MoM: How have the band members been handling the lack of touring and even the lack of practicing in 2020?
Lighthammer: We were extremely lucky that before everything locked down, we’d gotten the opportunity to play two really great gigs: Free For All Festival in January with the ever excellent D-Teez, The Woodsman, and the incredible Urfe, who we’d never seen before, and the Smash Fest at the end of February. Both of those shows managed to tide us over. We’d also literally managed to record Galaxy just before lockdown too, so we had that to concentrate on; back and forth with rough mixes, all the behind the scenes stuff that goes into putting out an album, etc. If anything, lockdown allowed us to really focus, as we all had that much more spare time to get in touch with people and spam the album everywhere. We finally had the time to do all of the boring, less fun parts of being in a band.
MoM: Were there any gigs/shows/events that you were particularly gutted to have missed?
Lighthammer: HubFest was a particularly sore thing to miss, because that’s always an excellent event to play, full of atmosphere, and is just a celebration of everything that makes Cardiff’s music scene so good. The band is still quite young, so we only have the one HubFest under our belt, and we were looking forward to climbing our way a bit higher up the totem pole, so to speak.
MoM: What did you have to do to adapt to the pandemic situation, i.e digital releases, videos, livestreams?
Lighthammer: We’ve actually only just started getting into the whole livestreaming thing now, just as we’ve been able to start practicing together again. We hadn’t managed to be in a room together playing music for eight months. But in terms of adapting to the end of the world, we did throw a lot more effort into digital releases, and just being on top of that. Just organically spamming our music out there as much as possible until people were sick of us talking about it. Despite not being able to gig and not even able to rehearse, this year has seen the most sustained period of growth for us. More people are listening, more people have heard us, and we’re getting radio play, admittedly on small independent stations. But it all counts. And we’ve even crossed the pond, getting radio play in Arizona, Ohio, Montreal and London Ontario. There were even times when we’d find out that a radio station had played us after it had happened! Notifications waiting for us that we’ve been featured on another show. And all of that was just us having the time to pester people with our music. That’s how we adapted.
MoM: Your single, with added remixes has been doing really well, (we even broke our rule and reviewed it), was it pleasing to hear good feedback for it and the two remixes?
Lighthammer: It absolutely was! Whenever we release things we want to make sure that you get a little more bang for your buck, so you didn’t just get ‘the single.’ Plus, we felt like it’d be a bit cheeky not to give a little something extra seeing as the single only exists to correct a Distrokid upload error on the album. And we were super fortunate to have Jvdah on hand wanting to remix things for us. It was a risk putting out remixes, because maybe people wouldn’t care. But it’s been received well, so we’re happy!
MoM: What are the plans for Lighthammer going forward in 2021? (obviously pandemic permitting)
Lighthammer: At the moment, we just want to play shows, shows, shows. And we want to get further afield. There are some options opening up for playing in the North of England and Scotland, and that’s going to be fun, Covid permitting. We’d also really love to do a few more festivals that are further afield too. The other big plan is to get Part 2 of the Galaxy Trilogy, Andromeda, recorded. We’ve been sitting on a largely completely written second album and while Galaxy is still new and fresh in people’s minds, we’re itching to get the second part of the story out to people, and it’ll be so satisfying to talk to people who like what we’ve done so far, and see the rest of the narrative unfold for them.
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