Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

“Sometimes,” Chinatown Slalom frontman Liam Nolan confides to Apple Music, “it felt like these songs were taking us for a ride rather than the other way round.” We believe it. On a vivid, playful and at times startlingly furious debut album, the Liverpudlian four-piece mix soul samples and maverick bedroom production while exploring the trippier horizons of indie, hip-hop and jazz. “We wanted to capture our world in a full album right away,” Nolan says. “We didn’t want to drip-feed ourselves across loads of singles and EPs. With an album, you can really fall in love with a band.” Here, Nolan takes you deep into their world with a track-by-track album guide. ”Dr Marvelo & His Best Friend Corkie” “We all met in freshers' week when we got to the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. In that first week me and Jake [Brettell, bandmate] started making beats. We went down to the Title vintage shop and got this album called 3:47 by Klaatu. We flipped the beat on this track called ‘Doctor Marvello’ and it sounded so sick. We’d only known each other a few days, but found ourselves rapping on it as these absurd characters: Doctor Marvelo, Bottle Top Bill and his best friend Corkie. We played it at a party during Freshers Week and from there I think we realised we’d found a very good thing.” ”Every Minute of the Day” “Weirdly, we then didn’t make music together for another three months. I think we needed to fully bond as friends first. Once we picked it up again the album began flipping between that teenage ‘I don’t give a shit, who’d want to be a millionaire anyway’ braggadocio and the angst and anxiety that can take hold as a teen. This song is shaped by that latter feeling. Lyrically, it worries that the game is basically rigged. It sums up the negative space we can all hit sometimes.” ”Where U At?” “When we were making the album we held the foolish opinion that we could sample anyone because if anyone decided they wanted to sue us we’d be so big that we wouldn’t care.