"Cartola is a salty, classic samba character from Rio who I don’t think a lot of people outside of Brazil really know about. I only found out about him through someone I know who married a Brazilian woman and he got super-deep into Samba and its history. “Brazilian music has always been a part of what Grizzly Bear do, especially Tropicalia records, Marcos Valle and Gilberto Gil. All of that stuff has been part of our vocabulary since our early years and in the last couple of years after Shields, I started discovering and getting into straight-up Samba. It isn’t trying to be psychedelic, blast anything open or trying to be crazy, it hits you right in the heart and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. “It’s not trying to blow your mind or anything, it’s just doing what people do in a Samba and it communicates so much. I know a little Portuguese, I don’t speak it well enough to know exactly what he’s saying but you can still feel the vibe and emotion of the song without knowing the words. There’s something so great about music that’s so straight-up in its own vernacular, that’s is exactly what this is and it’s just killing it. “‘Preciso Me Encontrar’ is my favourite track on the record and it’s such a good example of what that music does so well, it’s really honest, as honest as you could possibly be, there’s absolutely zero pretention going on and it’s played beautifully."

"I saw him [The Fall's Mark E. Smith] at Shepherd's Bush last year playing the last album, and only playing new songs. It was absolutely brilliant. I just sat and watched him, he's a genuinely strange person. He doesn't fit into the stereotype of the arts school drop-out, or the working class cliché either. It's a strange place he occupies in between. Just seeing him march around the stage turning the amps down, it sounded absolutely brilliant. You can tell he's got the ability to know how to make things sound amazing in quite a simple way. I could have chosen any Fall album from that period, Wonderful & Frightening World or Bend Sinister or I Am Kurious Oranj, but I chose ...Saving Grace because it has a really personal meaning to me. I grew up with it, and when I was at Sixth Form College I really started listening to the Smiths and The Fall. I had to find out myself about The Fall. I remember reading about them somewhere and going down to the record shop and buying a Fall record blind. Listening back, it's got some nonsense on it, like all his records. It's not some perfect artefact, there's something very instinctive about it. I love the track 'Paintwork'. As soon as I heard the track I assumed it was autobiographical, it's about the way he messes the music up. I can imagine the musicians saying, 'It's Mark, messing up the paintwork', but what they don't get is that that's the beauty of it, that he is messing up the paintwork, and the track in itself is strangely autobiographical because suddenly someone presses a tape recorder in the middle. He was always a huge, huge influence for me, growing up and then in Suede. You can't actually hear it in Suede, but we were massive fans, Justine and I especially, we were obsessed. When Matt, Justine or I were just mucking around we wrote the song 'Implement Yeah!', which was a sort of comedy song about him. Then there was the Fall song 'Glam-Racket', which the NME or someone said was about us. Who knows what anyone's songs are about, let alone Mark E. Smith songs? I think it was a timing thing: it came out in 1993, and people just assumed it was a criticism of Suede. Mark E. Smith's too smart to write a criticism of anyone, apart from people he's been in a band with. A great artist utterly defines their own genre, and that's what Mark E. Smith's done. He's got a patent on that sound."

"How I got to know about it was through knowing their original record label Kitty-Yo and working with people in Berlin and going over there, and then I met Ronald, and this album summed up a moment for me. Dance music had so completely dominated the 90s. Really you could only ever talk about music in terms of the beat. There was techno and electro and then there was drum & bass, and they were so dominant; there was no other music. I remember thinking at the time, at the height of drum & bass, why would you listen to any other kind of music besides drum & bass? That's the only kind of music there is. There's Britpop, but that's rubbish. And then towards the end of the 90s all that started to fade and there was Tortoise suddenly appearing with what Americans who didn't do dance music did as instrumental music. And then from Germany you had To Rococo Rot. I think they gave me that record, because I think the version I've got is a promo. And again it's one of those records we just listen to over and over again. Wire did a tour, I think it was in 2000, and when we started we hadn't provided any music to go on before the band. And in every venue they were playing something like Soundgarden. Sorry, but I can't stand Soundgarden. I can't take it. So then we said well why don't we give them some music to put on? And I had that album, so we had that on before every show and it was really good. It was like you have some thrashy support band and then some thrashy dirge playing after that and then Wire coming on and it's like an evening of dirge. So to lighten it up we put something else on that puts the audience in a different space. And it also set us up in a different way. We got to feel differently about what we were doing. It was very effective for that"