Splashh started out in unconventional circumstances. Sasha Carlson, the band’s lead singer and my interviewee, started writing songs with his buddy Toto Vivian back in sunny Byron Bay, Australia. But they only really took off after an impromptu relocation to East London in February 2012.
It didn’t take long after that, explains Carlson. “We put up a couple of tracks online and it started to gather momentum and we were like ‘fuck, we don’t have a band!’” The duo had to start recruiting quickly, so they got on the phone home. “We didn’t have a drummer, so Jacob was flown over from New Zealand a week before the first show”. With the addition of Jacob Moore on drums and Thomas Beal on bass, Splashh, whose name apparently came about as a desire to be more easily found on Google, were formed.
They’re certainly not making your average indie guitar music either. No really, I promise, they don’t sound anything like Noah & the Whale! Carlson has difficulty describing their sound, but he fumbles with some pretty great words before settling on “ambient, kind of shoegazey, distorted kind of stuff” and citing influences from My Bloody Valentine to The Rolling Stones, who they’re supporting in Hyde Park this summer, something Carlson says he can barely believe. Speaking in further detail about the band’s upcoming debut album, Comfort, he talks about how “We thought about the track listing quite hard. The first half of the record is more the singles and the B-sides and the second half is the groovy half of the album.”
Excitingly, Splashh, who are appearing better and better-travelled by the second, have just got back from a tour of America. Surely they have some classic rock ‘n’ roll stories? “In America we really got down on drinking these things called fireballs which are like a cinnamon whisky shot,” Carlson enthuses. “We played this wicked party in Dartmouth University. That was great, we played beer pong and everything”. You’d think returning to a one-day festival in Leeds wouldn’t exactly live up to that, but Carlson remains ever-enthusiastic, saying he was “surprised” at the large crowd which gathered to see them in the Leeds University Refectory. The crowd certainly seemed to enjoy the show, though none as much as the two girls in matching denim jackets (reading ‘Splashh’ on the back) who manically sang along to every song.
By way of advice to upcoming musicians, Carlson had this to say: “Just keep writing, keep yourself busy, don’t say no to things. If an opportunity presents itself, take it because you can’t really say no in this business.”
When asked the all-important question of whether he’d rather know the exact time and place of his own death or the time and place of everyone around him, he went for the latter, explaining that the former “would freak [him] out a bit”.
Splashh’s debut album, Comfort, is released on June 3rd,
