Pacific discuss upcoming gigs, the Manchester music scene and their latest single ‘Spiral’.
Pacific are the piano-indie rockers on the rise whose recent singles have been Apple music playlisted, made it onto Manchester United matchday playlists, and saw radio support from Radio 1, Amazing and BBC Intro. The Mancunian fourpiece have just unleashed their third single of 2021, the gritty and emotionally charged ‘Spiral’ which is available to stream now.
Would you like to say a few words to introduce yourself to our readers?
Anthony: “I’m Anthony and I’m the lead singer of indie-rock band Pacific. We hail from Manchester and we’re a fourpiece band, the piano is our signature element to our sound. We’ve released three singles now this year and we have some more to come, out latest release ‘Spiral’ came out on Friday and it’s had a really good response so far over the weekend which is amazing to see!”
How would you describe your sound to someone hasn’t listened to Pacific before?
Anthony: “We’re quite energetic, upbeat and cinematic, and it’s all centred around the piano so its quite a heavy but clean piano indie-rock sound. It’s accompanied by synths, lots of high-level lead guitar and drums, so its very arena sounding which might not be the coolest thing at the moment but its very much the kind of music we want to be writing. Our influences are all noughties bands, we’re all aged anything from 25-27 so that kind of music really influenced our sound. So, if you’re into Muse, Kasabian, The Amazons, Nothing But Thieves, that kind of stuff then you’ll be into us.”
You have just released a brand-new track called ‘Spiral’ which I loved by the way! What was your inspiration writing it?
Anthony: “I wrote some parts of ‘Spiral’ 5 or 6 years ago then other parts quite recently, it’s kind of a Frankenstein’s monster of ideas. I write all of the songs with my brother Dan who is the bassist and we always seem to do this thing where we play a really strong part of a song, leave it then come back to it and think ‘this goes really well with this new bit we’ve written’. I think lyrically ‘Spiral’ is about all of our experiences during the pandemic, and what everyone has been experiencing during this saga since March last year in terms of getting out of this humdrum of situations we have no control over. It’s the right song for the right time and it works really well with our last single ‘Alibi’, they both kind of marry together, it’s only now we’re starting to find what makes us stand out.”
Did you find it difficult recording and releasing music over lockdown?
Anthony: “It’s been strange, my brother Dan and I have been writing the songs together in our flat in Manchester so the songs are really familiar to us, but because we hadn’t seen Dave and Drew, our guitarist and our drummer, before recording ‘Alabi’ and ‘Puzzle’ it was quite difficult to record for the rest of the guys because they were very much coming in with fresh ears. It was actually a really refreshing and interesting way to record because the song in essence could change and adapt in the studio. We work with a guy called David Watts who is based up in The Chairworks in Castleford, we’ve worked with him since ‘Idols’ which came out last year and he’s really great at enhancing the sound and making the most out of the four instruments. Its proven a really interesting challenge like all of lockdown has to be honest, having to adapt and stay active with no gigs and stuff like that the singles have become content for us and they’ve really given the fans something to keep engaged with. The main things that Dan and I have been doing are ‘Live In Lockdown’ where every Sunday on our Instagram story we’re getting fans to ask questions and request songs that we’ll learn on the fly, we absolutely loved it and obviously we don’t want lockdown and covid to continue but we want an excuse to bring it back!”
Recently you’ve been championed by Manchester United, how does it feel to have that kind of support behind you from your hometown club?
Anthony: “Absolutely incredible to be honest! They’ve used three or four of our songs but the main than that Manchester United have done is the goal of the season, all of their nomination videos and all of the videos on Instagram of the goals, they used our song ‘Clarity’ across all of those videos and it was absolutely incredible. They even very kindly tagged us in the caption, it was brilliant. It’s great to have that support and our sound fits with their whole anthemic stadium football vibe so I think we’ve found a really good platform for out music.”
The Manchester music scene is full of great bands and artists at the moment, who are some of your favourites?
Anthony: “I love Blossoms who are based in Stockport, there are loads of great bands coming through! There is a guy called Joey Newey who happens to be the lead singer of Kashmere who I absolutely love, I think their music is great and hopefully we’ll be able to share some stages when we come out of covid. We’ve met once or twice on some bills, there was one gig in Warrington but we didn’t know each other that well. Since then, we’ve worked really closely with Joey over all these singles over lockdown and he’s made some really amazing visuals for all our songs. Their biggest singles are ‘Lucid’ and ‘Gravity’ and they’ve had some new releases recently, I’d definitely recommend everyone to check out Kashmere.”
We heard you guys have a reputation for your explosive live sets, what would you say is the best live gig that you’ve ever played?
Anthony: “I’d say it was our last Manchester show in 2019 which was a sold-out headline show at the Night People. I’d definitely say that because it was probably our most recent hometown headline show and I remember it came together really well, we played a lot of our new songs that had recently came out in that year.”
And you’re set to return to live performance this Autumn, are you looking forward to being back on stage?
Anthony: “It can’t come soon enough. Apart from the socially distanced gig we had in Liverpool on April 29th we haven’t played live. We’ve announced a sleugh of dates in autumn from October to early December but I will be some additional dates. It’s going to be great and I really can’t wait.”
You’ve been in virtual high demand over the past year too, how have you found playing livestreamed gigs? Do you think they’ll stick around in a post-covid world?
Anthony: “We really want to carry on doing virtual gigs, we’ve got one coming up on Wednesday its Chester Live which used to be quite a big festival over in Cheshire. We’re going to do an acoustic sort of setup which will be nice, we’ve never actually done a virtual gig all together which is interesting so we really want to carry on. It really has brought the fans to the centre of it all so they can decide what songs we play, we grew so much more in Lockdown maybe more so than if it didn’t happen and we’d carried on doing gigs and not thinking outside the box we might not have grown our fanbase so much so we definitely want to keep on doing this sort of thing, its just about finding the right idea and the right fit.”
And lastly, what to you hope to accomplish next as a band?
Anthony: “We want to release three more songs this year after ‘Spiral’, and the next big thing for us is getting tour ready. Its very much just constantly writing and jumping on the piano trying to come up with the next song, we work really well under pressure. But the main three things are writing, recording and getting gig ready.”