Coasts: The band that make their music via email and have still managed to sell out venues through word of mouth

Coasts tell how they have now assembled leading pop producers for their debut album

Coasts is made up of David Goulbourn, James Gamage, Chris Caines, Liam Willford, Ben Street who met at Bath University (Ben Hopkins)

It’s a red-letter week for Coasts: as January draws to a windswept, rain-lashed close, the band’s debut album is released, eight years after the five members got together at Bath University.

No matter that the timing seems off for a record with sun-dappled palm trees on the cover and whose 10 songs couldn’t be more summer-festival-anthemic if they came with a free plastic tumbler of cider and a knackered pop-up tent.

Coasts are a shining example of the very modern British guitar band: the one that doesn’t sound very much like a guitar band.

They’re a bit Bastille, another word-of-mouth outfit that took a long time to climb the charts (before finally selling huge amounts here and in the US). They’re a bit Blossoms, the Stockport long-hairs who made the BBC’s Sound of 2016 shortlist (Coasts didn’t) and who make similarly fresh-faced, singalong pop.

They’re even a bit (whisper it) One Direction, a boy band who want to be a guitar band playing naggingly catchy pop that was latterly sounding increasingly “indie”.

When umbrella-wielding, black-clad frontman Chris Caines rolls up to east London’s Spitalfields market this soggy afternoon, the self-titled album has been on sale for four days. How is it faring?

“It’s No 25 in the midweek charts,” he says, shrugging slightly and playing with a mop of hair suggestive of a medieval courtier. Caines is “sort of” happy with this outcome, which for a debut LP, is none too shabby.

On the one hand, if you’re a new British act not tipped-for-the-top by the Sound of…/BBC Introducing junta, making any kind of splash at this time of year is impressive. On the other, Coasts have been plugging away – putting in the gig miles, working those socials, assiduously gathering half-a-dozen producers – and it’s understandable that their singer might have reasonably expected a better chart showing. (Ultimately, Coasts enters the album charts at No 38.)

But affable, motivated and impassioned 27-year-old that he is, Caines quickly brightens. “Our ambitions are higher than that,” he notes, meaning it as a positive rather than a complaint. “It’s just the way it’s worked. But it’s cool. I think our core fanbase have bought all our EPs, so have a few of the songs already and didn’t want to order the album for that reason. But that’s fine.

“Ultimately it doesn’t matter,” he continues, dismissing the relevance of physical sales in a chart landscape that’s now as scientific as alchemy, courtesy of the powerful but abstract importance of airplay, streaming, views, shares and likes. “It’s all about reaching a bigger audience.”

For Coasts, as much heavy lifting is done by making a Tumblr-friendly video like the one for breakthrough song “Oceans” (1.2 million YouTube views) as it is by hiring a hitmaker like Fraser T Smith (Adele, Sam Smith) to work on the current single “You”. Their social-media following is large, loud and hearty, big enough to catalyse an impressive live profile – later this month Coasts play London’s 3,300-capacity Roundhouse, and they’re sure to be grabbing many a nice mid-to-late afternoon slot this festival season.

“We really like pop music,” one-time acting student Caines states unashamedly. “We’re into such a diverse range of music, from Eighties pop to Nineties R&B, house, dance, and modern pop music as well.” All of those influences are also corralled by co-writer/guitarist Liam Willford into solidly uplifting epics like “Modern Love” and “A Rush of Blood”. “The way music is consumed nowadays, via streaming, it’s ever-more important to have a strong song underneath. I think that shows in what artists are coming through.”

The five members of Coasts congregated, at Bath University, from all over England. They’re still scattered in different parts of the south and west, but, to Caines’s mind, this has only strengthened their music.

“Liam writes the music, emails it to me, I then write the lyrics and melody, then we bounce it across, get together as a whole group, and flesh it out. It was a bit of a challenge at first, not being able to speak face-to-face on how you want a song to develop. But it’s worked out. It’s meant our songwriting is a lot more focused.”

Even then, Coasts are open to outside influences. Caines is upfront about the reasons for their album seeming to suffer, on paper, from that very modern malaise: a set of songs made by committee.

Yes, they had production assistance from Smith; James Rushent (of Does It Offend You, Yeah?), Mike Spencer (Rudimental), Duncan Mills (Jake Bugg), Mark Crew (Bastille) and Eliot James (Two Door Cinema Club).

“Before we had a label we went in to the studio and worked with Eliot. That was great; we didn’t have a huge budget and just recorded the album. Then people started to get on board and started to give us money and said, ‘let’s do some of those songs again,’” explains Caines.

“That’s when we had to readjust where we were. But, also, we wanted to test ourselves, so it was really important for us to work with as many producers as we could.”

In terms of Smith, who won a Grammy for his work on Adele’s 21 and is co-writer of Coasts’ single “You”, Caines was more thrilled by his work with Kano than by his more mainstream credentials. “We weren’t worried about... someone else having a writing credit. We’re ambitious, we don’t really care – if someone has an input and is better than what we’ve come up with, why wouldn’t you take that advice and that guidance? We’re only going to get better because of that.

“Me and Liam felt like we needed a couple of songs that were slightly different to what we’d already done on the album,” he adds. “And Fraser taught us a lot about how to approach songs in a modern way of writing – really simple things like starting with a title and everything has to serve that title. It’s still our song, it’s still got that Coasts sound, he just helped us… improve it, I guess.”

It’s all helped create a genre-defying, broad-based appeal for Coasts, one that can encompass syncs on both Fifa 16 and Made in Chelsea.

“Our music is accessible,” notes Caines with pride. “We write pop songs, dressed up with guitars and synths and different sounds. We’ve got huge ambitions, and we just love pop music as well, so it’s naturally going to seep through into what we do. We want to be a really big band.”

‘Coasts’ is out now. The band play London’s Roundhouse on 26 February