Rudimental's Amir Amor speaks to Rachel Bache about the band's new album and Ed Sheeran connection.
Timeout: We The Generation is finally out - how excited are you about that right now?
Amir Amor: It's been two years in the making. We've been all around the world working on it - it's definitely been a journey. I'm super excited; I can't actually believe that it's out now! For us, we didn't take six months off to make this record, we continued touring after Home came out. So between gigs we'd get a studio and record it, sometimes I'd work on a tour bus, some of the tracks on the album I actually made on a tour bus in America, but we always bring them back to East London to finish it here.
How would you describe the sound of his album?
It's definitely got a lot of the up-beat festival madness that we're known for - but there's a depth to this album - the soulful side of it has come out a lot more, I think it's the best work we've done in that sense. There's a new generation of singers and artists that we're bringing through on this album, combined with the rave culture and the influences that we grew up with and also the older legends like Parliament Funk and Bobby Womack. We had a lot of offers to work with big pop singers but, it's a lot more interesting for us to work with fresh talent, it's like having a pallet of colours to choose from.
You mentioned creating a lot of songs while on tour - what is the recording process like for you guys? Was there anything that stood out?
It really varies, I mean, one of the songs is called New Day and we did it with Bobby Womack - we met Bobby on Later ... With Jools Holland - a TV show in the UK - a couple years ago, and he was performing and we were performing music from the first album.
He came up to us after the show and he was like, "Man you guys rocked" and "that was amazing" and all this stuff and we were like "What the hell? That's Bobby Womack, that's pretty crazy!" so, it was just an amazing experience. We exchanged numbers and emails and kept in touch over a period of a year - year-and-a-half, or whatever it was and just threw ideas back and forth.
We were on a tour bus in Arizona and the tour bus had broken down, the generator had gone, it was sweltering heat, we were not feeling that inspired. This is actually a studio tour bus, it's not that glamorous, but it's a recording studio built into a bus - and so we're sitting in there without any power, just with laptops and we got an email from Bobby's wife, after he passed away with his request for us to finish a song that he had started called New Day Coming.
She sent us the vocal and it was, lyrically it encapsulated how we were feeling at this time making oursecond album, how things were changing for us and it was such a poignant moment. I had this guitar riff that I'd been playing around with, a long time actually, before Rudimental, and I still had it in my head but I'd never recorded it.
I was just jamming and I played it and it happened to be in the same key and the same tempo as Bobby's vocals that we were playing out of a speaker and we jammed this idea together on the bus and ended up with this song called New Day which is on We The Generation and is one of the last, if not the last song he worked on before he passed away. So it really varies how we make our music but that was one of the moments that really stands out for me.
Lay It All On Me has been doing really well. What was it like to work with Ed Sheeran?
He's from a different world musically, but we just get along really well. Ed and I met at a party many years ago before [we] got signed. We exchanged details and then didn't really do anything for a long time. But then he got signed and he got massive and we got signed and we started doing alright and we bumped into each other in LA and he said to come down to the studio.
So we went and ended up writing five-six tracks together and one of those tracks was Bloodstream. A lot of people think it's a remix but actually Bloodstream on We The Generation is the original version that we wrote together that day. We love whenever we can get into a room with someone who's seemingly completely different and make something that's bigger than the sum of all of us together. So with Ed we got together again and we made Lay It All On Me - that's another really important song for us.
And now you're coming back to New Zealand with him.
Touring with him has been amazing, I'm pretty sure he brings us out on tour because he wants to party - we have a lot of fun. We can't wait to come back with Ed - we love New Zealand, and I'm not just saying that. It's such a beautiful place; it was one of the few places that we got to hang around.
We came down and did the Rhythm and Vines festival and had a few days to just hang out on the beach. [We got to see] one of our favourite bands Fat Freddy's Drop and hung out with those guys for a bit. Whenever they come to London we hang out here. We just love genuinely coming there and we can't wait to come back with Ed. It's going to be a big show - we always bring a lot of energy. There are 12 of us on stage - it's a big energetic experience, it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun.
• Rudimental open for Ed Sheeran December 12, Mt Smart Stadium and play later that night at the Powerstation in Auckland.
