‘The Maccabees are entering the prime of their musical lives’ - NME

The Maccabees will play The Academy on Saturday, 3rd March with support from Irish band We Cut Corners. Tickets €25.00 including booking fee are sale now. The band released their highly anticipated third studio album 'Given To The Wild' earlier this month on Fiction Records.

The five piece from London - Orlando Weeks, Hugo White, Felix White, Rupert Jarvis and Sam Doyle – spent two years writing and recording the follow-up to 2009’s critically-lauded ‘Wall Of Arms’. Having previously written as a collective, ‘Given To The Wild’ saw the band explore a new approach to songwriting. Avoiding the studio, each member retreated to their South London homes to develop ideas individually. Once these sketched ideas began to take form, the band took them into their new home – a shambolic rehearsal space and recording studio near them that they discovered had been previously christened ‘The Drugstore’ by its former owners Jesus and Mary Chain. From here the songs evolved into the thirteen tracks that would make up ‘Given To The Wild’, an epic and beguiling masterpiece of distorted pop, psychedelia and soulful guitar wig outs. It is the band’s most adventurous work to date.

Taking sonic inspiration from a disparate collection of musical peers such as The Stone Roses, Kate Bush, Talk Talk and David Bowie, ‘Given To The Wild’ finds the band exploring new territory. Television and Thin Lizzy-inspired guitar hooks pop out of washed-out soundscapes (‘Child’, ‘Feel to Follow’), where programmed loops and phrases are blended against the band backdrop (‘Ayla’, ‘Go’, ‘Grew Up At Midnight’), and where they write their most complete pop music yet (‘Pelican’, ‘Went Away’).

Tim Goldsworthy (LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, DFA, Unkle) and Bruno Ellingham were brought in to record the first part of the record. The session was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales. They spent a month there before enlisting friend and songwriter Jag Jago from Ghost of a Thousand to engineer the songs back in their own studio. Final touches were made including placing some guitars and programming from the first bedroom demos back in.

Following a sold out show in 2010 as part of the NME Awards Tour, the The Maccabees return to The Academy on Saturday 3rd March.

Oxygen.ie have two pairs of tickets to give away for the show. To enter click here now

NB - Entrants will need to be registered Oxygen.ie members. Click here to sign up