Kodaline are going back to basics with their new album: ‘It’s a breath of fresh air’

Kodaline are one of Ireland’s most successful rock bands and have hit the charts the world over – but even if you don’t think you’ve heard of them, you’ve definitely heard their music.

The band’s music has popped up in films and TV series ever since their debut EP in 2012, even soundtracking one of the UK’s most popular series.

Their 2013 single All I Want was featured in season nine of Grey’s Anatomy, the soundtrack of The Fault In Our Stars, season five of The Vampire Diaries, The Royals and Catfish, while In A Perfect World is the theme song for Gogglebox.

But while singer Steve Garrigan thinks it’s ‘great’ to have their music put out there, he admits it can be rather offputting hearing your tunes set to an emotional big screen scene.

Speaking to Metro.co.uk, the 31-year-old said: ‘We don’t really pay that much attention to them when they come out. It’s very off-putting. I went to see The Fault In Our Stars in the cinema and I was really into the movie, then as soon as All I Want came on, I was completely taken out of it. It’s just weird.

‘I think it’s great. No matter what way your music is getting to people, once it gets to them, it’s great. We’ve never been afraid of our songs being used for TV and movies. If anything, it’s helped us hugely. Especially in America, our songs have been used in a few TV shows over there, and people have come to our shows and said “oh I heard your song on this show”. It’s just another outlet for people to listen to music. But we never write music specifically for TV or movies. We get an email asking if it can be used, and we’re like, “ok, fair enough”, then you forget about it, and months later, it’s on it.’

This promotion via heartwrenching hospital dramas has meant that Kodaline – made up of Steve, Mark Prendergast, Vincent May and Jason Boland – have a devoted fanbase not just in Ireland, where their three albums have hit number one, but all over the world, and seven years on, Steve is still taken aback by the love.

‘In the last few years, we’ve kind of come to terms with the fact we have fans for life,’ he said. We’ve spoke to people at shows who’ve said this song has shaped this part of their life, and this album has meant so much to them when they were going through a good time or a bad time. That for me is more validating than a chart position or playing a massive show, to know that what we’re doing is genuinely affecting people. That’s the most gratifying.

‘I don’t know if we’ll always have that fanbase, but they’re incredibly loyal. Wherever we’re playing a show, anywhere in the world, people will come, which blows our mind. This year we’re going to South Africa, Vietnam and South Korea to play festivals. We did shows in south-east Asia this year and it’s just mind-blowing – you go to somewhere you’ve never been before, and there’s been people at the airport.’

Good news for those fans is that the lads are releasing a new record in the coming months, a year after the release of their third album Politics of Living. Going back to their Dublin roots, Kodaline have shunned state of the art studios for their kitchen and have begun working in house to make music that sounds truly Kodaline – and Steve is hoping this new attitude transfers to their upcoming tour, which hits the UK in November.

‘At the moment we’re working on new music again and we’re planning to release a new EP before the tour,’ he explained. ‘We want to design a whole new show, which we haven’t really done before – we’ve just gone out and played the songs. But this time, we wanted to put a lot more time into how it looks, how it feels, how the set runs. You can get so caught up with playing the songs from this album and that album and trying to please this person and that person, so now we’re trying to pick a set that we love, and it’s really exciting.

‘We’re playing new songs before they’re released, which we’ve also never done, and we designed the show with my housemate, so everything’s kind of been brought back to in-house. We’ve stopped working with other producers and other songwriters and it’s literally just the four of us in a kitchen in Donabate.

‘We have this big recording studio and the kitchen is where we’ve wrote and recorded most of the music. It’s a monumental waste of money,’ Steve laughed.

‘It’s such a breath of fresh air. We just got caught up with thinking we have to go to LA with this person because they did this song, and we have to go to London to rent a studio there – but the results we’re getting with the four of us are so much better. And for the first time we ever, we have a 9-5 schedule, Monday to Friday, which was almost unheard of five years ago. Everything just feels great at the moment.

‘The first album we did, we wrote the whole thing by ourselves, and this album feels the exact same. A lot of the songs we’re making now feel like our earlier songs. We got so caught up in the production, but now we spend more time talking about the lyrics. The songs we’re making now feel more Kodaline than the songs we’ve done in the past.’