Alt-J singer Joe Newman has said some journalists are being premature in describing the band as the ‘new Radiohead‘ following the critical success of their debut album ‘An Awesome Wave‘.
Speaking in The Independent newspaper as Alt-J continue to be one of the bookies favourites for this year’s Mercury Music Prize, Newman also admitted the ever-growing attention being paid to the band is putting ‘quite a lot of pressure on us’, and continued:
“Radiohead have had an amazing career and we’ve only just done our first album. We don’t ever want to find ourselves writing an album that we don’t feel comfortable with. It’d be horrible to hear anyone say, ‘Alt-J: First album was great, second album was really good, third album – they just blew it’.”
“Some of the greatest people in music have been pretentious, and isn’t that what being in a band is all about,” keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton added. “Plus we’re writing songs about what we think – that’s pretty pretentious.”