Since their irresistible bid for notice on the Dublin rock circuit in 2005, Director’s crafted, intelligent guitar music has stood them apart from the usual suspects.

 The band’s genesis saw three Malahide college entrants, guitarist Aherne, bassist Averill and frontman Moloney, playing together, sharing an aesthetic and with a few songs already starting to form. They began to take the operation seriously, assuming roles and casting around for a drummer to complete the outfit. Moloney, while studying for his degree in music, made the acquaintance of just such a drummer, classmate Lawlor, whose interests were in harmony with those of the group. Director were complete.  A year later, after an arresting sequence of live shows, amid growing popularity, Director recorded their debut record, We Thrive On Big Cities, for Atlantic Records.

It seems like the typical back-story for a rock quartet but Director are far from that. In everything they have done, the band have demonstrated an atypical and business-like directness.  The de rigeur posturing of the typical indie-group is absent.  The goal was always to write accessible, immediate, enjoyable pieces of music. Director constructed their songs with an auteur-ish pop sensibility, compromising neither on artistry nor mass-appeal.  Their first volley of live shows couldn’t fail to win converts.  The sheer speed with which they commanded major-label attention was no fluke.  They meant business from the very beginning.

Since then, their story has been anything but ordinary. We Thrive On Big Cities brought Director widespread success in Ireland (well over platinum status sales and a chart presence for 28 weeks after debuting at number 2 in the album charts).  Director played to packed-out venues across Ireland, and commanded large crowds at their Oxegen festival appearances.  Accolades were forthcoming as they won Best New Act at the Meteor Awards 2007 while We Thrive On Big Cities picked up a nomination for the Choice Music Prize Album of the Year.

Meanwhile Director began to pick up a following across the Irish Sea, where a seriesof support slots for successful British acts like Hard-Fi, Razorlight and The Fratellis along with numerous festival appearances won them an appreciative audience.

In late 2007 work began on an entirely new set of songs guided by the same exacting standards that had informed their debut.  A space was rented over a Dublin pub, and the band threw themselves into a four month-long intensive writing period.  Adopting a disciplined song-writing regime, the group often concentrated on a single song for days, moving on only after they were happy that some significant progress had been accomplished.

The method bore fruit, and Director began to find themselves with material for what they felt could be a fitting follow-up to their debut.  Four months of rehearsal in the darkness of a windowless room, however, took its toll on the band, and it was felt that a relocation was in order, both for the health of the record and of its authors.

‘…working in Dublin all the time really started to get to us.  It’s really hard to find a space that you can use every day and leave all your gear in.  We’d had about all we could take and were spending an absolute fortune on coffee too.’

Eoin Aherne

The new venue was a small house in the Leitrim countryside for the spring of 2008, where, due to a shortage of bedrooms, each of the four took turns sleeping on the floor of the rehearsal room.  Despite the apparent absence of creature comforts, the relocation had a profound effect on the creative energies of the band.  The revitalising effect of the countryside; the proximity to wildlife; the absence of distractions; a welcome intrusion of sunlight into the workplace; all of these things helped Director to take the promising material they had previously fashioned and wrestle it into a more muscular, organic whole.

 ‘…we’d get up in the morning, have some breakfast and then just play – all day.  If we weren’t playing we’d always be thinking – just throwing around ideas as we were chatting or sitting outside’

Michael Moloney

Gradually, an album emerged from the process, which was somehow more than the sum of its parts; a powerful, integral set of interrogatory reflections on romantic love, with a new, leaner sound which genuinely excited the band, and made them eager to record.

In the autumn, Director headed to Los Angeles, a significant change of scene for the band, to spend seven weeks recording in the home studio of producer Brad Wood (Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, Placebo), who was eager to work on the album.

‘Brad had so much experience.  Nothing fazed him and he really allowed us to go about the recording exactly as we wanted.  He just imposed some discipline on moving fast, not getting bogged down in the little things, things that had really slowed us down and taken the spontaneity out before’

Aherne

Against the backdrop of election fever and economic meltdown, Director went to work on getting the definitive version of their album down. The experience was more relaxed than their previous studio work, and, out of fidelity to the more organic feel of their new material, the band tracked many parts of the album live managing to import something of the panache and sensitivity of Director’s live show into the mix.  Barny Barnicott (Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian), who had worked with the band before, was again happily drafted to mix the album.

’You can expect a much harder sound than the first album but mixed with some of the softest, most delicate tracks we’ve ever recorded.  I think we’ve captured more of the live essence of Director this time round’

Moloney

 The final product, I’ll Wait For Sound, is testament to the relentless professionalism and integrity of Director, a focused, powerful, eloquent work and a manifest development on their previous record, vindicating every day of its some two-year gestation period.  It is Director’s self-possession, so much in evidence here, that sets them apart and makes them such a distinctive voice in contemporary music, marking out the release of ‘I’ll Wait For Sound’ as an event worthy of anticipation.

Director are: Eoin Aherne, Rowan Averill, Shea Lawlor, Michael Moloney.