Interview Sorry: In Character

Sorry have had a strange path to their third album. In the late 2010s, they were one of many young bands orbiting The Windmill in South London, and seemed promised for great things. Like a great many of their wider contemporaries - Wolf Alice, Fontaines DC et al - they were soon snapped up by a big label, and appeared destined to cross over into mainstream circles. But for Sorry, they were always slightly too odd, slightly too off-kilter, to quite make that transition; and that’s no bad thing.

Since then they’ve released two albums - 2020’s ‘925’ and 2022’s ‘Anywhere But Here’ - and bubbled away under the surface, making strange, yearning indie ballads and pop bangers obscured by layers of distortion and electronics. On their latest album ‘COSPLAY’, though, they channel this genre-hopping songwriting into an album that ties together a rotating cast of strange and fascinating characters. At the heart of the band itself are Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, school friends turned creative partners, who jointly write Sorry material together - they then bring in Marco Pini (also of buzzy London group RIP Magic), Lincoln Barrett and Campbell Baum to flesh out these ideas into Sorry’s beautifully warped world.

Speaking to Asha today over Zoom, she cuts an intriguing figure, talking to us from a friend’s garden bench, smoking a cigarette almost hidden away under the shadow of her hoodie. She speaks in a sing-song, disarmingly frank manner, at turns smirking and serious. “I think it’s reflective of the time that we’re in,” she says of the record’s title - named after the act of dressing up as a character in order to feel more part of the culture you’re consuming. “I think you can get confused about your identity so much right now. I think films, or pop culture in general, that would [normally] be a bit more of a step away from you, you can kind of be a part of it. Things can seep into parts of yourself more.”

It’s not surprising, really, that Sorry would find this a fascinating concept. So much of their material to date has shared a central preoccupation with other people - trying to get inside their heads, understand why they do the things they do, and work out what exactly everyone else is really thinking and feeling. “I think it’s just trying to understand, always just trying to understand,” Asha says, talking as if she’s puzzling her way through her music as she answers. “I would be thinking about someone, or an experience, and it would almost engulf me. I’d almost be speaking from their perspective, or this weird spirit of that moment; it would sort of be like stepping into the moment through somebody.” She pauses, and laughs. “When I’m drunk, I like to make songs with people - they’re always like ‘I don’t know how to sing, I don’t know how to make a song’. They don’t understand that it’s probably something small that they’ll say, that’s the song. Songs are just people, they’re not really yours anyway.”

Cosplay trickles conceptually through into Sorry’s view of themselves as a band right now, too. They similarly feel constrained by the labels that end up attached to artists when they come to the industry’s attention, especially if that’s alongside contemporaries with a recognisable sound. “Cosplay means, I think, being an artist or just being a person; you change a lot and you should be allowed to try on different things and have different opinions,” Asha says. “You can change. I guess you’re kind of always trying things on. A lot of [our] music, people will [say] ‘oh, you’re post-punk’ … I don’t really know genres that well. Me and Louis just write lots of different types of songs, and we don’t really think about that. So it was kind of an excuse for it to not make sense.”