More about: Elder Island

If you’re counting their giant ginger cat Ron (and god knows we are), then Elder Island are a quartet. Ron (named for Weasley), Katy, Dave and Luke make up the electronic Bristolian group as feline, vocalist/cellist, guitarist/synth man and beats master respectively. Today, they announce the coming of their sophomore album Swimming Static.

When we speak, the album announcement is still some days away, and Ron prowls back and forth on the video call while the trio who make the music sit in frame on their shared settee. Katy, in the centre, is a bundle of energy, crossing and uncrossing her legs, shifting on the cushions and removing then playing with her jumper. Luke is similarly skittish, the caffeine-addicted co-conspirator. Resident tea-drinker Dave meanwhile, is still and calm. All seem nervously excited to discuss their forthcoming record.

Written in a basement during the first lockdown, Swimming Static is a follow-up to 2019 release and debut The Omnitone Collection. It is, as Katy puts it, “perfectly ambiguous and contradictory”, just like its name, which was chosen for the way “it captures the album - and time.” At once restless and yet unmoving, the title describes the agitated lethargy of lockdown. And yet Swimming Static is no lockdown album. “It’s more escapism,” Luke explains, Katy adding: “though it does connect back to that time.”

The time in question was different for everyone, but for Elder Island, who spent the first quarantine in the dimness of their studio basement, it was an opportunity to knuckle down: “it gave us the chance to crack on” Luke says. With many of the tracks sketched out before the pandemic hit, the band then spent 2020 focusing on Swimming Static and how they might approach this, their second record.

The release of The Omnitone Collection, while a great succes, also set the band up with some learnings. The first: not to spend so much time on the visuals. “It was a bit much” Katy admits, referring to the hours they spent painstakingly piecing together all of the cover’s fictional machinery, “this time, we’ve used a lot of VHS footage from being downstairs: it clicked nicely.” Another difference this time around is the fact of having a clean slate. Rather than collating a “build-up” of old tracks, “this was all very fresh. Everything was new."

The upshot is a ten-track run that fit together impeccably, providing a spectacularly noirish dance album that puts images of home discos - of dancing on the kitchen tiles - in mind. “After we looked at the tracks there was definite huge bubbly ones and hard-hitting dance ones...and then there were depressing, broody ones” Katy agrees. “They aren't upbeat pumping tracks but they are energetic,” Dave adds.

Songs like ‘Feral’ (the album “black sheep”) and ‘Purely Educational’ with their fluorescent synths bump up comfortably against simmering brooders such as ‘Queen Of Kings’ like a raver and a New Romantic finding momentary love in the darkness of the club. In places, the influence of the 1980s and its nightlife are evident, a purposeful endeavour. “We were using a lot of 80s techniques in the making of this album, blending analogue and digital harmoniously together…without that cheesier production,” Dave explains. Prince was also an inspiration. Or rather, Prince’s home studio was: “we went to Paisley Park and got a tour. His studio was mainly a drum machine and synthesiser and we wanted that approach: a few pieces of gear that you focus on.”

In addition to some preamps and an SSL, one of those choice pieces was the cello, a mainstay in Elder Island’s back-catalogue, and in their live shows. You might not notice it as much in Swimming Static: “it’s on quite a few songs, but tucked in,” Katy explains, “it’s a nice thickener.” “It’s more that you sense it,” Dave agrees.

All-in-all, a productive and painless quarantine for Katy, Dave and Luke, who were finally able to give up their jobs (Katy as a prop-maker and set-dresser for Aardman Animations, Luke as a photographer and delivery driver, Dave as a perennial freelancer going “wherever everything takes me”) to focus on their music. Happily, too, the trio (and Ron of course), lived with a furloughed chef, meaning they were enjoying sumptuous meals while the rest of us subsisted on toast and Domino’s. 

Don't be too jealous: their relatively lovely lockdown was an ideal setting for the making of Swimming Static, which seethes with boredom, thrill, fear and horror. It's yet another entry into the setlist at the club at the end of the world. You're going to love it.  

Swimming Static arrives 28 May. Pre-order it here. 

More about: Elder Island