The Plastics are gearing up for the launch of their first full-length studio album. They launch Shark at the Assembly on July 31. The band consists of Pascal Righini (vocals and guitar), Sasha Righini (drums), Karl Rohloff (bass) and Arjuna Kohlstock (lead guitar).
"People can expect a cool party," Righini says. "The Assembly's going to look a bit different than it usually does. We're playing with Captain Stu, Holiday Murray, DJ Haasbroek and DJ Lapse. We'll be playing almost all of the new material apart from maybe one song which has a string quartet on the album. We'll see if we can pull that off."
The band scored a major coup by enlisting international record producer Gordon Raphael who has worked with The Strokes, Skin, Regina Spektor among others. The collaboration was the result of an optimistic e-mail sent by Righini.
"Around this time last year, we were on our way back from Jeffrey's Bay and were talking about our favourite bands and who produced their first albums. Gordon Raphael broke so many bands and we thought he was the perfect one to get us set on the next stage of the band's life," Righini says.
"I just mailed him saying, 'Hey, we're an indie rock band from Cape Town, South Africa, we're planning on doing an album, we love your work, we would love to work with you and what does it take?'."
He wrote back personally the next day saying, "Wow, South Africa! I saw the BLK JKS recently and was impressed and I'm interested in coming to check South Africa out." The BLK JKS really helped us out by being good. We thrashed out the details and there you go."
Righini is most pleased with the fact that the band has broken new ground for itself with the album.
"If you want to move forward, you have to tear the script up at some point and try something new and challenging," Righini says. "We feel like this album is a good indication of both where we're at as a band and what we're capable of. Our plan now is to raise our live show to another level to match the progress we've made in the studio. We've been fortunate to see some amazing places and meet some good people through our music. We'd like to keep doing that for as long as possible."
A national tour is planned for later in the year. The Plastics will play live on Highveld Stereo's Homebrew on August 8.
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