The Source Magazine sat down with Rudimental recently to discuss their new album “Home,” which was released in the US this month. It is hard to put a label on this UK act, as they have jazz, soul, dance, pop and hip-hop influences in their music. They have recently caught the attention of Wale and Childish Gambino who rapped on versions of their track “Feel The Love,” additionally Angel Haze and Emeli Sande are featured on their album “Home.” You can catch the guys at Summer Stage with Emeli Sande on August 28 and the quartet is also headlining Made in America Festival on August 31.

Rudimental consists of songwriters and producers Piers Agget, Kesi Dryden, Amir Amor and DJ Locksmith. Check out our exclusive video interview below:

Tell us about your new album “Home.”

Piers Agget: It’s all about the influences we had when we grew up, like dance music influences from house, jungle, D&B, garage, to the soul from the seventies and hip-hop from America. We were all massive into The Fugees and “The Score.”

Amir Amor: It’s just a family vibe with us, you know; us four are the core members, we’ve got a studio in Hackney in East London, where everyone comes through and does their thing…We come from a place called Hackney in London, which is kind of looked at in a negative way. With this record and with the videos, we’re trying to show the positivity in these dark places.

DJ Locksmith: The album’s called “Home,” it’s all about our influences as Piers said that we have had growing up on the streets of Hackney, East London, inner-city London even, and it’s just about not forgetting where you’ve come from, you know? That makes up the album. We can’t wait to show the U.S. our album…because it’s going to be really different. Might confuse a lot of people, but at the same time, they might be able to connect with it. So it’ll be really interesting to see how it’s interpreted.

Piers Agget: Lots of beats, bass and soul.

You also collaborated with Angel Haze on your new album on the track “Hell Could Freeze.” Tell us how that came about. 

Piers Agget: Angel Haze, she came to England for a week to do studio work, and she actually picked us as some of the producers to work with, which is amazing. And we had this beat lying there there in the studio that we played to her, we really didn’t think that she’d be into it, because it’s quite a kind of quirky beat, but she wrote it in like half an hour…and yeah, it’s kind of just like a vibe. She came down for like literally three hours to the studio.

Amir Amor: We ended up doing a couple tracks together, we’ve got some tracks on her record as well and we’ve been gigging together. She’s a wicked girl.

Tell us about your songwriting process?

Piers Agget: It varies, we’re all writers and producers and musicians…I’m a keyboard player, Amir is a guitarist and keyboard player, Kesi plays keys…so we kind of all bring different talents to the table, and then get in and get involved in different things and step out of our comfort zones. Sometimes we pass logic sessions around and then sometimes we’ll have four people working in one room on four different tracks, say. And then I suppose we also jam as a band sometimes in the studio.

DJ Locksmith: There is no real method to the way we go about things. It varies all the time, especially depends on what mood we’re in. Could be in an angry mood, could make an angry beat, happy mood, we’ll make a happy, soulful beat. So yeah, it definitely does vary.

Kesi Dryden: I think you summed it up. But we’re definitely doing a lot of jamming because we did a lot of live shows, recently. We’ve got all the instruments up and on the road, we come up with ideas instantly because everyone’s got an instrument so we can just play together, so that’s one thing we’ve taken into the studio quite a bit for this album, so it brings a really vibrant, real sound to our music.

Amir Amor: There’s a whole lot of soul on the record as well, so for people who are into soulful vocals, you’re gonna love it.

You have two tracks with Emeli Sande on “Home” (“Free”and “More Then Anything”). Can you speak about working with her?

Piers Agget: She was amazing. She came down to one of our gigs we did in Brixton Academy, we performed and then we met her. And we hooked up a session, and we just seemed to click really well musically, and she’s a great songwriter, so it was a pleasure for us to kind of work with her. And again, we had the ideas that we showed her, and then she wrote to them.

Amir Amor: There’s a way we work, we’re quite collaborative with writers. We write a lot of the lyrics and the vocals ourselves, but we don’t sing them, so it’s good to have a vocalist there who can really express what you’re trying to put out on the record, and she’s amazing.

What are some of your hip-hop influences?

Piers Agget: As I said earlier, The Fugees’ “The Score” was a massive album with all of our youth. I’ve always been a big Biggie fan, even from the 90′s.

Amir Amor: “The Score” by The Fugees. I remember speaking about Jay-Z and Big L, you know, just a lot of New York influences, but also west coast hip-hop, personally, like Dr. Dre and Battlecat, producers like that.

DJ Locksmith: Method Man used to be one of my heros in terms of hip-hop and rapping, and one of the first albums I actually bought was Dr. Dre “2001.” That just blew me away, there was a lot of elements about that album that I actually just fell in love with.

Amir Amor: Speaking about that album, that really got me into the P-Funk which is one of our biggest influences, especially live, you know, listening to George Clinton and people like that: DJ Quik, you know. I love west coast producers, that’s my thing, personally.

Kesi Dryden: For me, Fugees is one, as well. I think Lauryn Hill should still be rapping now, because to me, when she raps, she just kills anybody else. She’s just special, effortlessly just flows over any beat. I was into quite a lot of Tupac as well, and the production on a lot of Tupac tracks had a lot of soulful influences, which I think shaped a bit of our music, as well.

How did you get Wale on your “Feel the Love” remix? 

Amir Amor: I heard about him in 2010, my friend Yogi who is a producer in the UK did a track on his mix tape called “Workin’”. That is the first time I heard about Wale. I didn’t really follow his records after that until recently we went out to America. When we got this hip hop side of Rudimental going we just put out the word and said we wanted to work with American rappers and Wale’s name was put out there and he came through. It’s basically the first time we did something over the Internet, we sent it over, he recorded it and he sent it back to us.

What was it like working with Wale?

Amir Amor: He was cool over the Internet, he sent us over the version and we made some edits, changed things up a bit and that’s how we did it. We haven’t actually met, yet. We are starting to work with more American rappers; we did 4 tracks with The Game last week in LA, so we are moving into the hip-hop side of things, more.

What do you admire about Wale?

Amir Amor: Just checking out his album, he has a lot of sick people on there. He’s a storyteller rapper, which I like. What he is saying is inspirational. He has worked with a lot of wicked artists; he is quite well-respected in the industry. He has worked with a lot of my favorite producers – Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, Pharrell from The Neptunes and those guys. He is sick for that reason.