Talkback: Aron Kobayashi Ritch

Los Angeles‑based Aron Kobayashi Ritch first fell in love with production in a friend’s father’s garage studio, recording local bands while skipping school to assist at the legendary Sound City Studios with engineer David Boucher. It was in this period that he met Momma, the rock band he would come to join and whose records he would come to produce, not least latest LP Welcome To My Blue Sky.

At the moment I can’t stop listening to

I’ve been listening a lot to the first two Cranberries records. That was a band where I always knew the hits, but I never fully understood why they were important. They’re just so fucking good! The stuff that Steven Street was doing on them is pretty mind‑blowing. I’ve always been a fan of his, but yeah, those records are amazing. I also have a constant love affair with the band Frou Frou. They only have one album [Details], that’s it! But I think that is such a landmark for me, in terms of sound and songwriting and production. What Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth were doing on that record is so insane. I’ve always loved that record. And lastly, I’ve revisited the first Third Eye Blind record. Growing up in that era, the late ’90s and early 2000s, a lot of the music I make sort of dips into that. I like records that had radio pop appeal, but like, were still ‘indie records’, or at least had the stylings of alternative music. It’s such a feat to combine the two and not make it incredibly cringey. That’s a fine line to toe, and it’s something we think a lot about in my band, too.

The artist I’d most like to record

It’s hard for me to take artists who I love, whose records I think are amazing, and to think about how I would somehow alter their career. Like, yeah, I’d love to work with Radiohead, but would I really do a better job than Nigel Godrich? Probably not. But the reality is I enjoy the process of finding an artist’s sound, so the prospect of working with someone that I’ve looked up to is sort of like, “Well, what would I do with this?” I do think it would be really cool to work with Weezer. We toured with them a long time ago, and they’re one of my favourite bands, but mostly it’s because I have a specific idea of what they should sound like. They had an aesthetic in the ’90s that I think they kind of stumbled upon, which was this very dry, honest representation of their music that I think gets lost when you get popular. This is a debate that’s raged on for decades with Weezer fans.

The first thing I look for in...