Metronomy inhabit a brutalist, Escher-like world in the video for “Month of Sundays.” Tasked with making the final visual promo from the band's fourth album Love Letters, following Michel Gondry's fantastical effort for the record's eponymous track, artist Callum Cooper looked to the east. “When I heard the track, the stark harmonies brought to mind the Russian children’s choirs of the 1970s,” says Cooper, who set about finding suitable locations around London, creating a rig in the form of a sculpture to achieve the motion-sickness-inducing visual effect. “This architecture speaks of a shattered dream in a way. All of those buildings were once utopian, and forced an idea of the future.” 

Other visual influences include Angus McBean’s famous EMI building photo for The Beatles' debut album Please Please Me, a riff on Metronomy’s fetish for rock nostalgia, following frontman Joseph Mount’s progression from bedroom producer to studio-dwelling band leader. We caught up with Mount to talk MTV, old British lingo, and the beauty of simplicity.

How important is it to make a decent music video these days?
Joseph Mount: Very important. I look back to the 1990s, at things like “Ping Pong” by Stereolab or “Black Hole Sun” by Pearl Jam. We made our last video with Michel Gondry. When I was like 16 or 17 years old I would go and stay with my friend in Reading and he had MTV. I’d sit and just watch it for hours and hours. I didn’t necessarily like The Chemical Brothers before seeing his video, but afterwards I did. There’s a point where good ideas can make you like a band, even if you didn’t at first.

“Never in a Month of Sundays” seems quite a quaint British saying these days. Did the song grow out of the phrase?
JM: The song was going to be this slightly cynical song about the music industry in America, but then I just thought that was a tosser’s thing to do, so I changed it to work around this phrase. There are others I want to put into a song, like “bully for you” and “you’ve made a right pig’s ear of that.”

The track is reflective of the album: there are influences from some classic bands, but boiled down to their minimal and sparse essentials. Where does that idea come from?
JM: I just like learning more about what makes your songs sound like your songs. With this record, we worked in an eight-track tape studio. You have to try and distil it down to essentially eight parts. If you still feel like you can get a song or feeling across while it’s quite minimal, then you’re getting somewhere.

Love Letters is out now on Because Music. Metronomy is on tour in North America and Europe from September 10, beginning at the Hoxton in Toronto.