Debut album from Worthing band FunkZilla

Worthing band FunkZilla play Brighton's Komedia on October 1 as they continue to celebrate the release of their debut album.
FunkZillaFunkZilla
FunkZilla

Having met through Northbrook College, the band comprises Finn Hayes and Ben Wilkinson on guitar; Luke Rippingham on bass; Seth Markes on drums; and Nick Savage on vocals.

Finn, currently a second-year at BIMM in Brighton, is delighted at the way the album came together.

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It is available through Spotify and iTunes. Physical copies are available at gigs, but the band is also trying to get them into shops.

“It feels good to have the album out. It is a dream come true.

“It is something that we put a lot of money and effort into making. It was a big investment, but we are on our way to making it back. It is just good to get it out.

“I personally think an album is important. Just a single doesn’t really give you a perception of what the band is about.

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“We wanted to give people nine or ten songs where each song is different, where each song takes you on a different journey that is much more elaborate than you would get with just the one song.

“We started work on the album in September 2016. It has been a long, long time to get it done, and we spent a huge amount of work on it.

“But we didn’t want to put out something that wasn’t as perfect as we could possibly make it.

“We spent a lot of time working on the songs and the structure of the songs so that they were as good as possible; and we spent a lot of time in the studio trying to make an incredible sound, which is what we think we have done.

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“There are nine tracks on there out of about 40. We picked the first nine tracks that we wrote because we really thought they showed best what the band is about. There is nothing on there that doesn’t actually describe what kind of band this is.

“We are pretty much writing every day, and we will still be playing live the songs that we haven’t used on the album.”

The ordering of the tracks was another big factor. They knew where they wanted to start and where they wanted to end. The challenge was in working out the order of the songs in between.

“It starts with huge heavy drums and huge bass and then drops to a calmer more indie phase and then back to more heavy and then ends with a chilled-out jazz song. It comes in waves of heavy and then mellow.

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“We didn’t want to put all the heavy stuff at the start or all the mellow stuff at the start.

“We just wanted waves of sonic experience.”

Finn added: “All five of us come from completely-different backgrounds and different musical styles,” Finn says.

“It includes funk, rock, jazz, hiphop, metal and reggae. Our live shows go from crazy, heavy funk through to chilled, vibey reggae, and we have even got a couple of eight-minute jazz pieces.

“We all come from different perspectives so we all bring something different to the plate.

“There is not really a specific genre.

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“There are not really any boundaries. It’s just about fusing everything that we play together. It is just us expressing ourselves in all the different ways.”

Funkzilla have featured on the new artists’ slot at Surrey Hills radio and are pursuing other radio stations.

The band supported Dick Valentine’s (from Electric Six) acoustic set in Brighton in December last year and provided backing music for vimeo.com.

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