The hours locked in a windowless recording studio are currently bearing fruit for Music Academic Michael Ward with the warmly received new album ‘We Love You’ by Leeds stalwarts Bilge Pump.

You can usually find Michael beavering away as Course Director of the Music Technology and Audio Engineering courses or working as a Mastering Engineer, making other peoples recordings sparkle. But for this project he got locked in the studio with the 3-piece post-punk band Bilge Pump and set about sculpting the sounds that would help the band towards their first album in ten years.

Engineering as a team, Michael and the band developed a process which facilitated the best of both worlds, the quality of the sound of the recording studio, with its access to high-end recording equipment when needed, alongside home recordings for guitars and vocals; giving the band the flexibility to record when inspiration took them.

The plan obviously worked because the album has been released to great reviews and offers to play tours and festivals, including the highly respected End of the Road Festival in Dorset.

It has received great reviews, including Wire Magazine and is featured in Loud and Quiet magazine’s 7 best albums of Feb 19. Loud and Quiet said:

“Weird, wired, and anything but unlistenable, ‘We Love You’ is a lesson in how to make idiosyncrasy accessible – danceable, even.”

The band have been around long enough and respected enough to have recorded several sessions for the late great John Peel, but the new album is gaining them new fans such as BBC 6 Music’s Marc Riley who invited them in for a live session at the trail end of 2018 and has asked them to return and perform again to promote the release.

The album is out now on Gringo Records as Vinyl, CD or Digital Download as well the usual streaming services.

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