Opening with a crash into the sand, PEEL’s new track ‘DYNA’ slows it down a touch and invites us on a passage of abstraction. Flickering through landscapes stained with colour and transcendental imagery of the band at work, ‘DYNA’ is a teaser for their EP due out in mid-2021.

The lyrics, written by drummer Tom Kell, tell a story of boundless imagination. It unveils the journey of a robot slave on a distant planet who finds its body being used as an interface for intergalactic tourists. Drawing inspirations from Sci-fi writers H. P. Lovecraft and Phillip K Dick, ‘DYNA’ is a narrative of this robot’s voyage. “He tries to convince a new customer to travel out beyond surveillance lines, presumably to “delete” them and escape,” ​ Kell says.

Recorded at BLANKSPACE Studio with producer James Christowski​, the track blends elements of post-punk and psychedelia through layers of experimental sounds with various instrumentation. With ‘DYNA’, PEEL have ventured into a new realm of cosmic creativity and to dig into the new tune a little further, we had the band talk through the key influences that brought that track to life.


Primal Scream - Screamadelica

Nick Stillman (vocals/guitar): Before we got into the studio to record 'DYNA', we had the first half of the song pretty well down in terms of parts and structure, but the second half, after the breakdown, was a blank canvas. Harry (guitar) was listening to a lot of Madchester stuff at the time and had this idea that he wanted the second half of the song to be an extended instrumental brawl.

Primal Scream's Screamadelica is a favourite of ours, and we really wanted to capture the wild, acid house meets rock and roll vibe of that record for this part. We recorded this pretty late into the night and everyone threw everything into it. The whole choral vocal part was Tom (drums) overdubbing his voice over and over. Steve (synth) recorded the guitar solo in one take (pretty sure he was wearing a leather jacket at the time). Our friend Kat recorded those laser beam synth lines on a weird old Japanese synth (Korg SY20) that only has Kanji labels on it. There's some honky tonk piano going on somewhere, some congas too. There may have been a group hand clap session at one point. I can't quite remember.


RIDE

Nick: RIDE are a big touchpoint for us and we reference them quite a lot when we're in the studio, but I think their influence shines through the most on this track. Instrumentally, we wanted this song to be big - multilayered guitars, harmonised vocals, lots of fuzz and intensity, but still with an element of space and lushness, and I think that's something that RIDE do really well, so we're definitely indebted to them a lot here.


Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele

Tom Kell (drums): I loved this movie when it came out. I still do, but I remember it really resonating with me watching it for the first time. Outside of its hilarious and heart-breaking observations of modern racism, I was drawn to the idea behind the Armitage family’s transplant procedure. Body-swapping is a common device used across science fiction, horror and comedy to explore themes of the self, free will, morality, power, societal pressures and prejudices, and loads more. It’s a trope ripe for posing questions about what makes us us. Why Get Out stuck with me, though, is that the swapping comes about not as the result of some ancient rune or otherworldly force, but as the result of a technology developed by seemingly normal looking people for sadistic and exploitative ends.

I always thought 'DYNA' had an otherworldly element to it. The gliding textures and fanfaresque lead guitar line evoked images of nebula-voyaging space-operas to me, like something out of the airbrushed covers of 'Astounding Stories'. The guys asked me to write the lyrics for the track and Get Out immediately came to mind - I think I was thinking ‘How the hell am I out here star-hopping? I don’t have any oxygen!” And the story of 'DYNA' fell into place – a humanoid interface, a tragic backstory, bureaucratic smothering, an ambiguous murder attempt. The lyrics were done in about an hour. It’s basically a rip-off of Get Out, but set in space and with fuckloads of reverb.


Isolation

Harry (guitar): Much of this track was composed during lockdown, and there are nods to the idea of isolation throughout many elements of the song. This was a theme I wanted to carry through to the film clip. The clip features the band playing in and exploring a foreign world of hyper colour, where time moves at an uncomfortably slow pace. It is a nod to the liminal state the world went into during the pandemic; an isolated existence that we all had to learn how to navigate


Asahi

Harry (guitar): When we jumped into the studio to record 'DYNA', we had just come out of lockdown, and Sydney was still under heavy COVID restrictions. We hadn’t seen much of each other or spent much time out of the house, so we were pretty excited to be back together once again. The beers came out pretty quickly each evening, and long days turned into hazy nights. There’s definitely a drunken swagger to this track. Thank you Asahi.