HURTS — THE DARK SYNTHPOP DUO OF THEO HUTCHCRAFT AND ADAM ANDERSON — HAVE WALKED A RAPID ROAD TO SUCCESS. AFTER THEIR SELF-MADE VIDEO FOR WONDERFUL LIFE BECAME THE TALK OF THE INTERNET, THEIR DEBUT ALBUM HAPPINESS BECAME A HUGE SELLER ACROSS EUROPE. THE GOTHIC-TINGED SECOND ALBUM EXILE WAS A CRITICAL HIT, AND NOW THEY’RE BACK WITH THE SCINTILLATING SURRENDER. SINGER THEO EXPLAINS THE HURTS PHILOSOPHY OF POP…

ROY DELANEY

So you’re preparing for a big tour on the back of your new album, Surrender – how does it feel to be in Hurts right now?

It’s great. It feels brilliant. We’ve just put out the new album out and it’s been received pretty well. As an album we were visiting some unfamiliar territory, so you never know how it will play, so it’s a relief that people seem to like it.

Surrender seems like a much brighter and pop-fused album than Exile. Was this a deliberate tweak of direction, or more of a natural evolution?

It was a mix of both, really. I think Surrender was a reaction to Exile, actually. We recorded that one in the rain in Manchester, and it was something of a dark concept album – driven and draining. So for Surrender we thought we’d get rid of the shackles and make an album that was a complete 180 opposite to the last one. We travelled a lot while we were writing the songs. We enjoyed ourselves first and thought about the music second, and I think that’s reflected in the music. I think it’s been the most enjoyable album we’ve made. It’s fluid. At our core we’ve always been a pop band, anyway, so we wanted to make a big pop album that was energetic and bright. And we were conscious of that when we were doing it. I thought about all the great pop albums by my favourite artists. Look at Bowie when he did Let’s Dance. He decided to embrace pop, and it was such a fresh and exhilarating album. The Cure too, when they did The Head On The Door. They expressed themselves in a whole new way on that one.