More about: Palace

Few events in any lifetimes are as transformative as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and we’ve reached the point in art where we’re beginning to see ‘the new normal’ reflected at us everywhere we go. Be it the oft-distracting mentions of the disease in our favourite TV shows, Zoom-set plays and movies or isolation-inspired novels, despite our best efforts, COVID has changed us all, and changed every art form across the world.

Unusually, however, music took the very early decision to kick back against that. After early experiments by artists such as Charlie XCX, with her quarantine-inspired album How I’m Feeling Now, writing a ‘Covid album’, be it inspired by our universal lived experiences or written during the time, was seen as something to be avoided at all cost. ‘People are sick of COVID’ you would hear artists say, ‘they want to escape all of that’.

Which leaves us at an interesting intersection. As the world continues to grapple with the effect of the past two years, do we want our art to reflect the period; and even if we don’t, is it really something we can avoid? Working through such weighty themes at a time when the whole world is dealing with their own personal battles with anxiety, is there a fear an album detailing pain and unease is what listeners want to hear? According to Leo Wyndham, the lead singer of British alt-blues rock band Palace, it wasn’t even a consideration. “I don’t think we write music to please people,” he said of artists, “we’re just expressing ourselves in the best way we can.”

Palace were first formed in the summer of 2012, after its members first met each other in school and became friends. After a string of singles, they originally garnered widespread attention with the release of their debut EP Lost in The Night two years later. Eight years, two albums and multiple tours later (including acting as support for both Ghostpoet and Jamie T in their early days), the band have seen and lived it all. Now home for the longest extended stretch since the band began, they’ve made good use of their extra free time.

Six years after the release of their widely-acclaimed debut album So Long Forever and three since its hopeful follow-up Life After, Palace have returned with their most emotional work to date, the equally moving and jarring Shoals. Derived from a deep-rooted sense of fear and uncertainty that came with the onset of COVID-19; the collection finds Wyndham, Rupert Turner and Matt Hodges exploring everything from crippling self-doubt, the inevitability of death and what it means to live in an absence of love. 

“Yeah, it’s intense,” Wyndham admits from the couch of his London home, “there’s a lot in it and the whole process was very cathartic”. The band are speaking on the eve of Shoals' release, reflecting on the project's journey from long-distance collaboration to realised artistry. As a collection, Shoals is Palace at their most reflective, managing to perfectly balance the weight of Wyndham’s lyrics with bright, organic and deliberative instrumental choices. 

Writing the album began in the early days of the UK’s first national lockdown. From diverging corners of London, the trio would spend the day writing their own sections and coming up with track concepts, before uploading them to a shared drive and workshopping each other's plans. “The natural thing to do when we went into lockdown was to start aiming for album three,” Wyndham recalls. “It was funny because we thought it wouldn’t work as we were so used to working through things together in the same room, but it was actually a harmonious and easy process that really let us build our excitement as we wrote each separate part”. 

Virtual recording was such a success that Palace are now beginning to see it as a critical component of the creative process, allowing each member the freedom and space to get creative and explore their own unique interest within the Palace eco-system. “We’ve adopted it as a new method and it’s shown us that we can work from anywhere,” Turner admits. "There was that sense of freedom and the sense that there are no rules to the way we work. We don’t need to feel restricted as a band, we can try new things and still make good music using new processes and techniques and everything”.

“Working on your own, there’s no self-consciousness,” Wyndham says of the hours spent messing with different tones and textures in his home studio, “there were opportunities to try new things, try new sounds because I had that extra time and freedom to give things a go”. 

Shoals is Palace’s most experimental work so far, delving deeper into the realms of bass and tone than ever before. Inspired in part by the works of the electronic producers Mount Kimbie and James Blake, the change was unconsciously triggered partially by the depth of feeling being experienced by the band during such a universall-disorientating time. The trio, however, didn’t realise the poignant weight of their work until it came time to listen back on everything they’d created. 

“It’s always the same with all of our albums, the songs come out and emerge and a lot of the time you don’t know what the shape of it is or what you’re feeling,” Hodges replies, when asked to explain how it all slipped so eloquently under the cracks. “It’s rather a time stamp of where we were when we wrote it,” he adds, “and these things sort of come out of you and emerge, and it’s only when you listen back to the whole body of work [that you realise] what you’re singing and writing about”. 

An insomniac since childhood and an anxious sleeper at the best of times, Wyndham has previously described Shoals as "living in a space between dreams and reality". When asked to expand on this description, Wyndham takes a moment to pause and consider the question, mulling it over in his head. Finally, he replies: “lots of fears and experiences one has with that self-analysis seem to happen in the nighttime. We wanted to play with that idea of the fear we experience in dreams and whether we take that into our lives and if they manifest in some way in our own life.” He elaborates: "your mind becomes a sort of conveyor belt for all those anxieties and emotions. Then when you do get to sleep, you experience certain things and dreams and things that reveal themselves to mean something”.

Another element of their work that the band has referenced in the past is their connection to water. Throughout their discography, they have scattered references to the ocean and the sea wherever they could, a tradition stretching back all the way to the band’s formation. “When we started, we’d write music and it sounded like the sea and the ocean and this thing that’s at once aggressive and angry whilst also tender and delicate. It’s always been something we’ve lent into as a band” Wyndham details. “With the themes of the album, there was the parallel of the depths of one's mind and the depth of the ocean, so it’s a prominent theme and feature on the album”. On the surface, water serves as something of a metaphor for its writer's ever-changing state of mind" “It’s this place of mystery and this beautiful place” Wyndham adds, “but it’s also something sort of dangerous, and that can swallow you up.” 

Aware of Shoals' emotional weight and gravitas, before announcing the album, Palace decided to counterbalance its darkness with a more jovial release, the It Gets Better With Palace EP in July of 2021. A collection of some of Palace’s more upbeat and positive tracks, it was designed as a way of counterbalancing all that was to come with Shoals. “We realised we do write songs that often express a certain kind of emotion and a certain side of life,” Turner notes, “so we wanted to put together some songs that had some uplifting resonance”. 

Exploring trauma and feelings of self-doubt like never before, Shoals is an album built on frustration, on lost hope and the moments that come between the smiles. It finds Palace breaking the barriers of self-importance and the expectations of grandeur that they’ve cultivated in their first two releases. It’s bolder, wiser and a little bit more afraid, much like the people who wrote it. A Palace built on hopes and dreams standing taller than ever before. 

Shoals arrives 21 January via Fiction Records.

Issue Three of the Gigwise Print magazine is preselling now! Order here.

More about: Palace