More about: Lazy Day

For the seventh instalment of our new, new band column we’re turning our attention to Lazy Day. A quartet that caught our ears a little over a year ago now, they’re lead by the magnetising vocals of Tilly Scantlebury with Beni Evans (drums), Liam Hoflay (lead guitar) and Kris Lavin (bass) making up the outfit. The band have filmed a lockdown rendition of their latest single ‘All The Time’ especially for us. 

"‘All The Time’ has had many lives, but its final form is my favourite,” explains Tilly.  “It started off as an articulation of a time when I felt I’d lost control of a lot of things, but as we began to play it live it became this really exciting and almost reclamatory moment. I often find that songs take on a life of their own, and you’ve got to sort of just follow them wherever they might land.” Check out the video below:

The track is a glorious example of the power-possessing properties music holds. In a press release for the song, the singer divulges that “We’ve been playing the song as a band for a couple of years, and over time it has become a moment in our live show where I feel really powerful, like each time we play it I can overcome something big all over again.” It’s interesting to hear Tilly recount other powerful musical memories, striking a balance between tangible events in front of thousands of people and the first time Lazy Day stepped into a rehearsal room. 

“Honorable mentions should go to when we played to 8,000 people supporting Bloc Party, when we’ve sold out our headline London shows, and when we played Latitude to a packed out tent. All very cool and powerful experiences. But the most mind bending moment might have to be when I first got my band together in a grotty rehearsal room and heard them play my songs for the first time. Hearing the songs come to life in real time was unbelievably trippy, and it made me realise how much bigger it could all be.”

Another impressive feat is the female-led team of studio staff who helped record the song. With Steph Marziano on production duties, ill-informed naysayers professing a lack of female role models in ‘guitar music’ need look no further than the glistening gems Lazy Day are concocting with Tilly at the helm. The sense of empowerment bleeds through to the listener too, as Tilly details, “Queer and feminist politics are an inherent part of who I am in the world, which inevitably affects how I write and perform. Music has been one of the ways that I’ve been able to feel empowered myself, so I want my songs to make other people feel good in that way too.”

When creating music the singer explains that she is often guided by instinct and her mood as opposed to making something she thinks will fit inside a Lazy Day-shaped box. “I never think too much about particular styles when I’m writing songs, and tend to be more guided by a mood rather than a genre. I also think a lot about what it might feel like to play live. Having said that, there are probably a couple of things that always end up in a Lazy Day song, including but not limited to my dulcet vocal tones.”

And this has garnered a collection of songs all suitable to soundtrack a variety of situations; “Some would be best enjoyed in a car looking wistfully out the window, some at a party with friends, some would be a good soundtrack to a bubble bath, and others would be best listened to alone in a very dark room.”

“I get inspired by my relationships with the people in my life - the things we go through together, the conversations we have, how we feel about each other and the world around us. I get prompted by external things like politics and art, but songs often come about because I need to process and capture a mood that I’m in. I suppose it’s about making music that sounds like a feeling, as strange and abstract as that sounds.”

2020 has undoubtably shaken up plans for every musician on the planet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t exciting plans on the horizon for this band, “The idea is to come out of this having finished writing an album,” Tilly reveals. 

As our conversation wraps up, it seems that now is a more poignant time than ever to reflect on guidance for navigating an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable industry. So what is the best piece of advice she’s ever been given? “Stay weird and keep cool!”

'All The Time' is out now.

More about: Lazy Day