Lime Garden on break-ups, break downs, and their dance floor-ready second album 'Maybe Not Tonight' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Somehow, three years have passed since Brighton (well, Guildford, technically) self-described “wonk-pop” quartet Lime Garden released their debut album, ‘One More Thing’. With the likes of ‘Pop Star’ and ‘Nepotism (Baby)’, they showcased an irresistible ability to strike acerbically at the heart of Gen-Z malaise while still keeping a tongue-in-cheek, wry self-deprecation front and centre.

Sitting firmly at indie-pop’s top table, when in the studio working on its follow up, they found themselves out of rhythm. After writing what vocalist and guitarist Chloe Howard estimates was “about 20 songs that were a load of crap,” the band opted to return to their roots to grow into this next chapter - one which culminates this month with second album, ‘Maybe Not Tonight’.

“I think when we first started writing for [the new LP], we put a shit ton of pressure on ourselves,” Chloe reveals, “because, obviously, there’s that classic ‘second record’ bullshit. I think for the first two months we were taking it really seriously and realised it just didn’t sound like who we are as a band. We changed tack and started having fun with it, and suddenly the sound of the record just hit us.”

Drummer Annabel Whittle, whose name also peppers production credits for ‘Maybe Not Tonight’, agrees: “We were trying to keep in mind what people come to us for, looking back to songs [released] even before the first album, like ‘Pulp’ or ‘Clockwork’, and thinking what connected with them; just keeping that essence of what makes us us.”

That essence is, in short, four people who - before anything else - are best friends. Completed by guitarist Leila Deeley and bassist Tippi Morgan, the band share a synergy, electricity, and wordless understanding that was forged on nights out somewhere between the dancefloor and the smoking area, as they jointly learned who they were - as people, and as musicians.

“I think, essentially, going out and partying and being dumb teenagers was how we became friends,” Chloe smiles. “It’s what we’ve spent most of the last five years doing together, really! It was almost too close to us that we couldn’t see it; it made so much sense to write a record about the thing that brought us all together at the beginning.”

“The world has quite literally gone absolutely insane, so you might as well go out and have a good time, because you don’t know what’s coming tomorrow.”

— Chloe Howard

‘Maybe Not Tonight’ is an album poised on a knife-edge. Folloing the narrative arc of a similar such night out, it starts with ‘23’ - a look at the running-out-of-time existential crisis that anyone in their mid-twenties is familiar with - before we find our protagonists hitting the self-destruct button, exploding a perfectly innocent pre-drinks (‘Cross My Heart’) into an unhinged swirl of dwindling self-awareness (the title track) and wronged romance (‘Undressed’).

Anyone vaguely familiar with Lime Garden will know that one album which dominated their playlists over the last four years was a certain lime green club-pop behemoth. Its exploration of the millennial experience through the lens of letting life get a bit messy is clearly weaved into the fabric of ‘Maybe Not Tonight’, but in a way that speaks less to trips to Berghain and more to impromptu meets in The Hope and Ruin. Chloe ponders the parallels: “I think with albums like ‘brat’, that’s a very one-sided view on going out. Charli xcx is a gorgeous, rich, 33 year old woman, and we’re a bunch of skint 24-year- olds, so it’s a very different experience for us. We were channelling that to an extent, but we wanted it more to feel like you’d bumped into us in the smoking area and we were just baring our souls to you, then regretting it the next day!”

Cue Annabel shyly explaining how the opening night of a European tour in Amsterdam near-perfectly coincided with her relationship ending. Ideal. “We’d all been feeling angry and chaotic across that summer,” she recalls, “but I’d had a break-up one week before the tour started and venues treat you so nicely in Europe, so we got given so much free beer that we were out until probably five or six in the morning. Obviously, I threw up everywhere; it was the best start to a tour you could hope for!”

Chloe then unfurls another story of some French festival antics: “Me and Annabel stayed out watching Hot Chip until the festival shut down and we were thrown out, basically. We had to walk the whole way back to our hotel, which we didn’t realise was about two hours away from the site. We were just running through fields of crops trying to get back; we have so many stupid stories like that!”

As much as there is a rich vein of fun running right through the middle of both the band and this new record, liberation also comes balanced out by discussions of self-doubt (‘Body’), jealousy (‘Lifestyle’), and the general sense that the release partying can provide is something of a coping mechanism in a world which feels constantly on the verge of tearing itself apart. Reflecting on why the dancefloor is now the lingua franca for new acts (Fcukers) and established artists (Harry Styles, Arlo Parks) alike, Chloe posits: “We were all like 17 or 18 when Covid started, and we missed out on quite a lot of the partying era of our lives. As soon as we were let out, we went fucking nuts!”

“And also,” she continues, “the world has quite literally gone absolutely insane; every day [we think] ‘what the fuck is going on?’, so you might as well go out and have a good time, because you don’t know what’s coming tomorrow.”

“We’re not a cookie-cutter band that keeps everything in the lines, it’s all a bit wonky.”

— Annabel Whittle

This second full-length, then, marries a broader sense of hedonism with more personal mayhem: as well as Annabel, Lime Garden’s remaining three members also saw their relationships implode during its creation. “It was like a domino thing,” Leila chuckles, “I think me and Tippi were last to fall.” Continuing, she notes that “it was nice in a way because we were all in it together, but then it just spread the chaos across the rest of the summer. It became this snowball that got us thinking about what this record was going to be about; I think that’s why the music is very in your face, more so than the last record.”

Chloe agrees. “We can be like a coven of witches sometimes! I think we all had that feeling where your mate breaks up with someone and you start to look inward. It was just [a case of] outgrowing first loves, I guess, and then within the space of four months we’d all broken up with partners of three or four years. Then from there we just all went crazy.”

That’s why, we suggest, among the bouncy synth melodies and expressive vocal glitches, this second outing is spikier, more fiery, and altogether bigger than ‘One More Thing’. “The whole album is just more,” Annabel nods. “It’s more synthy, more guitar, everything’s just turned up. I was really inspired by hyperpop - though you probably can’t hear that - but also stuff like Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem. It was about combining an electronic club vibe with guitar music, just making everything more danceable. “We wanted it to feel alive,” she continues, “so we kept in all the room sounds, like talking and laughing, because it has that chaos; you’re on the edge when you’re listening to it. We’re not a cookie-cutter band that keeps everything in the lines, it’s all a bit wonky.”

As such, the quartet’s influences while writing come from otherwise disparate places: ‘Cross My Heart’ could easily find a home in the Madchester sound, while ‘Downtown Lover’ is like a lost Supremes B-side. Still, it all comes together to create a record as cohesive as it is creative. “I know it sounds bad, but we just didn’t really think about it that much!” grins Chloe. “For us, it’s always been important that we’re a band first and foremost. We’re not a pop act; we’re not manufactured; we’re an actual band of good musicians. I think we sat back and thought, ‘okay, pop music is what we’ve bonded over, let’s take a step back and make something that we would listen to and like’.”

While not a complete departure from the sights and sounds they made their name with, ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ finds Lime Garden with the shackles off, refusing to play by any rules. To paraphrase Annabel’s beloved Daft Punk: it’s bigger, better, faster, and stronger.

After two years sat on a record that took them about six months to complete, Chloe is already raring to go for Album Three: “[‘Maybe Not Tonight’] made us less afraid to take risks, which is all I’ll say about the next record”, she quips. But for the time being, the quartet are basking in a sea of their own success. “The longer we do this, the more I’m grateful to keep doing it,” Chloe beams. “I think my dream is just to keep rocking out until we’re 70 year old ladies or something.” Annabel agrees - sort of - before adding “world domination” to their list of desires. If Lime Garden continue at this pace, we’d challenge anyone to stand in their way.

‘Maybe Not Tonight’ is out now via So Young Records.

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