Over the last three years, British indie quartet Sea Girls have quietly become one of the biggest emerging bands in the country.
We caught up with drummer Oli Khan to talk about their excellent new album, Homesick; the importance of musical minimalism; and their upcoming headline show at London’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace.
You recorded this album transatlantically, with yourselves in London and your producers in California. What was that like for you?
‘It was interesting. It was the totally opposite way to how we recorded our first album, which was exactly how you’d expect, with us in a room and with the producer. We were working with Larry, the same producer as our first album; but then we also had Jacknife Lee working on the album from the States too. So, there was a lot of us recording through the day and sending it to Jacknife for him to work on overnight, seeing as the time zones are quite literally inverted…’.
‘So then, in the morning, we’d get what he’d been working on, and then interpret and work on that before sending it back to him at the end of the day. Yeah, it was interesting. A totally different way of doing it – and because of COVID, the four of us were never even in the same room together when we were making the album.’
‘We recorded this album between November 2020 and April last year, so we had plenty of time to chisel away at these songs and try to find the best arrangements. We must have had 50 other songs that we were working on for this album, but the ones we ended up finishing are the ones that made it onto the record.’
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Was there ever a fear from your side that the record may have ended up sounding fragmented by virtue of its recording technique?
‘Larry’s produced every single song of ours (bar the first EP), so I think he’s got an intrinsic sense of what needs to happen to make a song a Sea Girls song. Then add in Henry (Camomile, frontman)’s voice to tie everything together, and you end up with something that was always going to sound like us. I think as much as we can fuck around with recording and production, at its core, anything that we record is still going to be the sound of us as a band.’
‘We just set out to make this set of songs as varied as we can and just run with those and run with the different sounds that we started playing with on the first album, and just take them in any direction we fancied.’
It’s definitely your most polished body of work to date.
‘Yeah, and that was a deliberate choice from our side. I think Jacknife was instrumental in helping with that. He’s good at making everything as streamlined as possible. These songs are very lyrically raw and emotionally exposed, and I think it wouldn’t have felt right to kind of hide that beneath walls of guitars and reverb. We wanted to let these lyrics shine and let the songs serve that, rather than the other way around.’
‘A song like ‘Sick’, for instance, is all about the lyrics – so we had to work out how best to showcase these lyrics musically, but without detracting from them (or making it boring). It’s a fun challenge.’
‘We listened to a lot of hip hop songs while we were working out ‘Sick’, and I was trying to figure out what kind of beat needs to get behind that. And eventually, it was effectively the simplest beat you could think of – which ends up enhancing the song. I think a lot of the recording process for Homesick was realizing that you can make something bigger by doing less.’
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The drummer’s urge to maximalise must have been a difficult one to fight at times.
‘Definitely. There are some amazing maximalist records that have come out over the last few years – like the new Gang of Youths album, for example. But that’s just not us. I don’t think we would pull that off and it wouldn’t be true to our songs. This album is about letting each person shine at the right time when they need to, but it’s also a case of each person knowing when not to play.’
‘It’s just as important, I think. I always want to be playing the drums, and Rory always wants to be playing the guitar. But, if it’s going to be to the detriment of the song, it’s not necessary. And that’s what we really focused on for this album – making every note count.’
The term ‘coming of age record’ is overused – but this struck me as your most mature record, both musically and lyrically, of your career to date. There’s a sadness at the heart of it, but it’s still high-energy and up-tempo. Was this a deliberate creative decision or is this merely in your DNA as a band?
‘We all went back to our parents’ houses during the lockdown, and it was the first time we’d all properly left London since we moved there at age eighteen. And that naturally makes you think back to when you first moved away; the darkness that comes with that, and how to present that in a hopeful light. That’s what Hometown is about, really: the fact that it does get We were 18 and a bit lost, but now we’ve found our place in the world.’
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You’re also embarking on a huge UK tour later this year – including a headline show at London’s Alexandra Palace. How are you feeling about that gig?
‘We went in there when it was empty – which I don’t recommend that because it made it seem a lot bigger – but I saw Sam Fender there a few months ago and thought that it was an amazing venue. The fact that we’re getting to play there is truly special. We haven’t been able to tour for the last two years, and we’ve missed it, so we’re all just excited to get back out onto the road and share these new songs with fans. I just hope they like them…’.