“I feel like our society and culture, people right now are so obsessed with calling anything cool 80s or 90s, like you can almost replace the word cool!” For Paul Klein, LANY is the perfect antidote to the nostalgia-driven world we currently live in. And we just so happen to agree.
“Friday, wine and the internet” pretty much sums up the way we close out each and every week, so a band that can croon about this over sultry synth grooves is always going to be one we want to get to know. Welcome into frame LANY, the hook-packed LA trio whose ability to make pop suave again has seen them become the next heirs to that throne of future anthem kings. But don’t think this is any old new pop wave, LANY’s story is one that almost never came together.
Frontman Paul Klein had met fellow members Jake Goss and Les Priest years earlier when the three of them stumbled into each other in Nashville around Belmont University. “We just became friends y’know? We never talked about doing music together, we never tried and was never really a thing we talked about,” explains Paul, enjoying a rare day off back in Santa Monica after an extensive run of dates around the world. “I moved to LA and through a series of events I was so close to just giving up completely on music – it just seemed it wasn’t really working out, and in a last ditch effort I called Jake.”
[sc name=”pull” text=”I don’t think we sound like anything else in the world right now.”]
While Paul had headed into the LA wilderness, Jake and Les had been working on tracks together, not knowing they were pulling together the foundational parts of the LANY puzzle. As Paul flew back into town, it clicked and things quickly headed in a far more promising direction.
“In those first four days we worked on music together as a trio, we wrote our first two songs called ‘Hot Lights’ and ‘Walk Away’ and we put them up on the internet. We had zero followers and everything and within six days we got our first email from a record label, and it’s been growing non-stop ever since.”
Still oblivious to what exactly they’d created, Paul flew back to LA – before demand continued to knock on their door and once again, the trio found themselves working on songs in Nashville. Producing tracks such as ‘BRB’, ‘Made In Hollywood’ and ‘ILYSB’ with the latter in particular getting mouse-pads clicking, that body of work finally sealed the deal on LANY. “After that moment where ‘ILYSB’ took off, which was pretty unexpected, we all looked at each other and said ‘Wait, we’re actually a band – this is real’, so Jake and Les moved into my tiny one bed apartment in LA and just worked and worked from there,” reflects Paul.
It’s hard to imagine such pristine and effortless pop to emerge from such cramped living conditions, but working off of an old Dell computer and a lot of passion, LANY formulated two stunning EPs that have grabbed the attention of many more admirers. The smooth vocals and chilling synths that accompanied tracks on both ‘I Loved You’ and ‘Make Out’ found themselves a rabid audience, and lead to them recently taking that arena-ready sound to those very stages supporting Ellie Goulding on her massive UK tour.
“I think our favourite part of it all, was just how our songs sounded in such enormous rooms – like we really saw their full potential there,” notes Paul. “Realistically, we were playing almost two hours before Ellie was so those rooms were not full of people looking to discover a new band – it was a challenge, but it taught me how to be a frontman in all situations. Most bands will never get to play two nights at the O2 so getting to do that is an incredible honour.” [sc name=”stopper”]