dodie: It was more Orla who really built her world at Middle Farms (Miles’ studio). In fact, that was one of the factors that led us to starting the band because we all found ourselves having a bit of fun doing the live sessions for her album.
Orla: Yeah, so Middle Farms is Pete’s studio, which is in Devon - like southwest England, a very beautiful place. Pete’s way of working is so old school, 70s; it’s tape machines; it’s live performance. It couldn’t have been more different from the way that we usually make music in London, which is more clinical and very much in the computer, so even though, dods (dodie’s nickname) and I have worked with Pete before, this was definitely the project that was like Peter Miles unleashed and better than ever - really rather than trying to mould Pete’s way of working to suit our project, it was more letting him take the reins and do music in the way he loves to do it, which is impulsive, very fast, no overthinking, and recording tracks all at the same time. There wasn’t demoing, chipping away - most of the vocals you hear on the record are the first time right after the idea comes to mind, so that was something very different for us. And I think it was very different for Pete. I think it was good for him to work in the way that he loves to, so I think we got the best out of each other and the best out of Pete and out of the space, which felt very different from before.
Martin: The main difference between Pete and others - I don’t want to speak for all of us, but I think it’s true - Pete is very focussed on pre-production - throw up all the mics, throw up all the instruments; everything is ready to go, and then he presses the red button, and it’s pure vibes. That’s all it is, man. That’s what the album is. It’s just pure vibes, whereas I think the way that we write tends to be way more backend heavy; we write the song; it’s very steady, very curated, and then, we’ll carefully figure out what the bass part is, what the keyboard part is. It’s very thinky and methodical. All the work ends up happening on the backend. You know, we’re on mixed revision number 20, whereas we felt with Pete it was completely reversed. We did all the work of setting it up in the perfect environment to then just press record, and it’d be great. Yeah, it was just about inverting our way of working.
Greta: And I think that whole process, the way of inverting how we made music, literally carried on through every aspect of the project. Reverting how we release songs; we release a song every other week, instead of waiting months between releases. Even the visuals, the marketing, everything. We’re intentionally trying to do what we always wanted to do in our solo projects and be more impulsive with it in the same way that writing the songs had a stream of consciousness to it. It’s like you’re hearing us writing, recording, producing the songs as we go on the album. It’s the same with every other aspect of the project moving forward.