Syd: For the track Disaster Pop, that’s because that track is about this youthful idea that I’d rather be emotionally devastated than not have any emotions – I’d rather be really hurt by a situation than be cold and not affected. A lot of the songs have this emotional intensity on this EP. A lot of it is about this period of life which Monika and I were in at that time, where I thought, these things are really intense, but I kind of like it, and I’d rather celebrate that it hurts.Rather than making it all melancholy, [I’d rather] follow the idea of suffering and make it a really fun, playful beat which has that element of angst to it. That felt really authentic, I guess.
Olivia: My cat died in Summer and I was crying in Syd’s kitchen, and he said, oh, but isn’t it nice that you could feel this much respect for this? I guess that’s kind of the same thing as that song. It didn’t help me – I felt a bit angry at [Syd] at the beginning - but after a bit, I thought yeah, that was quite emo.
Monica: The Pop element of our music is something Syd and I wrestled with a lot together as people. Where we are and what we’re doing with the project is just not a coincidence, because everyone [in the band] is a great musician, and Syd has always done a lot of experimental music, but when I met him, he was at the crossroad of thinking about what kind of music he wants to make next. We decided - but without really deciding - mostly by fighting over structures, eventually with Louis as well. We decided to make pop music because I like songs that feel good. There’s the disaster element and there’s a whole emotional ethos of how it’s written and what it evokes. But the pop element is also something that’s very mouldable in how we approach music and how accessible we want to make a song, given that the whole field of experimentation is open to us.
Louis: Making popular music is quite a scary thing, and whatever you make is going to be, in an artistic way, a reflection of yourself: the window into your psyche. There’s also an argument to be made that it’s such a terrifying thing to make something that is bopable and danceable.
What is Future Trip Hop? Obviously Trip Hop still continues, but for me it’s situated in the Portishead and Massive Attack thing of the 90s. It’s not stuck in time, but it feels almost vintage at this point. How do you negotiate that with the future?
Syd: I think Trip Hop ended and was kind of unrealised in that way. To me what Trip Hop means is, for example, Hip-hop sampling methodology mixed with Rock music ideas, basically, and Electronica, and everything in between. For a decade there was this incredible innovation in that field, and then it slightly plateaued a bit in my opinion. Beyond those classic artists, I don’t think shit went much further. I think Future Trip Hop is used in our press release because we’re now combining modern Hip Hop with modern Indie or modern Rock ideas, and the result is very, very different I think to that Massive Attack sound. In terms of that ambition of genre fusion and sampling methods with a full band playing live, it’s more the methodology than the song.