It’s been a pretty big year for Bag Raiders. The Modular duo of Chris Stracey and Jack Glass have gone from strength to strength with festival appearances, big singles and some major moves up the ladder of this year’s inthemix50 poll. On top of that, the duo have just released their self titled debut album and are out on the road spruiking it and their new and improved live show. Here ITM catches up with Stracey to get the dirt on the tour, the album and everything in between.

One of the big things around this latest tour is the brand new Bag Raiders live show, which is different to the original live setup you debuted a couple of years back.

“Yeah, it’s a different thing this time. Like, you still get just the two of us up there and we’re doing a lot of percussion stuff, but there’s less running around and jumping on different instruments here and there. We’ve got two separate spaces on stage where we’re like very set in what we’re doing; we know exactly what we’re doing in each song. It feels a lot more thought out this time!”

What was the preparation like for the live show?

“It’s been pretty full-on, dude. We were basically rehearsing all day and night before we kicked it off at Parklife. We rented out this studio space in Sydney – it’s in a building with a bunch of rehearsal spaces and our one was like this little cave with no windows or light. We just locked ourselves up in there going through everything for the show and making sure we had it right. We were pretty nervous going into it but I think the response has been really great already.”

The record’s pretty vocal heavy with a few guests in the mix, so how does that work for you guys live?

“Yeah for the show me and Jack are singing everything and it’s been going really well so far. One thing that has taken us a while to get used to is using in-ear monitors. We never really did that before, and I swear man, it’s been the biggest learning curve. It seems so simple, y’know? Like, you would think that you would be able to do everything better when you can hear more clearly but it’s been a bit of a struggle to get our heads around what we’re singing coming through our own ears. There’s a lot of fiddling with levels and getting it to sound exactly how you want, so it’s kind of a weird thing for us to get used to. I know it will be amazing when we get the hang of it, but I can tell that I just suck at it right now.”

So with the guests on the album what was the process for getting those features? Did you approach people or did they approach you?

“Originally when we did the album we basically did everything with just ourselves and our own voices, and we were listening back to it all with our label and we were kinda like ‘yeah…it’s alright but there’s something missing’, and then Modular suggested we ask some other people to do a few vocals as well. It seemed like a good idea so we had a brainstorm of who we’d like on the album and who was on our wishlist with people like Benjamin Diamond...trying to figure songs that way and get vocals through emails can be a real pain though so we tried to keep it contained to people that way know. Dan [Black] was interested from the start of it, he actually did the demo vocals for Sunlight while he was in an airport with all these other passengers looking at him sing into his computer! He was great to collaborate with and we would go back and forth with different tweaks to the song, it was a cool experience.”

I remember speaking to Crookers and they said something similar about the difficulties in sourcing all those guest vocals.

“Yeah it can be painful, especially because people have their own preferences for recording and production, so they might send over some really heavily treated vocals that you didn’t ask for. That’s why it was really good to get our local friends to come in. Like when we had Martin [Solomon] from Whim who’s on Way Back Home in the studio; we brought him and just had him sing the demo that we’d recorded ourselves, so we had a lot control over it.”

How’re you feeling about the album now that it’s finally out there?

“It’s been really exciting, y’know? For a while there I think I was going through this thing where the album was done and delivered and it was just sitting there in the cupboard waiting to come out, and I was just feeling really weird about it. Like I was sick of all the songs and I didn’t know what people wold think of it…but I think the live show has really helped that. Being able to perform the songs that we worked on for so long has made them fresh again for us.”

It’s definitely a strong album from you guys and it got me thinking about all your old productions from the Fun Punch days. Do you ever listen back to those and think about your growth from there to now?

“Yeah, you know, I still kinda like some of the stuff we did ages ago. I think definitely our standard of production has raised quite a bit since then. You’d hope it would, though! After three or so years producing you should get better. I think with the album it’s got a lot of that stuff that we got into doing originally – a few instrumentals and some club tracks – but we also got to stretch ourselves with songwriting and making some cool pop tunes that aren’t all club focused. That’s a lot of fun for us to do.”

Bag Raiders album tour dates:
THU 18 NOV – GEELONG / EUREKA HOTEL [LIVE SHOW]
FRI 19 NOV – MELBOURNE / BILLBOARDS [LIVE SHOW]
SAT 20 NOV – BALLARAT / KAVORA LOUNGE [DJ SET]
SUN 21 NOV – NEWCASTLE / KING STREET HOTEL [DJ SET]
THU 25 NOV – ADELAIDE / HQ [LIVE SHOW] – DATE CHANGE
SAT 4 DEC – SYDNEY / THE FORUM [LIVE SHOW]
SUN 5 DEC – PERTH / SCARBOROUGH BEACH AMPHITHEATRE [LIVE SHOW]