We booked three weeks in a converted grain store outside Ghent. The acoustics were wrong in a way that turned out to be the whole point.

The room fought back

The first two days were spent trying to make the space behave. Blankets on the north wall, a wall of cases where the flutter echo was worst, the drum kit moved four times. None of it worked, because the problem was not treatable — the ceiling was concrete, curved, and roughly the length of a delay you would never choose on purpose.

On the third morning we gave up and pointed a pair of ribbons at the ceiling instead of trying to keep it out. The echo stopped being a defect and started being a part. Almost everything on the record has some amount of that room in it, and the two songs that do not sound noticeably smaller.

You spend the first week trying to make the room disappear and the second week realising the room is the arrangement.

Live takes, mostly

Seven of the nine songs are full-band takes with no overdubs beyond a vocal pass and one guitar. Not out of principle — it was simply faster than fixing the bleed, which was unfixable anyway. Everything leaked into everything. Editing a drum fill meant editing the bass and both guitars along with it, so we stopped editing.

What that costs you is precision. What it buys is that the band is audibly listening to each other, and you cannot fake that afterwards with a grid.