Listen to Lower Than Atlantis' self-titled new album - exclusive

Watford’s Lower Than Atlantis release their self-titled new album on Monday (6 October), but you can stream the whole thing right now here on Q. Plus the band’s frontman Mike Duce has written us a track-by-trac guide to the record.

Originally intended to be a B side, it wasn’t fully written – just a chord progression and a couple of riffs. We wrote the demo in a day and then decided it was really fucking good and sent it to the people that we work with, and they decided it should be a single. Recorded it the next day and it got sent off tour biggest single the day after that!

This sound in the intro is the producers’ voice in single notes that we then put together to make chords. The chords were put together to make a chord progression and I sang over them. The song is about the end of a relationship.

This song is about the first time we went to America on tour as a band, which was on our bucket list so I thought I’d better write a song about it! I wrote the riff for the pre-chorus ages ago and managed to get it into a song so I’m really happy about that.

Criminal is about learning a lesson from our first experience with a major label. The strings were added at a later date and we think they make the song.

This song was originally supposed to be an acoustic song; the recorded version starts that way but then turns into a full band. The riff in the post-chorus was a single guitar note played in and then cut and pasted into a riff in Pro Tools.

Emily was originally written as a joke about my dog Rosie, but I was stretching a two-syllable name over a three-syllable melody, so I later swapped it out for ‘Emily’.

There’s an interesting percussion section in the middle eight where we all had different forms of percussion in the live room, and smashed out syncopated rhythms, which was really fun! I really like the lyric ‘The future might change but the past says the same’

This song is about the one inevitability in life, however rich, powerful, strong or intelligent you are, you are going to die at some point. So you might as well enjoy life whilst you’re here!

I’ve had religion forced down my throat from a young age, being from a big Irish-Catholic family and this is my vent about how I don’t agree with organised religion at all.

Probably my favourite lyric on the whole album is time time ticking by, the one thing we spend we cannot buy. It’s true, there’s nothing we can do to stop the ticking hands of time – so I wrote a song about it.

This song is about sex, who doesn’t like getting down?!

This is a song about me wanting to leave my mark on this earth because the thought of me just being another cog, helping society tick, over makes me feel sick. Being in this band is hopefully me leaving a piece of me behind. The chorus is all one note, E, the chord voicings change but the root is always E which I find interesting.

For more head to Lowerthanatlantis.com.