Experimental London octet caroline open up about new album 'caroline 2' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“What is it? What is this band? Who are we? What is our relationship? We were having to re-invent it.” Casper Hughes and Jasper Llewellyn, with bellies full of pizza from their regular South London haunt the Hill Station Cafe, are fuller still with self-reflection. They form two thirds of a songwriting partnership - completed by Mike O’Malley - that, since they began playing together in 2017, assembled the full-blown eight-piece outfit now known as caroline. As they speak, new single ‘Total Euphoria’ has been out for three days, and we find the duo reminiscing over how the song was written, like old friends indulging over shared memories.

“I remember you and me being like, ‘there’s something really good in this’,” says Casper, “and I think Mike was a little bit more confused by it in a sense. It was not in our comfort zone as a band. It sounded really good, but what do we do with it?”

Their first release in over two years - and the follow-up proper to the band’s 2022 self-titled debut album - ‘Total euphoria’ is a breathtaking return. A snippet of a lo-fi outtake breathes for a second or two before clangorous chords twang in and out of sync. Thumping drums roll in like dark clouds and a massed choral vocal sings from the rooftops, split by horns, scratching fiddles, and a gut-ripping sub-bass explosion two thirds in. It’s a track that’s as grounded and humble as it is majestically disorientating; a stumble through a weird, dense, and sensational paradise; an emotional and sensory overload grabbing for attention in all directions at once while remaining in total cohesion. When they chose the track’s title, they weren’t joking.

Sounding like an expression of profound conviction, the process it took the band to reach ‘Total euphoria’, as released, was far from straightforward. The question of how to follow their self-titled debut may be a perennially challenging one, but caroline didn’t let on that they were especially daunted by the prospect. All they needed, it seemed, was time - and lots of it. Plus, multiple week-long residential writing trips: “Twice to Essex, Once to Margate, once to Scotland, once to France,” lists off Jasper, matter-of-factly.

During these trips, the band would spend more time discussing and debating their overall vision than actually constructing fresh material, reaching Socratic dialogue levels of “discussion and reflection” on what caroline as an entity should represent. “It’s funny,” remembers Casper, “after going to Scotland for four days, and going to France for ten days, we had very little music to show for it. When we went and showed it to the rest of the band, they were all like, ‘what have you been doing?’. It was very important to work yourself up to the point where you know what you want to do. You have to be a cohesive unit. You can’t just drop into it.”

“It’s never worked like that,” adds Jasper. “There’s no one person bringing a whole song for people to put parts to. We had to, as a three at least, work out where we were in terms of our core interests. It has to be the three of us. That’s what works.”

“It is a massive undertaking. It’s a real slog - it probably is for everyone,” confess Casper. “We make it hard for something sometimes, but we really want to make it really good, and so we dedicated a lot of ourselves to [the band], which made it quite knackering. Especially Jasper and Mike; I had a baby last year, which is exhausting in a totally different way…”

“Over time your musical relationship develops, your process becomes more refined.”

— Casper Hughes

Through such self-admittedly “protracted” and “gruelling” processes, the band were able to arrive at a piece of work as ambitious as ‘Total Euphoria’. First sketched out nearly half a decade ago during writing sessions for a debut album on which it had no place, the tune was reworked a year later, and again and again after that. By the time it was ready to take into the studio, each section and moment in the song’s labyrinthine web had been meticulously determined, frame by frame, like a story-board. Days in the studio were planned hour by hour to maximise studio time - and to help coordinate such a large group of musicians - and as such, the final outcome is worlds apart from the sprawling jams and organic blends that defined their earlier material. While the track’s life began during the earlier years of the band, ‘Total euphoria’ now signals the mood for what’s to come.

“On the first record, I think we were really interested in one thing happening,” explains Jasper. “Just one thing being repeated and changing and growing through repetition, and basically, we weren’t that interested in that again. We’d done a lot of long-form improvisation for the first record, like hour-long versions of songs. I think we were interested in making things that were shorter just because we had never really done that before, and because we were interested in moments, harder juxtapositions, harder contrasts, harsher shifts. Not having things as one line that just unfolds, but actually being aligned… and then a hard right handbrake turn into something else.”

“Over time,” Casper adds, “your musical relationship develops, your process becomes more refined, and you work out how to write music in a way that there’s less friction. I guess some bands are forever set in a certain aesthetic but, for us, we got interested in new things, new ideas, and you want to explore them. That’s where this song comes from.”

“There’s a mood that prevails, across all the records and all the songs, which is a bit euphoric and a bit downtrodden.

— Jasper Llewellyn

While a product of this intense collective contemplation, this shiny new version of caroline - all glistening melodies and bright production - also represents a band constantly dipping into the freshest sounds they could uncover. When throwing about the main influences behind their new direction, the band agree that they’re invariably all albums released since work ended on album one. Ellen Arkbro is mentioned, as is Alex G’s anthemic ‘God Save The Animals’, or the glitched-up hyperpop experimentalism of Giant Claw’s ‘Mirror Guide’.

“On the first album tours, I was listening to this soundcloud playlist of collaged, really mashed-up, break-core-y remixes of pop songs, and the melodies,” says Jasper. “The noisy-ness, and the euphoria of all that was very inspiring at the time.”

“We were just allowing ourselves to have these hooks in there,” he continues. “I think we were a bit self-centered for the first record in terms of how sugary the melodies could be, whereas those melodies we’re okay with right now, and they came out quite organically.”

Speaking of hooks and melodies, another core influence - their almost namesake Caroline Polachek - makes a surprise appearance for the band as a guest vocalist on recently-released track ‘Tell me I never knew that’. Joking during a writing session that they’d written a Polachek-esque melody, and debating for “a year” whether to ask her to sing on it, a hopeful DM on instagram was answered enthusiastically by the alt-pop star who was already an admirer of the band’s work

“We’ve always been fan,” says Casper. “I remember showing [Jasper] ‘Door’ when we were recording the first album, and we were like ‘this is fucking sick!’. She used to like our posts on instagram sometimes. We were like, ‘Shit! Cool, someone who we really admire, really likes my music. That’s great!’”

“We didn’t ask this of her,” continues Jasper, “but before the session, she was like ‘how about this?’, and she sent us a demo version where she just had like recorded all these harmonies, so many of which are in the song. She really levelled it up. She’s in it for the music, big time. You think that when someone’s a pop star, they’re not that into the music, not that dedicated.”

So then, with all these new interests, new influences, and new ideas now becoming integral parts of the band and their music, what is it, after everything else, that makes caroline caroline? “I think it’s quite hard for us to see what that is. I can tell that there’s a mood that prevails, across all the records and all the songs, which is a bit euphoric and a bit downtrodden?” offers Jasper. “That dual movement of it being triumphant and euphoric but also collapsing - that’s kinda in everything a bit.”

‘caroline 2’ is out 30th May via Rough Trade Records.

#AD