Interview by Tom Lanham

The Joy Formidable may be a pugnacious little power trio from the dinky hamlet of Mold in North Wales. But – thanks to the virtual wall of tempestuous sound created by blonde bombshell guitarist/vocalist Ritzy Bryan, bassist Rhyddian Dafydd and drummer Matthew Thomas, on the recent A Balloon Called Moaning EP and the new The Big Roar full-lengther – the band has already taken Europe by storm and feels so at home on these shores that they now have signature places to eat on tour. “Matt’s burning through a lot of calories playing drums, so America has opened up a whole new playground of food possibilities for him,” explains Bryan, who’s a bit more familiar with the US than her bandmates. “So now we have a bit of a ritual when we get Stateside – we like to see how many pancakes Matt can eat in one sitting, so we’ll got to IHOP if we can. Because that’s where we were on our very first American breakfast – in an IHOP, watching Matt consume twice his body weight in flapjacks!”
        Bryan was weaned on her parents’ sprawling record collection. The first album to rivet her attention was Close To The Edge by Yes, then she discovered Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and Roy Orbison. “But mostly it was my dad’s Elvis Costello records, and Elvis Costello’s was the first songbook that I bought, and the first album that I tried to memorize all the lyrics from – he was my first musical obsession,” she recalls. Which almost explains the Joy Formidable’s daunting prog-punk sound on Roar pummellers like “Whirring,” “A Heavy Abacus,” “The Everchanging Spectrum Of A Lie” and breakthrough UK single “I Don’t Want To See You Like This.” Bryan spoke to Hot Topic about her unusual affinity for America.
 
HOT TOPIC: How did you get a name like Ritzy?
 
RITZY BRYAN: Well, my parents, you know, they’re kind of eccentric. So I’ve been called this absolutely forever, and it just stuck. I am not going to disclose my real name to anyone. I’ve got a different birth name, but I’ve been called Ritzy since I was very, very tiny – it was like a pet name, and it stuck all the way through school, all the way through college, and it's too late to change it now. And it was kind of playful, so it seemed to fit in okay at school. But in Wales, you get lots of really long names, and we don’t use a lot of vowels in the Welsh language, so abbreviated forms of names are quite commonplace. We like to save on the syllables.
 
HOT TOPIC: And you come from a town called, of all things, Mold?
 
BRYAN: Well, you know what? I’m gonna blame that on the English, because it’s not called Mold – that’s the English name for it. But the Welsh name is far more beautiful – Yr Wyddgrug. It sounds rather poetic, and it means "the heavenly hill." But there aren’t a lot of bands that have come out of North Wales – the last big band from our area was the Alarm.
 
HOT TOPIC: The cover of The Big Roar looks like an old Hokusai “Great Wave”/tsunami-type print. Kind of an eerie coincidence, huh?
 
BRYAN: I know, I know. Rhyddian does all the artwork, and always has. And it’s something that we really think is an important side of the band – we’re very involved with the link between the music and the visuals. So certainly there’s always a lot of symbolism behind the artwork, as well.
 
HOT TOPIC: Well, how in holy hell did you end up living in Washington, D.C. for a while?
 
BRYAN: Oh. Man. It feels like another lifetime. I was over there doing a lot of music and a lot of writing, and that year and a half that I spent over there was really where I felt like I came into my own as a songwriter, for sure. But it was under very strange circumstances. Just to cut a long story short, I needed to get out of the UK quite quickly for various reasons, I found a family online, I started au pairing for them, just went over with my guitar. Which is quite laughable, Because I think most people would label me the least maternal person. So it’s f*cking ridiculous to look back and think that I was actually in charge of looking after anything other than myself.
 
HOT TOPIC: Was it a lot like The Nanny Diaries?
 
BRYAN: It was a very, very strange year and a half. I found out a lot of stuff about myself, and my escape was very much in writing. I mean, I’d always written. But it’s quite a lonely existence, being an au pair, and you have a lot of time to think and concentrate and write. So in that sense, it’s good sometimes to have some time to yourself, just to get a different perspective on the world. But it certainly wasn’t easy.
 

HOT TOPIC: Did you have your own nanny room on the premises?
 
BRYAN: I had the f*cking basement, with a window that I could just about crawl out of if I needed to run away. I used to come and go without them really realizing if I was in or out – like a little cat door! But the two kids were really sweet and very young, and we had some good times. I mean, I’m a big kid at heart, in a lot of respects. But it was definitely a very strange life.
 
HOT TOPIC: How old were you when all this went down?
 
BRYAN: It was a few years ago, when I was straight out of college. I’m 26 now, so I was…23? It was just before this band started. I grew up in North Wales with a family that was really passionate about music – they weren’t professional musicians, but they were big record collectors, and they played music and listened to a lot of it. So I was writings songs from a very young age, and picking up instruments. So the one thing about going to D.C. was, I was very, very alone. In the suburbs, I didn’t know anybody, just this family I found online, there was no car, so you’ve got no real company but yourself. And you’re looking after two small children every day. So in that sense, it seemed to inspire a lot of creativity for me. And even though I’d been writing songs forever, that was quite an intense period of soul searching.
 
HOT TOPIC: How did you wind up moving back? Rhyddian was busy with a new group in Manchester, right?
 
BRYAN: Yeah. In the interim, Rhyddian had put a band together, so I didn’t know what I was getting into. I hadn’t spoken to him in a few years, but he phoned and said "I’ve got this band – do you wanna come over and play guitar? We’ve got songs written, shows lined up." And I thought "What the f*ck – might as well!" It felt like my time in D.C. had come to an end, so I went back over. But the band that he had in Manchester? I don’t wanna make it sound like I went from one miserable situation to another one, but I kinda did. There wasn’t great chemistry in this band, there were a lot of internal problems, and it quickly became clear that this wasn’t why we got into music. It was too f*cking messy, too much bullsh*t, too many egos, too much drama. So we fled again and went back to Wales, and that’s when we started the Joy Formidable. And that marked the first time that I’d written with anybody else, when Rhyddian and I wrote together.
 
HOT TOPIC: Then you relocated to London, and actually tracked The Big Roar in your bedroom?
 
BRYAN: Yeah. And in a tiny space. A tiny corner of what was already a small attic room in South London. It’s just the way that we’ve always wanted to do things, just with the production element – us being the producers is a vital part of the band. It’s been there from the start, and we don’t wanna change it. We like the spontaneity – we can record at any time of the day or night, and capture those moments quite honestly. We don’t book recording time somewhere – we just write, track and record songs when they come to us.
 
HOT TOPIC: Were neighbors pounding on the walls during sessions?
 
BRYAN: No, because we’re kind of clever with the way that we soundproof ourselves. But we recorded the drums in a garage in Wales, and we didn’t have any neighbors there, so that was okay. And the rest of it we just seemed to get away with, so maybe our neighbors were a little deaf to begin with.
 
HOT TOPIC: And you’ve stated the general theme of the album is finding victory in hopeless situations? How do you mean?
 
BRYAN: Just generally, I think there’s a Northern sensibility of always trying to be the eternal optimist. You keep your head down and you try to get through situations and be hopeful. And that’s definitely one of the feelings of the record, a thread running through it. We’ve had quite a turbulent year, so in that sense it’s quite a personal record, where we’ve tried to overcome things and find a happier alternative. So there are a lot of observational, dreamlike, make-believe things on there, things that have affected us, socially. So it kind of all ties together with that theme of trying to strive for something better.