Vow’s Andrew Thomas Talks New Single and EP, the Importance of Vinyl + More

As they prepare for the release of their second EP, 'Make Me Yours,' L.A.-based synth duo Vow are celebrating their first new single of the year. 'Planks' dropped yesterday (June 30) and features an electro-pop beat with an eerie piano rhythm created by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Thomas. Thomas' audial landscape serves as the foundation to Julia Blake's penetrating and hauntingly beautiful vocals.

'Make Me Yours' is available on August 12 via the Native Sound and will be pressed on three vinyl variants: clear with pink splatter, light pink and black. The first run for all three variants combined will be limited at just 300 copies. In addition to the vinyl editions, 'Make Me Yours' will also be available as a digital download.

On the heels of unveiling 'Planks' to the world, Thomas took a few minutes to catch-up with Diffuser about 'Make Me Yours,' his personal appreciation for vinyl and how he sees 'Make Me Yours' as more than just an EP and actually a part of a "series."

'Planks' has a lot of layers to it, with an atmospheric sound that at certain times sounds eerie but other times quite comforting. Is this a good representation of the whole EP?

Definitely. This song is a good middle-of-the-road song off this album. 'Make Me Yours' is a very dynamic album song-to-song and so is 'Planks' as a song. 'Planks' definitely covers a lot of the bases of the album.

How did the writing and recording process for 'Make Me Yours' differ from 'Make Me Young'?

'Make Me Young' was very heavily influenced by the music gear I was surrounding myself with at the time and I was listening to a lot of the Soft Moon and reconnecting with my deep rooted love for Depeche Mode.

For 'Make Me Yours,' I just bought a very awesome, f---ed up looking Strat from a good friend of mine and I didn't want to put it down. It rekindled my love for guitars. So, unlike 'Make Me Young,' where most songs started with a drum machine beat and a bass -- either synth or electric -- the building blocks for 'Make Me Yours' started with a beat and a Strat and developed from there on down instead of bass on up. Then in our usual fashion, once I'm happy with a track instrumentally, I send to Julia and usually within minutes I get a text back saying, "Let's do the damn thing."

We try to track vocals as soon as she feels inspiration after hearing the track to capture the most of her emotion in the words she wrote. Then we press the record, mix and we're done. We usually just cross our fingers and hope all of our songs relate to each other enough to put on an album and so far we've lucked out in that regards.

I love that you're releasing this in such a cool way with the various vinyl editions. In today's day and age of digital distribution, why is vinyl important to you?

Thanks! We couldn't have been happier to have Julio from the Native Sound help us achieve that dream of getting this album out on vinyl in so many great ways. But yes, vinyl still plays an extremely important role for new music and to us, beyond just the sound quality being better than digital.

It's the only cure I can see to our digital A.D.D. I suffer from this as much as everyone else when listening to music and easily having access to anything I want to hear. It's so hard to listen to albums these days when mid-way through an album or even song you want to listen to something different. Most of our favorite artists put a lot of time into curating their music into an album order that impacts the listener most or portrays the album in the way they intended best and to me there's nothing better than a physical record forcing you to enjoy that record in the best way it was intended to be listened to.

For fans of 'Make Me Young,' what's the connection from that EP to this? Obviously there's a tie-in with the name ... is there more to the relationship?

'Make Me Young' and 'Make Me Yours' are definitely connected in a lot of ways. Since we're a young group and our musical tastes and inspirations are constantly changing we realized the EP format was a great one for us to develop our sound further instead of pigeonholing ourselves into one genre the way a full length can do to bands in their beginning stages.

This "Make Me …" EP series is definitely all about development. Both as people and song writers. 'Make Me Yours' is a great middle record in the series to connect where we were and where we're going.

'Make Me Yours' will be available as a 12-inch EP or digital download via the Native Sound. Get details on the EP and pre-order your copy here.

Vow, 'Planks'