Natalia MantiniX Ambassadors are busy these days: they’re finishing a tour, their single “Unsteady” is climbing the charts and they’re featured on their producer Alex da Kid‘s new single “Not Easy,” with Elle King and rapper Wiz Khalifa. Speaking of rappers, X Ambassadors credit rap for inspiring part of their debut album, VHS.
“We love the way that ’90s hip-hop records have little interludes…that sort of tie the whole record together,” explains X Ambassadors keyboard player Casey Harris. “And rock records really haven’t done that since the days of Pink Floyd, y’know? And we wanted to do that with our record.”
“We…realized the record really just tells the story of our lives, of us growing up and becoming a band,” he adds. “And we had some footage that we had taken of our first tours and…so [we] took some audio clips from that.”
But the band didn’t stop there.
“It just sort of logically followed that [we] might as well get some stuff from earlier in life,” he laughs. “So we went back through our parents’ old VHS home videos and lifted a bunch of audio clips from there and spliced them throughout the record.”
“And.that’s sort of how the title came about,” Casey explains. “It was a reference to those home video clips but also sort of a technological marker of the time we grew up in.”
Of course, some X Ambassadors fans weren’t alive when VHS tapes were a thing, so they had no idea what the album title meant.
The band admits, “A couple of people on Facebook, when we first announced the title of the record [were like], ‘What does that stand for?'”
X Ambassadors finish their current tour dates November 27. They’ll do a few holiday shows in December before wrapping things up for the year.
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