Ok, let’s take a little break. Here’s a piece of pop rock music for ya. TERRA TERRA TERRA are streaming their new album “The Space We Create” in its entirety here.
Lakeland, FL’s Terra Terra Terra has something to say. Actually, the anthemic pop-rock trio has a lot to say. And it all comes out on the band’s new full-length, The Space We Create.
Five years after forming in 2007 and four years after signing to Round Kid Records in 2008, Terra Terra Terra is set to release its sophomore LP, a record that has slowly bubbled up into fruition since writing began in early 2011. Recorded in the fall of 2011 with Jesse Cannon and Mike Oettinger at Cannon Found Soundation Studios in New Jersey, The Space We Create is the labor of love woven together by a band of youthful and driven musicians.
Lead vocalist / guitarist Loren Taylor and bassist Matthew Lowry, the band’s primary songwriters, recorded the album with Cannon with the help of studio drummer Tyler Jordan Soucy from A Great Big Pile of Leaves. Together the two main songwriters stayed up deep into the night, perfecting song structures and re-writing lyrics until The Space We Create came out as the most intimate scrap of their lives possible.
“I really think the end result of the two of us cranking out 12-hour days in the studio and pushing through gave us an album that came from raw emotion and definitely put our mindset closer together,” says Lowry.
Sonically, The Space We Create is a momentous step forward from the group’s debut LP, 2009’s Mind Like A Mind, Soul Like A Child. The new album features almost an ambient surface, but consistently relies on a rock-solid poppy rock core. The songs are catchy at their very being, ranging from immediate foot-tapping singles like “Angel” and the thoughtful singalong “Burn” to the more brooding “Glow” and the building “The Only One.” There are snippets of the arena rock of The Killers, Kings of Leon and Coldplay, but they mesh with pieces borrowed from Taking Back Sunday or Manchester Orchestra. The indie-rock creativity of bands like Lovedrug glues the sound together.
Where Terra Terra Terra steps out of pop-rock’s comfort zone is in the ambition behind its songwriting and the sharp intimacy of its lyrics. While Loren is consistently demoing all of his ideas, never not creating blueprints for new songs, Lowry is there to flesh ideas out and build a sturdy foundation. The shiny exterior of the final product comes only through many revisions and painstaking changes.
The choice to work with Jesse Cannon was an easy one for the band, which worked with Cannon on two songs from Soul Like A Child. The relationship fostered in those early sessions made Cannon the go-to choice to produce Terra Terra Terra’s next release in its entirety. “Jesse is a producer with these punk /alternative roots from Jersey and New York, who at the same time is the biggest sucker in the world for pop gems like Katy Perry and Kesha songs,” Lowry reveals. “It’s an interesting combo that works so well with us because we really love to rock, but at the same time, we want to write catchy songs that have a mass appeal and people can sing with.”
All that’s left now for the Lakeland trio is to finally release The Space We Create out into the world. For Lowry, he says there’s no release that could better represent the band at this point in its career.
“Musically, lyrically, conceptually. Everything from anthemic rock / pop down to the little indie interludes. It’s a taste of what our influences have made us into. This is our own sound. This is what we want to offer to music, to people who love to listen to music as much as we do. Our own space that we’ve created.”
The Space We Create will be out digitally and in stores on January 15 via Round Kid Records.
