For each of us, the completion of “El Prado” I’m sure ignites different recollections of a difficult season we were all going through, and are largely still going through – even as we prepare to tour it in the coming months and beyond.

“El Prado” was recorded in five houses, three of them under Californian skies, but this process was also kept company by a European winter and a New Zealand summer.

We produced it all ourselves with help from one of my best friends and roommate, Michael Guy Chislett.  The songs were all written between November 2010 and November 2013.  We spent a large part of the last two years playing them out, and learning how to make them feel right on the road.

For me “El Prado” is a literal album.  It’s a collection of moments, journeys, and personal epiphanies.  Creating it was therapeutic, and a reasonable place to escape to at the time.

Now, if I listen back through from beginning to end, it’s not unlike the feeling you might draw from seeing a box of photographs fall out of your closet, or chancing upon an old home video.

The various feelings, emotions and victories it conjures inside me are too many to explain, but the collective hope that I now feel is present was most decidedly missing back when we started writing these tunes in 2010.

Perhaps it was that we all needed something to wake up for… perhaps it was that along the way we realized we’re never going to run out of questions to ask.  Whatever it was, it took a year longer to finish than we’d planned, but it’s now landed in such a way that I not only feel proud, but also that we couldn’t have completed this chapter any faster if we’d tried.


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This post was written by Bradley Hanan Carter of NO, as part of their Takeover of Indie Music Filter.  Find the band on twitter here.

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