Cosmiclava where the lava flows

Among all the new groups I discovered last year, I particularly liked MUD WALK, an all-female heavy rock band with a strong preference for the blues and the music of the 1970s. Formed in 2010 on the Swedish island Gotland, MUD WALK present themselves as keepers of tradition and they are doing this with unlimited enthusiasm and a lot of heart. Their music is vibrant and throbs with energy while the songs are not short on catchy hooklines. You may check it out yourself by listing to their latest 12" EP 'The Drifters Forgotten Lore' (review here). This is MUD WALK's second EP and I can assure you that it spent a lot of time on my platter. In order to find out more, I contacted the band to ask some questions about their background and future plans. All band members replied to my questionnaire. Hope you like it and have fun discovering MUD WALK!

First of all, let's talk about the band's history. MUD WALK has been formed in 2010. What was your intention behind it and did you play in any other bands before?

Mud Walk: We more or less started a band just a few weeks after we first met (at the school), but the concept of Mud Walk was not created until the fall of 2010. All of us had played in other bands or solo before Mud Walk and therefore the music was a combination of all our musical backgrounds. In 2010 we decided to narrow our influences down into a concept that we all agreed on. The concept was to play honest and raw rock with blues influences, which is a combination of genres that inspire us all and drives us to make music together.

If I understand correctly, you have two vocalists in the line-up. What is the reason for that descision?

Mud Walk: It wasn’t really anything that we decided upon but it rather just happened! We’ve got a lot of positive reactions to having not one but two vocalists and we really think that they go well together musically.

How did you get in contact with the blues- and hard rock of the 1970s? What do you like best of the music in that decade?

Mud Walk: There’s indeed a whole lot of music that we like from in and around that time. We basically dug deep into the music that inspired the contemporary music that we love and ended up in the heavy, groovy and occult feel of the 60-70s and all the way back into the blues of 1920’s. What draws us to music from that “era“ is the rawness and honesty of it and the fact that some of the bands of that time were pioneers of great and crazy ideas. It is the simplicity, rawness and experimentalism from that time that inspires us and we want to make our own interpretation of that with a contemporary feel.

Do you think that the music of the 1960s and 1970s was better than today? What do you think about the current state of rock 'n' roll?

Mud Walk: We’d don’t want to say that music was better before but you could suppose that many great things were done musically in the 60s and 70s and that those things can not be done today by someone claiming that they are new ideas. With that said, there’s a lot of great music being made today that inspires us as well!