A quick word with Tom Larkin from Shihad

Shihad have gone back to their original name and just recorded their sixth album, Love Is The New Hate. This time round no one is telling them what to do or what to sound like.

You wrote some of the new album, in the remote spot of Ngamatea. Why?

Ngamatea is in between Napier and Taihape and without giving away the exact location, it's on the dirt road that connects those two towns. The house was designed by a guy called John Scott who wasn't a trained architect, but he put houses together based on his own instinct. The amazing thing is it gives you all these vistas on to the landscape, on to the mountains and the volcanic region. We had hit a brick wall and were boring ourselves silly, and when we got to Ngamatea we started writing off instinct again, and bouncing off each other. The isolation allowed us to focus fully on the music because for the first few days a cow had chewed through the phone line so we couldn't get on the internet and we couldn't be rung. All we did was eat food, play music and build the fire, with the landscape as inspiration.

So the new album is unique in that it was created totally differently from your previous albums?

It was more a rekindling of how we made some of our favourite stuff. It was an unlearning process and we got back to that core of the band being able to spark off each other. It was like jams would just flow out and we'd capture them.

Was the Pacifier Live album the real Shihad sound coming to the fore once again after the Pacifier album?

Definitely. We were a band who had always been about instinct and energy. The thing with the Pacifier album was that we spent so long making it that we lost all perspective of where the energy was at. Having said that though, we set out to make a record of arena rock songs really. We kind of did that but we lost a lot of what the band was in terms of power. And I think the live album, it's like smack, there it is, and you get to hear those [Pacifier] songs as we imagined them.

What's your take on the name change back to Shihad?

We basically [expletive] up. We didn't have our heads screwed on. We felt we'd robbed ourselves of our identity. Going back to Shihad was driven by reconnecting to how we should write music and shouldn't over-think things and music should be allowed to flow. We believed in the reasons for changing our name but I can't tell you how grounded it feels to be back to Shihad.

What happened with your US record company?

We signed with Arista who are a hip-hop label and that's a very pop-driven genre. They were trying to get into rock and they didn't understand how rock works. You've gotta take a [rock] band and you've gotta have them for three or four albums, and you've gotta build them step by step. But they just threw [Pacifier] out there with a tonne of money behind it and watched what happened for 10 minutes and when it wasn't going off like a pop act they just cut it.

What have you been doing since getting back from recording the album in Vancouver?

Just recovering. That's it. Listening back to the album. The first single, Alive, is out there and that's getting an interesting reaction and it's good to have something fresh out there. Apart from that, just resting and I love going to see bands live, even though I just saw the most average PJ Harvey show I've seen in my life. It bummed me out because two of her shows I've regarded as emotionally life-changing. She's gone and got a rock band and she's lost all the subtlety and the intimacy.

* Shihad will be playing Brewers Stadium of Rock, Mt Maunganui, Dec 26; Butlers Reef, New Plymouth, Dec 27; Waihi Beach Hotel, Waihi, Dec 29; Shed 2 Street Party, Napier, Dec 30; and Big Day Out, Ericsson Stadium, Auckland, Jan 21.