Roll of the Dice: 5 questions with Volk Soup

Leeds-based six-piece Volk Soup are chasing coherence through the chaos on their new album 10p Jazz; a sprawling, instinct-driven collection that finds beauty in disarray. Vocalist Harry Jones sat down with That’s Good Enough For Me to discuss the art of sequencing, the growing pains of expanding from trio to six-piece, and how Leeds’ overlooked underground scene continues to shape their sound and spirit. What follows is a conversation about disconnection, community, and trying to make sense of the noise.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview and congrats on the release of 10p Jazz! You’ve described the album as an attempt to “bring coherence to the chaos.” How do you know when a song has the right amount of chaos before it collapses completely? 

Thank you, it’s been a long time coming. Well, it was only ever an attempt to bring coherence to chaos. I can’t say with any authority whether or not we actually achieved it. I think for the most part we’re going off of instinct. If it feels right it feels right. 
These songs were also written quite disparately over the course of a couple of years. So going into the studio we knew it would be somewhat of a balancing act to create a natural coherence from these inherently disjointed parts. We really had to think about the assemblage of the album and find a way to engineer some sense out of the whole thing. For me, sequencing played a big part in tying together these relatively unrelated songs. How to weave a thread through such uneven terrain was crucial to how the album functioned. Some songs already felt like they had their place. “Bastard” and “Meet Me by the Willow” seemed like obvious bookends and “Mass Village Angst” seemed like a good way to start a second side. Once we had that vague outline everything else seemed to slide into place quite nicely. I was recently talking to a friend about the art of sequencing and we both agreed it was make or break for an album. 

Volk Soup started as a three-piece and now you’re a full six-piece organism. How has that expansion shifted the band’s chemistry or the way you build songs together? 

Well it’s certainly made it a lot more of a logistical challenge to get everyone in the same room. In the early days the songs would usually just come from us thrashing something out in a rehearsal space. Although the music is still quite bass led, those early songs were very bass driven and I would often write guitar parts that played in opposition to the bass line, usually out of key. 
These days we tend to write separate parts more remotely and try to bring those things together with a little more consideration, but we still do so quite instinctively. I’ll often bring a broad shell of a song to the table and let the others feel their way through the songs and contribute in a way that’s their own. We all have different ways of looking at a song but often those contrasting visions can blend to create something more interesting, less predictable. It’s quite an open field of play. 
Ultimately it’s stayed a very relaxed way of writing songs. We can spend months not seeing each other to write and then we can do one practice and have three new songs. 

Leeds has long had a strong underground scene. How has the local environment (venues, people, energy, etc) shaped who Volk Soup is? 

I love Leeds deeply and we’ve been given some great opportunities here but Volk Soup aren’t as ingrained in the scene as some other bands. We’re a bit of a Frankenstein band made up of members from other Leeds bands but no one in Volk is actually from Leeds. We’ve been bound by the city and the wealth of venues but I don’t personally feel as wrapped up in the way the local independent music scene operates. I think we’ve actually had to become a little more DIY as a result of not being swallowed up by the support of local promoters and industry people. I’m mostly just quite jealous of being ignored by certain pockets of Leeds’ music scene. That said, Volk Soup would look and sound quite different if it wasn’t for the support we had early on and if we hadn’t met like-minded people from other interesting bands.  
I think I’m also still resentful of being part of a large, diverse scene that isn’t being taken particularly seriously on a national scale. I think if these bands were all in London it’d be considered a bit of a halcyon era but we’re not. And you’ll find that the most successful bands in Leeds are the ones that can get to London regularly, of which we are not one. There’s scant documentation of what’s been happening here for the last 5 years and I think a lot of good bands have been let down by how centralised the country’s music industry is.

What’s next for Volk Soup? 

We’re going to France at the end of this month to play a handful of shows and then in December we’ll be playing some shows in the North of England with Gaol Bird. Other than that we’ll just keep plugging away writing and hopefully raise enough money to get back into the studio for album number two. I think there’s probably enough ideas there for us to make a second album but until someone wants to put us in the studio and finance it then we’ll have to do it ourselves.

October 28 – Le Cessonnais, Saint Brieuc, FR
October 29 – Penny Lane, Rennes, FR*
October 30 – L’Avant Scène Bar, Bordeaux, FR
October 31 – Water Moulin, Tournai, BE
December 4 – Soup, Manchester^
December 5 – Kazimier Gardens, Liverpool^
December 6 – Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds^
^with Gaol Bird
*supporting KEG

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Roll of the Dice is a short interview format with a variable amount of questions. A pair of dice is rolled and the total, between 2 and 12, is the amount of questions we can ask. All questions are given to the interviewee(s) at once, and no follow-ups are allowed. The interview may be lightly edited for content and clarity.