🎉 Our second album 'Boa Howl' turns 10 today🎉 A few recollections and memories in this 🧵 if you'll indulge us with a few clicks.

🎉🎉🎉

Once a month Gary?! Rookie numbers

A wonderful thread🧵 on a fantastic album. Happy 10th Birthday, Boa Howl by @HALVESband. A real favourite in this 🏠

@TowerDublin I mean…

This thread might be enjoyed by @talldanhegarty @TPOEblog @learnandsing @hotpress @nialler9 @imroIreland @ArethaFranklin @JohnnyCash @RockandRollHOF

🎉Happy Birthday Boa 🎉

Relive it: Double 180grm etched vinyl in full colour gatefold glory available here for €16 (?!) along with a cd edition https://t.co/UpFhtgJ2tY. The album is on all streaming services. It stands up well after a decade so give it a spin. We're glad it exists anyway

Tour: It was a really fun album to tour though it was all done and dusted shortly after this for no real reason other than, these things happen. Hug the Blood (live) https://t.co/o4Y6ntcMnE Drip Pools (live) https://t.co/PDSB9D2rqU

Odds and sods: One outtake from the sessions which is probably one of the oddest pieces of music we did: 'Ink & Ice' https://t.co/e3gPl1lSy6 Our pal @Guy_Andrews did a remix of 'Drumhunter' which I think is better than the studio version by a mile. https://t.co/22aji1glsQ

Guests: Chanced our arm and managed to get @gemma_hayes on the track 'Tanager Peak'. Spent a nice afternoon in our rehearsal space tracking her amazing vocals and drinking tea. Our old pal Elaine (aka @CarnivalMoon ) features on a few tracks too

Album theme: It's a strange one. Kind of about heaven, or someone's version of it. Kind of about dreams and parts about drowning. Some really amazing lyrics (once again) by Tim on this one. See inside gatefold of the Boa Howl vinyl for proof. (Time for a restock @TowerDublin ?)

Album cover: Typed 'analog' into Flickr and spent the bones of a week going through the results. This is a family photo which is unedited save for a slight crop to remove the date (April 10th 1993). Very Boards of Cananda. Thanks again to Lee Chang Ming for allowing us use it.

Album title: Pleased with this one. Refers to a summit on a mountain in China dubbed 'White Boa Howl', only one google hit for it at the time. Found it late one night down a rabbit hole of weird Wikipedia articles. Terrified the other lads wouldn't go for it. Sorry @BoaMorteBand

More photos: (golf cart incident/accident not pictured)

Recording diet: filter coffee, granola & yoghurt, very very weak Heineken. https://t.co/K80n7QwBa6

Working titles of songs : 'Sad Sad' (Drip Pools), 'Bad Bad' (Bring Your Bad Luck), 'Looper'(White Boa Howl), 'Creeper'(The Glass Wreckage), 'Kitchen'(Drumhunter), 'Folker' (Tanager Peak), '50's'(Slow Drawl Moon (For David)) Complete nonsense until we pieced it all together.

We booked 12 days in Gothenburg to get all band tracking plus all layered strings so we did 14 hour days. We'd record with our lovely Swedish engineers (Oskar and György) by day and our lovely irish engineer (Ciarán) by night once he'd put the bass down. We went a little mad.

Recording: Like our debut we wanted to go abroad to track on 2". Svenska Grammophon was chosen due to the amount of gear & the fact we could sleep there. The Neve desk was originally owned by Queen in their Swiss studio. Johnny Cash, Aretha & Halves all through the same board.

Preproduction: We did a bunch of field recordings as we were writing. Jumping on rocks, re-amping demoes in a forest and the like. Elis slowed it all down and cut it up into lovely beats. Worth it for the terrible headline below.