As one of the less familiar names on this year's Mercury Prize shortlist, GoGo Penguin have suddenly become one of the most talked about acts of the week. So we decided to sit down with them and find out a little more about who they are and who they reckon deserves this year's prize.
Hi GoGo Penguin, how are you today?
Really good thanks.
You have just been nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize. How are you feeling about that?
We’re really happy and humbled to be shortlisted. It means a lot to have v2.0 included as one of the 12 albums of the year.
And have you known about your nomination for a while or do you find out like the rest of us?
We heard it was likely the day before, but didn’t hear for sure till the day.
You’ve been nominated for your second album ‘v2.0’, can you tell us when you started working on that?
We started writing in January 2013 as soon as Nick our bass player joined the band. We had a really intense few months of being locked away in rehearsal spaces for hours and hours in rooms without windows writing and coming up with ideas.
What were you aiming to achieve this time round that you didn’t do on your debut?
We were less concerned with genre and just made the music that we like first and foremost. We wanted the band to have a more cohesive sound both musically and sonically.
So now with the nomination in place, what are you expecting to do over the next few months?
The shortlist should get our music out to a wider audience and hopefully we’ll be doing more shows and tours off the back of this.
And do you think the exposure will affect your work schedule at all?
Even at this stage there are some things coming in that sound exciting. It’s still early days but it looks like our schedule is due to increase later in the year and into 2015.
Finally, if you don’t manage to scoop the award this year, who do you hope will?
Probably FKA Twigs as we included one of her tracks on a Gilles Peterson mix we did a couple of months ago.GoGo Penguin's Mercury Prize nominated album 'v2,0' is available now.