Outfit - Performance: Exclusive album stream
It took two years and three different locations to conceptualise, write and record Outfit's debut album Performance. The quintet formed while living in a mansion in Liverpool called The Lodge, a hedonistic party house owned by an eccentric lawyer named Roland. The claustrophobic and incessant fun of The Lodge meant that the band's ears were filled with a multitude of musical influences and they began to make indie music fusing stoned ambiance, techno, house and spooked, paranoid sonics.
The band moved to London for a brief period after signing to independent label Double Denim, and started writing the tracks that would make up Performance. They then headed back to Liverpool to self-produce the record; living and working in an abandoned block of flats once used as a shelter for asylum seekers. As a result of being left to their own devices in a big barren building, their imaginations could run wild, and Performance is smattered with samples collected from their surroundings - the click-clack sound on House On Fire is a DVD player's draw being closed and Nothing Big's crunch and thwack noises are footsteps through snow and skateboards smacking on concrete. Snooker balls and a door creaking can also be detected.
According to Outfit's frontman Andrew Hunt, his band "want to take their listener somewhere else and make music that's evocative and not down to earth musically".