You might not know where Mohnton, PA is, but everyone knows that square on the Monopoly board labeled “Reading Railroad.” That’s where electro-rock foursome InnerPartySystem hail from—a small town right near Reading, PA, the place Monopoly named a section of their game after. The band, who released their debut EP in November, is preparing to reveal their first full-length (self-titled) to the world on Sept. 9. Drummer Jared Piccone discusses the record, the band’s future and what it’s like to sleep in a garage.
When did you finish the album?
Well that’s a hard one to say because it kind of trickled out. We got a bulk of it done a while ago, maybe four to six months ago. We ended up writing a ton of mid-tempo and slower songs and we don’t do that very much. We’re actually a heavier band, especially live. So I think that’s what held it up is that we wanted to write a couple more heavy hitters. We probably were getting stuff finished up until only about six weeks ago. ‘Hard Fire,’ which is on the EP, was re-recorded at our house and just got sent off to get mixed.
What was the motivation for using a bunch of different producers instead of just one?
Just being new and not knowing any better! Not knowing what we liked and what we didn’t like. We started this band and started recording songs on pirated computer software in our apartment. We kept trying to continue doing things on our own but it got to the point where we couldn’t keep the sound up ourselves. Not having a lot of money, it was a lot of like ‘Oh, my manager knows this guy’ and ‘Oh, I know a guy who knows another guy.’ It just turned out that the guys they knew were really cool. They were bigger guys and friends with people we worked with so they kind of cut us deals.
That’s why there’s three songs with this guy and three songs with that guy and two songs with another guy. It was nice because we got a taste of what everybody does and maybe we can make more educated decisions next time about what we want to do.
Did you notice that each one had a distinct producing style?
Absolutely. Some of the record we recorded on our own and just sent it to get mixed so we didn’t actually go there. For Alan Moulder, we just sent the files online so we didn’t really get to meet him. But you could see how he worked when we got the songs back.
Does the record still feel cohesive even though so many different people worked on it?
Absolutely. We’re a band of producers, and there’s a lot of opinions. That was one of the concerns early on, that we wanted to make sure it was uniform and all flowed the same, had the same tone. We wanted to make one solid full record. But we’re all really happy with it.
