Tell us about your new EP, recently released on Soundcloud. Why did you decide to give it away for free? 

The EP we just put out is our debut release. It’s been kind of a long time coming in relation to how much we’ve been touring, but we knew the sound that we were developing wasn’t where we wanted it to be. We didn’t wanna just put shit out for the sake of putting it out, it had to be right for us.

The main reason for it being available for free is that we just want it heard by as many people as possible. We’d rather have a thousand people playing it over ten people paying for it.

How would you describe your live show to anyone that has not yet seen it and where can we catch you play next?

It’s definitely energetic, and it’s heavier than it is on record. It really is something you just gotta come and see for yourself, you’ll either love it or hate it. 

We don’t have too much booked at the minute due to us spending our time recording. Towards the second half of this year though that should all change. We can’t wait to get back out on the road. With that said, we’ll be at Strawberry Fields with Labrinth and Hadouken! in August. We can’t wait for that to come around.

You’ve worked with unique artists such as the very talented Eva Lazarus on your EP. Can you tell us more about the other artists involved?

Eva is the ultimate professional; she really is a genuine talent. She got the train up to us from Bristol first thing, tracked a demo for Versus White Knights, shot the video for it, then rolled with us to Manchester to get the song down properly, as well as tracking a second song for the next EP we got lined up, all in a day. Hopefully that’s just the first of many songs we write together.

We also had features from Lauren Faye and Luka Brazi of The Lost Generation. Lauren, like Eva, smashed it. We recorded most of the EP at Blueprint Studio’s in Manchester, and Lauren is a student at one of the classes they hold there. We wanted to try a female vocalist on a track we got called Gold, and Ian Stewart, our engineer and co-producer, recommended her. She learnt it and got it down in the couple of hours she had free. Killed it!

The Luka Brazi feature was a big deal for us. We’ve been listening to The Lost Generation since we were youths, and we’d always talked about how sick it would be to have a feature off one of those guys on one of our beats. For it to not only happen but to click as well as we did in the studio was surreal. Luke and Devas make real music, we regard them both as up there with the best MC’s in the country. And we ain’t just saying that because they’re from Brum either!

If you could work with anyone in the music industry, who would it be?

We’d love to tour with Enter Shikari, Breathe Carolina and Tek-One again. Those lads are a lot of fun to be on the road with; they know how to put on a show and how to party after it. We’d love to perform with N.E.R.D, Cypress Hill, Travis Barker… it’s endless though to be honest.

We have heard you guys are back in the studio working on more material, can you tell us more about that?

We’re picking up from where we left off with the first EP really. The two EP’s combine to make an album, and this second EP, or second half, is a little more up-beat. We’re not sure how many tracks we’re gonna put out on it as yet it is still early days, but we start recording in June.

How did Tyler Mae come about? Where did the act name come from?

Believe it or not we were a punk band that used to play just for the hell of it in a bedroom. The sound kinda grew up and changed as we did as people. 

We named the band after an actress from the 50's. We wanted something that didn't sound genre specific so we could have free reign to keep changing, and so that we weren’t put into a category before we'd even been heard.

Your style is quite hard to pin down to a specific genre – could you please explain it for those that have not yet heard your music.

It's a tough question. We're into a lot of music and we try to take something from all of it. It's a similar sort of concept I suppose to DJ's such as Mr Scruff and Oneman in the sense that they play everything and it works. The difference with us is that we try to play two to three genres at once over one track, rather than different genres back to back. We'll try and take say grime and jazz and force them to fuck to make this lovechild that some might find beautiful but others might find ugly.

We are a heavy band, especially live, but we'd like to think our sound still carries melody and that it's still got a groove. It really is something that we'd encourage you to see for yourself so that you can make your own mind up.

Have you got any advice you could please pass on to upcoming acts that are just starting out?

I think we're still that act ourselves; we're a long way away from where we wanna be. So far though, we've found the most important thing you can do is to be different. You gotta try and stand out and stand alone from other artists in your scene. You also gotta maintain a never-say-die attitude. You'll have a 100 setbacks before you get a shot at something that can help you and your work progress. If you’ve got the stamina to deal with the setbacks, then you'll be alright.