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caroline’s debut album was one of the most exciting releases of 2022. The self-titled record achieved its power through repetition while tying together folk textures, minimalism and something you might vaguely call ‘emo’. Live, the 8-piece performed the album in an open horseshoe that invited the listener into the fold, where an uplifting collectivity seemed to emerge from the rousing chorus of voices and instruments.
Earlier this year, I was excited by the first sounds coming out of caroline’s follow-up on Rough Trade Records — archly titled caroline 2 — which appeared to take what was essential about their debut and develop it in multiple complementary directions. The album, released a few weeks ago now, simultaneously pushes the experimentalism — with wild and unique studio effects throughout — while opting for more clear-cut pop songwriting in the harmony and vocals, including a feature from pop zeitgeist extraordinaire Caroline Polachek.
As it moves further towards both the pop and the experimental, caroline 2’s power is in deftly retaining the thread of collectivity and sentimentality that underpinned the first album; if album one was defined by developing one idea at a time to an emotive fever pitch, caroline 2 asks what happens when multiple of these ‘caroline’ ideas interact simultaneously.
I spoke to the warm and thoughtful Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes from the band last week to discuss caroline 2, performing the album live and the intersections between popular music and performance art. For those who haven’t yet seen caroline live, their current tour is now sadly concluded, but I’ll include some links below so you can keep up to date. Onwards!
You’ve just concluded your tour - how has it been translating the songs from caroline 2 live?
Part of the process is making a case by case decision; what studio enabled things are so integral to the song that it’s going to be strange if you don’t include them. For example we realised when recording the bass clarinet that it’s not actually a very bass-y instrument in terms of its frequency range. But then if you use hardware to generate further sub-harmonic bass frequencies it can sound like the most enormous thing you’ve ever heard in your life! We realised we’d need to find a way to do that live, or it just wouldn’t have the power.
We have a touring sound engineer for the first time — Syd Kemp — and there’s a lot of choreography he’s doing on the desk, bringing down big clusters of instruments together and bringing up big clusters of instruments. It kind of implies the ‘moving between rooms’ thing you can hear on the record. The result is different because nothing is left to the imagination when you’re hearing it, because you can really see what everyone is doing. On the record, it conjures up a different experience.
Something that was spoken about of your first album was that it was composed via these long jam sessions in the upstairs of a pub. This kind of became the myth of the album — that the where of the project was somehow very important. Is there a where for this new album?
The first album actually was about playing above the Five Bells in New Cross and playing things on repeat. Casper would normally have these really nice riffs, five seconds long, that you could loop. It felt really radical to all of us. I had been in bands and I was interested in writing what was essentially pop music. When we did this project and it wasn’t supposed to even be a band. It was extremely un-inhibited by what we thought other people would think sounded good. It wasn’t to do with playing shows or anything public. It was a private thing for an unusually long time in a way that really benefited the project.
In terms of the “place” that’s associated with the second album: the point of it is that it’s multi-place. It’s meant to switch and move. It’s meant to cut quite drastically between different environments. That mirrors the process of writing the album, it was partly written in Scotland, partly written in our studio, partly written in this barn in Essex, we did a week in France. There was no one place we retreated to to write it. Every place we went to there was a feeling that emanated from it and in some way we transplanted those environments into the record, whether directly by actually recording in those places or maybe more abstractly.
One of the most unique things about this album is these moments where two songs seem to be playing at once. There’s a club track playing underneath the “song” in ‘When I Get Home’ and on ‘Coldplay Cover’ there are very clearly two different pieces happening simultaneously. These moments made me feel like this is a record about the experience of listening to music, is that fair to say?
I think that’s an aspect of it, definitely, but I wouldn’t say the record is about just that. We’ve talked a lot about listening as an experience. Living in a place, the environment around you. And there’s lots of different versions of listening you can do in different environments.
What we’re trying to do is to make music that includes all of the things that we think sound good, which is not exclusive to “band plays in room and records their songs.” For example: hearing a band through a studio door. It can be found sound in your environment or sound you make with your instrument, but the boundaries of what sounds good are huge and endless in fact. Our explorations of field recording, zoom mics, moving them around, are very inspired by that feeling. Sound is everywhere; that’s the maxim.
Of our first record, there were a few people independently from each other who said “this is the sound of walking through a building and there are multiple bands practicing in different spaces”. It’s interesting because that wasn’t what we were trying to do on the first record. But for some reason people were attuned to that conceptually. On this record we more literally tried to make it sound like that. Reading that multiple times about our music before at least encouraged us to do that kind of thing more viscerally.
Incidental sound, that’s what we’re interested in. Stuff that wasn’t purposeful. To organise the non-purposeful. And the organising is something that happens whether you like it or not — the listener organises it.
What we’re trying to do is to make music that includes all of the things that we think sound good, which is not exclusive to ‘band plays in room and records their songs’.
What’s the genesis of the Caroline Polachek collaboration?
The vocals are much more foregrounded in this record. For the first version of ‘Tell Me I Never Knew That’ the prompt was: you’re at a sleepover and you’re singing into the hairbrush. It used to be sung really differently because we can’t sing like pop singers, so it was really over the top. The way the melody moved and the intervals, we thought it sounded like a Caroline Polachek melody. We knew that she liked our music because she’d posted it before on Instagram. We just said: this would sound amazing with you singing it. She replied very quickly saying she was happy to give it a go. She’d written a load of harmonies and tweaked the lyrics to be more comfortable.
Some recent reviews of your work have foregrounded a political angle to the music which is not necessarily immediately apparent, what do you make of that?
A friend of ours read back all our early interviews and there’s so much conflicting information amongst them all. He told us: “wait, that’s not true about you! It says you got into politics when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party but I knew you when you were into politics before then!” These things, they just congeal into different truths and perspectives.
This new record, I wouldn’t say it’s explicitly political. It’s the culmination of some friends’ relationship and collaboration and pursuing certain concepts or ideas about sound and space that we thought were really interesting on their own terms. At least one song on the first album was about hope and the conditions of contemporary capitalism and life being miserable and that the only way to change that was in a collective way. I still fundamentally believe that that is true. But part of the reason why that isn’t the focus is because that sense of hope that sense of tangible systemic change was within our grasp but that’s now a long way off. Hope has been extinguished for the time being, not forever though!
I think that there’s a current in some art where what the work is actually about is really interesting things to do with texture, space, time, abstract universal themes that can be explored through our different artistic practices. Our work is focused on that. People often retroactively make there be a big-P Politics to it that wasn’t in the original conception of the work. Or they feel the need to say it is in order to validate it somehow.
There can and there must be works of political art and some people do it very well! But I think there’s a trend — especially in contemporary art — where there’s a feeling that there has to be a politics to it for it to make sense in a world that is very unjust and unequal. That leads to quite a lot of confused messaging about the work and what it actually is. It’s an interesting time for art and the relationship between art and politics and what’s actually true to one’s own practice and what’s window dressing.
caroline — and Caroline Polachek for that matter, who recently achieved the feat of being played on Radio 1, 6music and Radio 3 — feels like it straddles both "popular music” and contemporary art. Is this something you would agree with?
I feel like a lot of pop music is kind of exploring the intersection of those things. There’s a lot of really forward thinking pop music.
When we were reflecting on the album when making it we were thinking it’s both more experimental — mic moving techniques, a collaged way of approaching band music, genuine experimentation — but also the songs are really poppy and catchy. We were interested in it being both those things. I’m really pleased that it’s been taken both ways.
We also have aspiration to do a stage show, a performance that goes beyond just sound, something more performative, more choreographed, that is both performance piece and musical piece. We’re interested in more than just writing albums as a band. What our music touches upon, what it explores, is more than just an album you can listen to on Spotify or a live show where you can hear those songs. There’s more we want to do in our creative lives. A stage show that is more theatrical, that’s performance based. There’s potentially plans to do that in the works.
Our recorded music is about trying to capture what it’s like to capture music and create music in space. To make it sound three dimensional in some respect. The next step is to bring that out into physical space. The ‘Coldplay Cover’ video is a good example of that approach. It’s still in its early stages.
caroline 2 and caroline, back to back
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