New Madrid grows on the road

Athens’ psych rockers talk new album and live presence

The moment the swirling lights and billowing smoke fill the room, it’s clear that New Madrid is a band that thrives on stage. The Athens-based psych rock four-piece has excelled in many different settings since its members started playing together as teenagers. But all of the group’s members didn’t even live in Athens until after finishing their first album, Yardboat. “We all lived in different places and were kind of a recording project, a theoretical band,” says singer/guitarist Phil McGill.

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McGill, along with current members Graham Powers (guitar), Ben Hackett (bass), and Alex Woolley (drums), started out by sending music back and forth, but soon found a home in Athens. The group also found an ally in producer David Barbe (Drive-By Truckers, Son Volt, Sugar). “In a lot of ways he’s just an extension of our ethos,” McGill says. “He’s very hands-off; the four of us do a lot of the decision making in regards to recording, but he captures it.”

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New Madrid’s DIY, try-anything spirit has given the group a sound that jumps between influences from song to song, and that grows more intricate with each new release. As much as New Madrid’s intentions were planted in the recording process, the group found much of its growth on the road, sharing bills with fellow Southern psych rock stalwarts Futurebirds, Diamond Rugs, and All Them Witches.

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In many ways New Madrid cut its teeth on the road. The group has been cutting records there, too. Earlier this year, the band recorded a five-song live EP, Dawn Teeth Rattling, chronicling performances captured during a run of West Coast dates. The record draws from Yardboat material such as the reverb-heavy “Magnetoception” and fan favorite “Country Moon” while delving into Sunswimmer with songs such as the janglier “Manners.”

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“The live record has more of the variances of the energy of where we’re playing, what kind of crowd there is,” McGill says. “Our songs always morph as we reinterpret them.”

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The band recently announced that its third full-length, magnetkingmagnetqueen, is due out in April via New West imprint Normaltown Records. And while the creative process has been pretty constant for the band, Dawn Teeth Rattling encapsulates the way New Madrid moves forward. “The live record was just kind of an experiment, and it ended up coming back around,” McGill says.

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For the forthcoming record, the group used the live rig to record at Dogwood Lodge near Chattanooga in addition to the sessions recorded at Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction. The record has its differences from the band’s previous works — shorter songs and a longer track list in addition to the varied recording settings. But they’ve managed to blend its strengths with their original intentions in the recording process. “It’s just us playing live in a room,” McGill says.

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As each round of shows reveals a more confident group of musicians, it’s promising that New Madrid harnesses the same dynamic with its studio recordings. As a band that formed around the idea of producing innovative content as a recording project, every step forward on stage only elevates the group’s body of work as a whole.