Interview: Getdown Services
Interview & intro by Skye Matlock
photo by Siôn Marshall-Waters
There's a concert review sitting in our archive of Getdown Services' second-ever U.S. show, back when the duo (Josh Law and Ben Sadler) borrowed a guitar with a dubious Interpol connection, and left a room full of famously unimpressable Brooklyn regulars looking like they'd just remembered why they leave the house. Honestly, we're not sure the room fully recovered.
That's the baseline for these guys: turn up unassuming, leave the venue changed. It's the same chemistry that anchored their debut album Crisps—an unruly yet irresistible catalog of dry British humor that somehow always circled back to genius. In the time since that record and their first U.S. run, Getdown Services have only gotten louder, weirder, and better at being witty in a way that never undercuts how much they actually mean it. Having recently supported Viagra Boys on tour, the Getdown Services gigs have gotten bigger, the crowds rowdier, with songs that keep doing that thing where absurdist humor and genuine tenderness collide.
Which brings us to the brilliant record that pushes all of that further inward– Massive Champion. It’s an album about childhood, self-pity, and the strange possibility that all the "heal your inner child" talk might not be nonsense after all. The album pulls in live drums and acoustic textures alongside their usual electronic pulse. Songs like "600 Dance Lessons" and "Check The Definition" mark a deliberate turn toward more emotional, story-driven songwriting. "I Can't Die Like That" and "Stop Living" pair their anthemic hooks with surprisingly dark subject matter, and bring lyrics that lean further into storytelling and vulnerability than anything the duo has released before.
Ahead of the release, I caught up with Josh and Ben to hear more about their personal perspectives on the creation of Massive Champion.
Check it out below!
INTERVIEW
Getdown Services at Baby’s Alright in Brooklyn, October ‘25. By Tommy Krause for Occult Magazine
SKYE MATLOCK: Were any of your songs inspired by certain experiences from the travels of your last tour?
JOSH: Our day to day lives have changed massively in the way that we spend our time focusing on things we like now. That has definitely informed our general writing process, but I don’t think any specific touring experiences came into the writing. Writing and recording feels quite detached from playing shows.
BEN: I think it’s hard for touring not to affect your everyday e.g doing the touring, especially the end of year tour last year has made it possible for us to have mental space and time to process a lot of things that we speak about on the album. So it maybe has, but in a roundabout way rather than a direct story or experience.
SKYE: The sizes of crowds you’ve played for have changed quite a bit in a short amount of time. Has that influenced your approach to songwriting in any way?
JOSH: Not as much as we expected it to really. It’s corny, but our enjoyment of gigs is largely based on the energy from the audience and that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the size. I’d say if it’s inspired the writing in any way it’s that we’ve had a lot of good times on tour and experiencing regular joy in that way sort of flushes certain parts of your cynicism away. At least it has in our case.
BEN: I think we purposely tried to not let that affect how you write, obviously putting songs and the set list together you have to think about how people will receive it but in terms of topics or wording we’ve tried to not let more eyes on us affect it.
SKYE: Massive Champion has a various mix of intimate, diaristic moments and hypnotic grooves. What inspired the contrast?
BEN: The first album Crisps was put together from songs we made over a period of 2-3 years meaning there were a lot of different styles and colours on it. We really liked this mix of influences as we like a lot of different styles of music and wanted to carry that purposely over to the second album while maintaining a cohesive offering, I think we nailed it.
JOSH: A lot of albums we love have a lot of different sounds and styles going on. There’s something about the confidence of albums like that that inspire us. It feels like they aren’t second guessing themselves, or talking themselves out of ideas in pursuit of consistency of style. It sort of feels like they’re trusting the process and tapping directly into what inspires them. Hip hop albums do this a lot. There are a lot of musical styles being incorporated but the choices and taste of the artist glue it all together. The decision to make the album like this was based on us consciously not getting in the way of ideas more than it was a decision to purposely put different styles in there.
Getdown Services by Tommy Krause
SKYE: This record pulled from something like a hundred demos. How did you decide which bits would end up on the record?
BEN: Literally as simple as which ones we liked the most and which felt the most finished without having to shoehorn too many changes in there. Also with the tireless input from our manager Alice, and Josh and Dan from Breakfast Records.
JOSH: Yeah, it was a lot of trial and error and trying to think of the bigger picture of the album more than we have in the past. Our manager Alice and Dan and Josh at Breakfast Records helped out a lot. We all made a shortlist. Interestingly a lot of the stuff on all of the lists we made isn’t on the album. Fortunately, as we got to the deadline the right stuff started to present itself more naturally and it just all slotted in.
SKYE: You’ve said you wanted to push further into storytelling and emotion lyrically on this one. What’s a specific song where you felt that shift happening?
BEN: For me it was probably “600 Dance Lessons”. I wrote most of the words and had the idea for that long before we started putting things together for the album. We toured with Antony Szmierek early last year and his style of lyricism really spoke to me– you can be vulnerable and honest without having to be blunt about it, there’s beauty in the ambiguous.
JOSH: I think for me it’s probably “Check The Definition”— one of the things I love about Pop Music is its ability to convey feeling without necessarily saying much. It achieves an emotional punch with simple ideas and often quite broad lyrics. I think if we had the talent we’d both turn our attention to making that kind of pop music. I’ve never felt confident enough to make something Poppy like this and then as the band started to become known for our vocal and lyrical style I think I felt even less confident to try that. When I made that song I think I felt like maybe we can pull at this thread after all, even if we don’t necessarily pull it off. Maybe we can make Poppy stuff and it can still sound like us.
SKYE: “Cha Cha Slide” unexpectedly taps into intrusive thoughts with expectations. What was the moment that idea clicked into a full song?
JOSH: It took me ages to get the lyrics right for that song. The moment it came together was me and my partner Daisy were waiting to get picked up because our car had broken down. We were parked in a petrol station for hours and we wrote the lyrics for that one together. She’s a really helpful and strong voice when we’re making stuff.
BEN: Juxtaposition is something that should happen naturally, something about a sad song having happy music to it makes it sadder, I think setting out to make that happen can result in something not quite hitting either side of the balance you’re trying to strike. Death is something I think we think about a lot and making happy or angelic music is also something we’re passionate about, hehe.
SKYE: How did the title “Massive Champion” end up as the lens for the whole record?
JOSH: We realised the album was loosely about childhood and self pity and wanted a title that painted an image of positioning yourself as the victor in all of the imaginary fights you have with people in your head.
Getdown Services by Tommy Krause
SKYE: “I Can’t Die Like That” and “Stop Living” both sit death and dark thoughts next to something anthemic or sugary. Was that tension something you were chasing on this record, or did it just keep happening?
BEN: When writing for this album we both independently were writing about childhood and nostalgic feelings for some reason without deciding that’s what we were going to do. It’s nice we noticed that as we leaned into it more. Minehead and the West Country is home for the both of us and is an extremely formative place. Big up West Country.
JOSH: It wasn’t intentional, but I like a lot of music that feels uplifting and dark at the same time so we were happy to lean into it.
SKYE: Compared to Crisps, this album leans more into specifically West Country and Minehead imagery. Was that a deliberate direction for this record, or did it just surface naturally once you started digging into this material?
JOSH: I think a lot of things we’ve done have been about where we grew up in some way, I just don’t know if we were aware at the time. There isn’t really a culture of pride where we’re from, compared to some other places in the UK. It’s really easy to be corny when you’re making music about this stuff, so we shied away from it in the past. But with this album, we realised reflecting on your relationship with your upbringing isn’t necessarily even about pride. It’s not meant to be some flag waving thing for Somerset, it’s more about our specific relationship with where we grew up. We are proud of where we’re from though, and most importantly, Somerset is better than the rest of the West Country.
SKYE: Josh, you self-produced the whole thing again. Did the sound palette you wanted for Massive Champion specifically push you toward any genres you hadn’t pulled from before?
JOSH: Yeah definitely, from a technical point of view there’s loads more live stuff on this one, live drums and acoustic instruments etc. so I learned so much about engineering and microphones and all that stuff making this album. Genre wise, I think the musical idea probably informed the sound palette more than the other way round this time. For example I knew I wanted to do something folky so had to learn how to mix and record banjo. There are some examples of production ideas coming first though, “600 Dance Lessons” came from wanting to achieve a specific sound more than a specific musical idea. The whole thing definitely pushed me, and it was great.
Getdown Services by Sam Dronfield
Massive Champion by Getdown Services is out everywhere August 14th, via Breakfast Records.
Pick it up on vinyl here.
Keep up with all their tour dates and new releases here on bandcamp.
Listen to Getdown Services directly below!
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