Dan Hillier
Formed of members Chris Anderson, Gareth Hughes, Taran Ali, Ellie Richards, Nic Bowde and Joe Richards, the Sheffield collective forgo the notion of genre in order to create art that stretches well beyond the frivolous parameters of genre. Whilst it would be easy and awfully too convenient to allocate tags such as dream-pop, post-rock, shoegaze, prog-rock, chamber-pop and shoegaze to the band’s sound, to even describe New Ghost’s output with such inconsistent tags would be limiting to to the point of being insulting. As seen within the act’s extended plays Recifity and Future Is Dead alongside their debut LP New Ghost Orchestra, New Ghost are a band that bound across the lines etched in the dirt by purists that divide genres to warmly coalescence sounds and musical motifs incorrectly thought to be mutually exclusive. However, it’s the band’s new single ‘The Wolf Of Allendale’ that make’s this statement cinematically tangible.
Essentially an eight plus minute prog-pop opus, ‘The Wolf Of Allendale’ is a magnificent musical beast of a track that gracefully leaps across those aforementioned faded lines as it explores the human condition. In fact, as the track’s mood transmogrifies from buoyant whimsy, to tender apprehension to optimistic despair, the single unfurls as a tapestry not just of emotion, but of sound, with so many textures, motifs and sounds intertwining in way seamless and majestically gorgeous. The creation may have mad a painfully laboured birth – as New Ghost detail below – but with the track now released into the wilds, ‘The Wolf Of Allendale’ is a musical creation heralding one of the most creative and skilled band’s in the UK.
With that in mind, we got in touch with Chris to learn about the track’s creation, the band’s ethos and more.
“We are an art-rock band from Sheffield/UK, who basically incorporates anything that excites them when putting together new music. Chiefly this involves mashing together lots of different genres, like shoegaze, chamber-pop, grunge, post-rock, dream-pop, electronica. There are some crazy talented musicians in New Ghost (I must stress – NOT me), so whatever we set our hearts on, we chase down until we create something we love.
The “band” originally, was a purely studio based thing. I’d built a great relationship with the producer of something I was working on at the time, which was the cause of a great deal of heartache and stress, and so he suggested we work on something separate. We just started recording things (the first being a Christmas song dedicated to my dog!), I sent these early demos to a couple of friends – one of whom (Ari – now of Hidden Mothers fame), sent them to a bunch more friends, and from there we started putting together a wishlist of people to help finish up the recordings. Those initial recordings were quite heavily reliant on guest spots – the lineup of the band is more cemented now.”
“We’re musical magpies – and we all listen to a LOT of music, so there’s an element of osmosis when we start piecing together songs. There’s a lot of spill over from things we are excited about. On occasion, there’ll be musical factions in the band – in recent rehearsals for eg., me and Ellie spent about 20 minutes talking about how amazing the new Caroline Polachek LP was, and Joe and Taz were excitedly talking about having just seen Sonar (groove based math-y prog band from Switzerland). So, we really take inspiration from all over the place.
Topically – I write the lyrics, which for New Ghost are a mixture of the personal and political. I have so much respect, and a healthy amount of jealousy, for anyone that can effectively write something which is overtly political, that does it in an emotive way. It’s a skill I don’t really feel I have. It is there if you wanted to look for it though. ‘Wolf…’ alludes to “waging a war on losing things”, which very much reflects a lot of my own feelings looking back over the last few years politically. Specifically as it relates to ‘Wolf…’, I was feeling quite despondent when I was writing it, so there’s a lot of that in there. I felt like a bit of a failure, so there is a lot about inadequacy in there, coupled with a healthy dose of catastrophising. I’m often moved by lyrics that can be both oddly specific, but also open ended enough to infer meaning. The most successful lyrics capture a feeling, which is the aim – and so a lot of our songs exist in that hinterland between painting a picture of something really quite specific, and also embellishing it enough to keep identities hidden.”
“It feels like a huge weight that’s been lifted from our shoulders. We started writing and recording it so, so long ago that to get to this stage feels almost surreal. Releasing music is a joy, and a huge privilege, but there are times like these where the stop-start nature of it can create a really peculiar feeling of being stuck in quicksand, wrapped up in layers of procrastination and frustration. We initially weren’t going to release it just yet, but we had one or two things happen recently and we all just collectively decided on the group chat, “fuck it! stick it out!”. We got the final mix and master back, and I think we realised two things – the first being that it was great and secondly – that it didn’t really fit on the album that we had just finished up. We thought it best to give it its own space and its own life before we started releasing things from the record – as and when that happens.”
So – there was a studio high up in the hills of Sheffield that was due to close. The owner, the chap that we’d made our first set of recordings with, who was leaving the country, said that whilst they were finding someone to take over the space and were closing up – we could basically camp in there for two days to record what we wanted. This was pre-pandemic! As we were packing up after the session, there were reports of a strange new virus appearing across the globe. After then – the hard drive with the music on was thought lost, and to be honest, with everything that was happening we just didn’t think about the sessions until we started making the next thing. It was here that we started trying to put the pieces together of what we’d done during these supposedly “lost” sessions. A lot of it is boring stuff, much of which I don’t fully understand, but files were corrupted, different operating systems, actual tracks lost, and on and on. We eventually got all the base layers, and re-built the songs as were were making the album, so it turned into this herculean effort to record both the album (which has its share of ambitious moments), and piece together these lost tracks. When we broached it with our current recording partner, he was game, but then he saw the size of the projects and the re-building that was needed. I think we may’ve taken several years off his life. It was an odd experience revisiting what we’d done…that first play back was like listening to a totally different band. Almost like we’d dreamt the music into being.”
“Genre seems to matter less and less nowadays. There’ll always be purists obviously, but as long as it sounds good, and moves you in some way – that’s all that matters. We move to areas that excite us, and aim for the resulting sounds to be unequivocally “us” – irrespective of the genre. I’m not really a strong enough musician to be able to map out where something is going, and what it will ultimately sound like. I do think we’re successful in merging relatively disparate elements and genres (others may disagree), but it hasn’t come easy. I listen back to things I’ve done before, and can hear the joins a little more. You really want to get to the point where you can’t hear the joins.”
“I guess it depends on what kind of progressive rock you’re referencing. I’d argue the biggest dream pop band in the world currently, Beach House, on their latest went full prog. I’m not really a fan of stunt style genre mashups, so there isn’t really an interest in juxtaposition for shock value, but if the music has an emotional truth it doesn’t really matter how you get there. Everyone in the band has a love of bands that’d be described as ‘progressive’ in some way, and that feeds through. Prog to me has always meant having an adventurous outlook. Bands like Oceansize, The Mars Volta, Aereogramme, and in particular Mew have soundtracked some incredibly important moments in mine, and I’m sure the bands life, so these kinds of influences feed through into our songwriting – even if the frame we’ve given ourselves to work within for a song that day is more glitch-pop orientated.
I usually make a sonic scrapbook when starting on a new project, but this time around I made a visual one, and started sharing all these images with the band whilst writing (and even through the recording process). There was a definite “mood” that we were aiming for with these recordings (so everything from the Rectify EP, through to the album that we have just put the finishing touches to). There’s a narrative thread that runs through all of these songs, which isn’t really something I have ever tried to do before, and whilst it isn’t essential to enjoying the songs – I thought it’d add an extra layer to the work. In terms of the films and TV shows that had a major influence – it’s really things like Coraline, Eternal Sunshine, anything by Lynne Ramsay (particularly You Were Never Really Here), The Leftovers was a huge influence, The Father, The Haunting Of Hill House, A.I, Children Of Men, Never Let Me Go. Those are the biggies really. There is something unnerving, but also really comforting in those stories. Almost like there is an imperceptibly huge well of hurt and loss and sorrow buried within them, that they can barely contain. That was something that has followed through as we were piecing the record together.
Definitely. I’m fairly confident in saying that we’re all cinephiles in the band, to varying degrees. Some of us are in a film quiz team together. I absolutely love the visual art form, and love its relationship to music as an art form. I love how they can be this collaborative effort to capture and manipulate something that doesn’t really exist, and try to cast it in amber in some way. ‘Wolf’ is particularly cinematic, in that it rolls along, through a lot of different moods and textures. We always write with strong dynamics in mind though, which can naturally result in a more cinematic feel.
I think one of the great strengths of listening to music, and one of my favourite parts, is that rolling wave of feeling it can give you. The connection in that moment where everything comes together, the melody, harmony, lyrics, the vibration all just hit you at once. We aim to make emotionally honest music that can hit you in the stomach. Like a form of gentle maximalism