Kablammo!

Rick in a press release that accompanied the album:

We set out to capture the live essence of Ash, the closest sonic predecessor would be 2004’s “Meltdown”, with the songwriting of the “Free All Angels” singles.

Tim in the same press release:

We were trying to make quite a concise record this time and we wanted it to live up to what we’ve done before. With Kablammo! we want the power of the songs on 1977 and Free All Angels with the impact of Meltdown.

Tim speaking to Noisey in May 2015:

I feel it’s got the essence of what’s best about Ash. I think because we’d gone away from making albums for a while, I’d definitely felt the pressure of living up to 1977 and Free All Angels, in the sense that there needed to be stronger songs. I spent a long time focusing on songwriting. I think there’s a sense of nostalgia and looking back on songs like “Hedonism” and “Bring Back The Summer.” I think you can still hear we’re having fun. That’s part of the reason why we called it Kablammo!—we wanted it to be a fun and exciting pop record.

Before Kablammo! we’d been pushing ourselves for about ten years trying to develop new sounds. We wanted to make a record that sounded great as a three-piece rock band that would translate instantly live. We weren’t trying to sound like anybody but ourselves. You can hear we’re really confident and comfortable in our own skin on this one.

I definitely got burned doing the whole single series. At the end of it was just so exhausted. So, I guess if I kept going with it I could have sustained it, but after a break we felt we needed another challenge. In between that I did a Christmas record with Emmy the Great, which was quite fun. And I did some soundtracks and my solo album [Lost Domain]. During that time I saw the re-emergence of vinyl, and I started listening to vinyl more, just to try and get the essence of what an album was again. I sort of knew the fans wanted us to make an album, but for a long time I didn’t want to admit that we would. I like to be an honest person and not go back on my word, but I felt this was a challenge that Ash needed to take again. So then it was a question of how do we equal the best of our records? I looked back and thought the ones fans love the most are 1977 and Free All Angels and I needed to find what it was we needed to tap into.