you're doing, you're coming at it from an oblique angle, it's in the space slightly outside your line of vision.

Sideways Sometimes will be released on April 23rd on Tough Love