An interview with Springfield Elementary - Keep on Moving!

By Jon Milton

After laying low for most of 2021, Springfield Elementary released their stonking new ep 'Ne + Ultra' earlier this month on York label Safe Suburban Home. The EP shows the swift evolution of the band in a short space of time, with this latest music further infusing psychedelic and krautrock influences to the garage-punk blasts of their early releases. I caught up with the band to find out more about the EP...

How are you all? How has 2021 treated you?

It's been a strange year much like the one before it but there’s plenty of positives for us too. We were lucky and our practice room stayed open throughout the lockdowns so we were able to keep playing music together & write new songs.

Your new EP Ne + Ultra is out – tell us about it?

We recorded this at Airtight Studios at the start of the year so it feels good to finally release it! We felt that we were able to experiment more throughout the EP and start bringing in more of our external influences from across the globe. Safe Suburban Homes Records were kind enough to help us release it and we have some cassettes of the EP available on Bandcamp.

The EP feels like you’re starting to expand your garage-rock sound, the shoe gaze influence on ‘On a cloud’, the motorik beat on ‘Keep on Moving’, a bit of the Coral maybe on Barracuda King’ – how has that come about?

We all enjoy a wide variety of music and our road trips usually consist of weird and wonderful playlists so I think as we’ve grown as a band, we’ve figured out a way to start bringing these influences together a bit more. We don’t really think about it when we’re writing songs, we usually just have a jam and see what happens.
 
Barracuda King is about an interesting night, care to elaborate? 

​It’s probably more of a concoction of many strange nights I’ve had over the years to be fair. Moments in the after sesh where you go a bit nuts and your mind isn’t in this world. It’s kind of half anecdotal and half tripping guide!

 Keep on Moving – do you think that people are more and more getting sick of social media?

Who knows? I think people hate to love it. There’s a fine line between a harmless bit of scrolling and getting completely Zuckerberged, so we’re just here to voice our opinion on it. Hopefully society does become less reliant on it though… 

What’s next for the band?

We have plenty of songs ready to record so the plan is to get into the studio. Our next gig is at The Castle supporting Acid Child on Wednesday November 24th.