The song that led the way was the slow-building euphoria of Nothingness And No Regrets. “They’re like little diary entries, except they’re a little bit more veiled perhaps. To me, albums are memories of times in my life.” “Each album is like a collection of thoughts and ideas that fit the time we’re in,” he says. Each song on Visuals represents its own little chapter and story: nothing needed to be overly long. Bjerre says there was no need for a grand, overarching concept. With only one song over five minutes, it’s their most concise album. Visuals is Mew at their most compact, their chemistry at its most potent. “Even though a song is on an album, it keeps growing because we get to go out and perform it for an audience, and through people who listen, we get to experience the music in an ever different light. “I don’t consciously know why the songs come out the way they do,” says Bjerre. Understated verses could suddenly rocket skyward, anthemic choruses could implode into beautiful soundscapes or sophisticated grooves could be crushed like a tincan. It’s what makes the band so special, that thrill that songs could go anywhere, that He finds it hard to pin down his lyrics, his melodies, himself. “Spending less time on it, you can still maintain the feeling you had when you first wrote it, and you don’t get stuck in the quagmire of second-guessing yourself all the time” says Bjerre.ījerre doesn’t know where Mew songs come from. Visuals was completed in under a year – what Bjerre describes as an “incredible” feat for a band used to periods of prolonged tinkering.
You definitely got the feeling that things don’t last forever, and it’s an important reminder to treasure the here and now”. At the same time, new songs were emerging in reaction to what was going on around them. “It was pretty dark last year, so some of the darkness in the lyrics comes from that. They set to work in Copenhagen and started knocking the demos they’d written on tourbuses and in hotel rooms into shape. “If you keep doing it like that, ultimately you make a handful of albums and then you’re ready for retirement.” The trio wanted to make an album spontaneously, keeping the energy they’d generated on the road going. “We just felt like, “if we do it the normal way, it’s gonna be another three or four years before we get to do it again’,” says Bjerre. They wanted to break the cycle and make an album quickly. They arrived home with demos that had been written on the road and the spark was lit. The tour that accompanied 2015’s +- album found the band reaching a creative peak that they felt was too exhilarating to be dampened by a period of extended cave-dwelling. Mew have a tradition of, as Bjerre puts it, hiding away in a cave for three or four years between albums. I like the idea that each song has a visual aspect to it somehow.” “We produced it ourselves, designed the artwork, and the visuals.
“We do everything on this album ourselves,” says Bjerre. The resultant record feels like a culmination for one of rock’s most ambitious and inventive groups: Visuals is where Bjerre and his bandmates, bassist Johan Wohlert and drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen, join the dots of a career that has spanned over two decades. For their seventh record, though, the singer decided to turn things upside down, picturing visuals in his mind first and seeing how they could inform the music. Usually, the Danish trio finish an album and Bjerre gets to work on the visuals. Mew frontman Jonas Bjerre has worked on the projections for the band’s live shows since their early days.
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