Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon’s Drinks needs no game plan

Hermits on Holiday – the pair’s debut LP as Drinks – is like a visitor’s guide to the trippy recesses of their collective consciousness. Ice-cream van chords loop into tick-tock rhythms, seemingly unstoppable riff locomotives fracture into melancholy spokes of layered vocal, but however wild and patchwork Hermits on Holiday might appear at first listen, there are ever-recognisable landmarks of the musicians’ previous works flowing throughout to keep you on track. Both have collaborated before (Cate most notably with Gruff Rhys, and Tim with Ty Segall among many others), but never, it seems, with such ease. “The definition of ‘compromise’ never really came in to play,” insists Tim. “Whereas it can when you collaborate, y’know? We never really butted heads at all.”

While they’re both old hands at the sometimes-wearing cycle of writing, recording and touring as individuals, Tim and Cate have placed the focus firmly on fun as Drinks. Try too hard to “moralise” (as Cate puts it) anything on the album and the pair will stop you short. When I try and find the deeper meaning behind the supremely strange, comedy skit-like album track Tim, Do I Like That Dog?, for example, I’m told there is no such thing. “It was meant to be playful. It’s just us having a nice time, and not taking anything too seriously, you know?”

This sense of excitement and fun was key to how Hermits on Holiday took shape. “I think we’re both lovers of spontaneity and chaos,” says Cate. True to their word, the album’s recording started with no plan at all. “We kind of went down the complete abandon route,” she continues. “We immediately came off the White Fence tour and went, ‘we have to do this record or we’re never going to do it’. Initially we were throwing around some songs that we knew we could do, songs I’d written, songs Tim had written, but we thought, ‘my god that is so boring, I’m bored, how can we expect people not to be bored if we’re bored?”

There’s a sense of mutual adoration of each other’s creative outputs that surfaces more than once during our chat. When I ask Tim for his favourite Cate Le Bon song, and Cate vice versa, I wonder if there might never be a conclusive answer. In the end, Cate has to pick two: Goodbye Law, from White Fence’s most recent LP For the Recently Found Innocent and Chairs in the Dark, from Cyclops Reap. “Still?” asks Presley, surprised. “Even though you did it [on tour with White Fence]? Really?” It’s still an unequivocal “yeah!” from Cate.

Tim finds it even harder to choose a Cate Le Bon song he’d rate above any other. He’s had a sneaky listen of her forthcoming album, you see, and it’s “fucking amazing – I think I might like it better than Mug Museum, which I thought was impossible”. So again, it’s a tie – this time three-way. Shoeing the Bones, Duke and “a few on the new one that I know are going to be my favourite” get the title.