Rhondda garage rock champs Chroma have a 6 Music Festival Fringe gig and a long-awaited debut album in the pipeline. Buzz’s Emma Way spoke to frontwoman Katie Hall, drummer Zac Mather and John Hywel Morris from PRS For Music – who have just made Chroma ambassadors for their Back To Live Music Venue Prize.

Read the full conversation, or watch the video, below.

Does it feel like everyone’s going back to a level playing field in live music at the moment? What are your thoughts on gigging again?

Katie Hall, Chroma: We’ve been cooped up working on new material so we’ve had the time to catch up with stuff, create a project and now it feels like time to go out and play venues and start the full kind of circus again. A lot of grassroots venues that we’ve played in before have disappeared, or gotten rid of staff – it’s been a really difficult time for them. They’ve had so many challenges just to be able to sustain themselves as a business, but there’s definitely an appetite for live music out there at the moment.

You’re the official Welsh ambassadors for the 2022 PRS Music Venue Prize. What would you like to see venues improving as the people that visit these places so often?

Zac Mather, Chroma: Everybody in the music industry from top to bottom is experiencing the same thing, where we’re in a different landscape to anything anyone has ever been in before. Everyone’s making decisions now that are probably more difficult than they have ever been, so it’s difficult for developing artists coming through now – they’re facing the next possible two years of festival lineups, gigs, all being rescheduled. There’s not that much freedom for venues to take risks.

It’s really important that PRS For Music is offering this prize for six venues across the UK – one of them being in Wales – because it’s going to give the venues the chance to explore new areas that they haven’t been able to on a grassroots level. That’s really important to sustaining the whole ecosystem.

Katie: We love playing small venues. I think the intimacy of it is really important, and the community element as well. It would be great for venues to use the prize money to build a community and build a scene so it can sustain itself. The livelihoods of a venue’s ecosystem gives so much back, culturally and to the community.

John Hywel Morris, PRS For Music: These venues are important nurseries for artists making their way in the music world, and important for nurturing audiences as well. Going to gigs in specific music venues pretty much started my career in music. Once you have a venue you can have a scene and place to meet people – most artists started off performing in these kinds of environments. 

Zac: It’s not just about developing talent, but the music and venue managers and everyone else who works behind the scenes. It’s really important we keep these small capacity venues because that’s where everyone who wants to be in the world of music will go to. They need somewhere where they can feel like they belong.

Katie: I think over the pandemic, people have missed the kind of human connection that live music gives you when you’re in a sweaty little room somewhere.

Why do you think independent venues are so important when the majority of new artists have digital platforms already and have built an audience online?

Katie: We are in a very tech-savvy world at the moment but for me, my favourite bands I’ve come across, have been at live shows. Watching bands performing live is something quite magical. We do social media stuff, but to sustain playing shows.

Any favourite Welsh bands at the moment? Thoughts on Panic Shack?

Katie: Panic Shack are great! We’re quite close friends with a band called Adwaith, they’re wicked. Also Red Telephone, they’re an awesome up and coming band from Cardiff.

Zac: The Bug Club!

John: James & The Cold Gun. And Bandicoot have a new album out.

And you’re playing a 6 Music Festival Fringe gig.

Katie: Yeah, at the Moon on Mon 28 Mar. We’re so excited! Over the pandemic, we’ve written a new album and we’ve got an EP on the way, so we’ve got plenty of new material to play. We’re also playing Swansea Sin City on Fri 25 Mar. All of these venues have great memories for us personally.

Zac: It feels really good to be back in these venues with our debut album. We’ve been saying for so long that our debut album is coming, but it’s here – essentially! – and it feels like we’re starting again.

Katie: We struggled over the pandemic because we all live separately. It took us a while to develop the songs that are on the album.

“We’ve been saying for so long that our debut album is coming, but it’s here!”

Zac Mather, Chroma

Did you record the album in Wales?

Katie: Yeah, mostly at Giant Wafer Studios in mid-Wales. It’s this farm in the middle of nowhere. We did a week of recording during a sweet spot in between restrictions – it was like a residency, we were very lucky to be able to do that.

Zac: The second we had the go-ahead, that people could bubble up and go back to work, we thought great. Katie, I and Bev [Liam Bevan], our bassist, went up to Giant Wafer with Stephen Pringle, who has recorded, produced and mixed the album. We went up for four days and tracked the majority of it. The main priority was to get the drums and guitars right.

Katie: Putting any kind of body of work together, you as a musician put your heart and soul into it. We’ve missed playing gigs: you get such a buzz out of playing live and it’s really good for your mental health.

John: I think people took live music for granted before the pandemic. Not having it was a serious blow to a lot of people’s mental health.

During the pandemic, were you always certain you were going to come back as a band? At any point did you think of doing something else? 

Katie: For me, having the album to work on really helped. We were going to see that project through to its end. I do know a lot of people who’ve had to retrain: that’s a common thing that’s happening because the work’s there. You realise stuff about yourself during a pandemic, and it makes you assess what you’ve wanted; a lot of people have had that epiphany and moved on to other pastures. But for us, no.

Zac: I don’t think there was ever a point that I thought “I’m out” – it’s so important to me as an individual. I’m sure Katie’s exactly the same. Life without live music is a life I don’t want to live! I think that’s a sad kind of truth but we have the power to make sure that never happens.

How do you decide if you want a Chroma song to be in English or Welsh? To date, you’ve got a 50/50 catalogue in that respect.

Katie: I’ve got to have a good idea. I found that when we were writing the album, I didn’t have any good ideas for Welsh songs, and I don’t think you should put out music for the sake of it or just because it ticks a box. We’ve recently finished writing a Welsh-language EP – I think it was great because I waited on it for quite a while.

In Welsh, it should be equally, if not better, than anything we put out in English. I think we set a standard for ourselves that was quite high, and we’re quite proud of the Welsh language EP that we’re in the process of mixing at the moment. We were keen to do something completely in Welsh, and we’ve managed that.

Zac: When we started, we didn’t have enough songs to play a full length set in either Welsh or English, So we kind of combined the two. That was always a lot of fun – playing songs originally in one language, then taking them to a different live platform and switching it to another. We’ve got some songs that kind of switch between English and Welsh – it’s quite funny playing those songs live, you look at people’s faces and sometimes they don’t realise you’ve switched languages.

Katie: It’s one of the joys of being bilingual, I guess. If you’ve got the opportunity to write something like Welsh language music, I think that’s something cool to contribute towards.

Zac: It feels like our offering to what we’ve lived and breathed growing up – saying, yeah we can just write English language music, but this is important to us too.

Is the sound of your new music different to early Chroma; are the math rock influences still there?

Zac: Math rock influenced the rhythms a lot. One thing we all said, listening to the masters, is “yeah that’s Chroma!” For a long while we were finding out who we were, playing countless gigs and doing horrible load-ins, but ultimately, the album’s a good representation of us now.

I don’t think we’ve strayed too far away: it’s still quite heavy in areas, indie in others and it’s also quite poppy. It.s a nice blend of everything that we’ve released previously.

Chroma play Sin City, Swansea on Fri 25 Mar (tickets: £3. Info: here) and The Moon, Cardiff on Mon 28 Mar as part of the 6 Music Festival Fringe (tickets: £5. Info: here)
Debut album Ask For Angela is due to be released this year. Info: chroma.band

words EMMA WAY