UK group Rudimental is having a very busy summer.

They just played Governors Ball, a UK festival they created with Disclosure called WildLife and are playing Bonnaroo tomorrow. We caught up with them at Atlantic Records’ #BigBeatBBQ, a few days before their Governors Ball debut, where they played tracks off of their sophomore album titled We The Generation. They just released the video for the first single off the album “Never Let You Go,” which you can watch here: The band consists of Piers Aggett, Kesi Dryden, Amir Amor and Leon Rolle. Read what Kesi and Amir told us exclusively:
You guys just dropped “Never Let You Go.” Talk a little bit about the inspiration for the track.
Kesi: It came to us while we were on tour with Ed Sheeran and he introduced to this singer called Foy Vance. We went into the studio with him and started writing this idea and it just came about. We wanted to create something that could lead us into the summer for 2015 and boom there it was.
Amir: It’s amazing. We’re going to be dropping the video which we’ve been working on for a while now and we take our videos very seriously and we put a lot of work into them … really excited about that and to play at Governors Ball for the first time.
Talk a little bit about the video.
Kesi: There’s lots of colors.
Amir: We filmed in four or five different countries, like Ukraine and Africa. It’s a big video.
Kesi: It’s about bringing people together from all walks of life, everyone having one goal and being positive together.
Are you excited to be playing with this massive Governors Ball lineup?
Amir: Yeah, very, and also we’ll be bringing our new album and playing a whole bunch of new songs. The last time we were in this part of town we played Terminal 5, which was absolutely amazing and we can’t wait to play Governors ball.
Anyone you’re excited to see?
Kesi: I’d love to be able to see Drake, SBTRKT, Little Dragon, people we’re big fans of. But unfortunately we’ve got our own festival us and Disclosure in the UK on Saturday called WildLife, so we’ve got to fly back the next day because we’re performing at that.
Amir: I’d love to see Bjork, Little Dragon, SBTRKT from back home, we kind of came through this game together so it would be good to see him. Our festival on Saturday and Sunday Wildlife Festival, we’re doing Saturday, Disclosure is doing Sunday and we’ve basically got all the acts that we love, we’ve got Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, we’ve got Mark Ronson and tons of people that we love.
Kesi: Yeah and we wanted to put a lineup of people that inspired us growing up, people that we’re fans of currently and legends.
Are you going to collaborate with Disclosure on music?
Kesi: We sort of came into the game on a similar sort of level, playing and doing shows together, gradually growing and now us doing a festival together that’s one step closer to working together and that’s the start of something. You never know there mights be a collab musically sometime.
What about Mark Ronson, how amazing is he?
Amir: Yeah he’s awesome, we were in the studio with him, we’ve just been hanging out. He was producing Duran Duran with Nile Rodgers we were there hanging out with him, jamming and stuff. I’m sure at some point we’ll hook up and do something. Our focus has been on getting our album done, now that that’s done we can have fun, we can start doing other things.
Give fans a little teaser of We The Generation.
Amir: Our album is an evolution from Home, which was our first record. Home was us finding our feet. This was us finding our feet some more. We’ve been touring around the world for three years now and we’ve brought together some new singers. Same way we brought out John Newman, Ella Eyre and Emeli Sande. On this new one, we’ve still got Ella but we’ve also got Ann-Marie who’s signed to our new label Major Toms and in fact her album just released on our own label now, which is fun, through Atlantic. We’ve got some old school legends on there like George Clinton. It’s all just our bucket list of people that we wanted to have fun in the studio with and not necessarily go for the big names that we were offered, the big pop names out there, we didn’t really want to do that so much in order to work with fresh talent and also some old school reggae legends Max Romeo, we worked with Chronixx (whose not old school, but we love his music), Steely Dan believe or not and Bobby Womack. It’s a mixture of old and new.
How did working with Bobby come about?
Kesi: We met him at a show in England … he was performing as well. After our performance he came up to us and was like “wow guys that was amazing” and we started a relationship there and we planned to get in the studio, but unfortunately we didn’t get to collaborate before he passed, but his family held back a song for us, which he wanted us to work on. It was an amazing opportunity, of course we didn’t turn it down. So we’ve got an amazing collaboration with Bobby on the album, which we’re very excited about. We’re very honored to have it.
Any final thoughts?
We can’t wait for people to hear our new record on September 18 and just come and see us live if you haven’t yet because that’s a whole different experience. Rudimental, are us four at the core, but then we have eleven people on stage, all of our friends from school basically. We have a lot of fun.
We the Generation track listing:
1           I Will For Love (feat. Will Heard)
 
2           Never Let You Go (feat. Foy Vance)
 
3           We The Generation (feat. Mahalia)
 
4           Love Ain’t Just A Word
 
5           Rumour Mill (feat. Anne-Marie & Will Heard)
 
6           Common Emotion (feat. MNEK)
 
7           Go Far (feat. Will Heard)
 
8           Foreign World (feat. Anne-Marie)
 
9           Too Cool (feat. Ella Eyre)
 
10          Bloodstream
 
11          All That Love
 
12          Needn’t Speak (feat. Lianne La Havas)
 
13          Lay It All On Me
 
14          New Day (feat. Bobby Womack)
 
 
 
DELUXE
 
15          Treading On Water (feat. Sinead Harnett & Will Heard)
 
16          Run (feat. Will Heard)
 
17          Breath (feat. Lianne La Havas)
 
18          System (feat. Max Romeo, Earl 16 & Spee)

 

 

-$haina_Moskowitz