More about: Alfie Templeman

It’s mid afternoon on a relatively mild mid-afternoon and Alfie Templeman, the 19 year-old songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and artist, has started to get nervous. Templeman is four days out from the release of his debut album Mellow Moon, and as reviews are starting to filter out online and despite knowing he should ignore them, he’s well aware of their presence. “It’s an overload of emotions at the moment,” Templeman admits, rubbing the back of his neck, “One minute I’m really excited about it and then the next minute I’m terrified”. “I feel like all artists get that, where even though we shouldn’t read reviews it’s still in the back of our mind,” he notes, “and itt’s hard to ignore that people are listening”.

Despite this being his debut album, Templeman should be well used to release days. Releasing music online from his early teens, it was only a matter of time before his pop-hits-in-the-waiting reached a wider audience. When it eventually happened with the 2018 track ‘Orange Juice’, Templeman was thrust into the spotlight and has been committed to releasing the best pop-infused slow jams ever since.

Templeman’s interest in music began when he realised that his father was a musician in his own right — playing guitar and drums — which Templeman had picked up and tried to self-teach himself by the age of 8. “He had a guitar, but he was left-handed” he recalls, “but I was so ambitious to learn it that even realising that I was determined enough and passionate enough to try to teach myself on a basically upside down guitar”.

By 13, Templeman had grown tired of teaching himself every instrument he could get his had on, and he switched his attention to producing his own music. As soon as he was content with his progress, he began releasing originals online, on Spotify and BandCamp. “That ability to have my music and my ideas on Spotify and available to the world was really exciting,” Templeman smiles, adding that even when he only managed a few monthly listeners he was fascinated by watching the data rise and fall. “There were years when I would write five albums a year,” he laughs. “Not good ones, but just seeing them on Spotify and BandCamp was exciting for me”.

In 2018 as ‘Orange Juice’ was picking up speed and the chance at a career in music became a possibility, Alfie was in the middle of exams: “While I probably should have been studying I just put my head down and committed to music and to this day I’m so glad I did,” he notes. Boy, did it pay off. Since then, he’s been on a quick ascent to the fore of electro-driven indie-pop. Everything he has released so far has been written and at least part produced from his bedroom. Shortly after ‘Orange Juice’, he released the five-track Like An Animal EP, which further cemented his status on ones-to-watch lists across both the UK and further afield. Since then, Templeman has released a project almost every 8 months, with Sunday Morning Cereal and Don’t Go Wasting Time arriving at either end of 2019, Happiness in Liquid Form in 2020 and his Forever Isn’t Long Enough mini-album last year. Each project delves into a different element and aspect of Templeman’s life, be it love, uncertainty, heartbreak or just a fear of what’s to come. 

While personal, however, it’s Mellow Moon that stands apart when it comes to introspection. Writing for what was to become Alfie’s debut album had begun in early 2020, prior to the pandemic, however it was almost entirely rewritten during lockdown, at a time when Templeman was cocooning in his room due to lung condition he developed as a child. “We were gonna go all over the world, we were really excited,” Templeman said at the time. “I just can’t do it with my lung condition. But that first gig back, I’ll be so excited for it, and I’ll be grateful for all the smaller things”. Almost two years out, what does he remember of that time?

“It was a mixed bag,” Templeman answers, reflecting on months spent working away from his home studio. “There were times where I took advantage of it and took each day as it comes, recording when I felt like it and being really chill and relaxed about the whole process. Then there were other days when it was a nightmare to put your thoughts on the right path and turn your mind on”. Did he feel pressure, either internal or external, to use the time productively? “It definitely felt like I should be doing something, but after a while you realised no one was doing anything”. “When the pandemic started, a lot of people were like ‘hell yeah, I don’t have to see people for two weeks’ and a lot of people really enjoyed it,” Templeman laughs, “but then it went on way too long and turned into hell”.

Once Templeman decided it was safe to leave home, he went straight to the studio and found that he had fundamentally changed as a person compared to the man he once knew before lockdown. “I feel like I lost a lot of confidence in 2020,” he admits, “so it felt very surreal at my first show back in April or May 2021 that I had the confidence to step up and do a show like that and perform”. “At the same time though, I was 17 when the pandemic hit so I was growing up, so it felt like a double whammy,” he notes. "There were a lot of things that completely changed me during that time period so it had a big impact”.

After lockdown, Alfie took some time aware from his bedroom produced material, to work on new stuff and create new sounds, but when he returned to it early last year he realised that every track fit together perfectly to create a clear picture of what it was like to live in his mind at the time. It was then that he decided this would be his album.

Across its 14-track run-time, Mellow Moon blends elements of other-worldly instrumentation and song structures with down-to-earth lyrics about his experiences struggling with anxiety. He felt so low during lockdown that he began taking antidepressants to combat his feelings of uncertainty and stress, something he explores on the record. This is the first time in Templeman’s career he’s been so frank about his mental health, and is opening up in such a way as to show young people that their weaknesses don’t define them. “I think people assume that I’m this easy, outgoing person but there’s actually a lot more layers to me and this record shows that,” he says. “Writing songs like ‘Broken’, ‘Take Some Time Away’ and ‘Mellow Moon’ were like therapy. It was me asking ‘What’s wrong with me?’ and ‘How am I going to get better?’ Just figuring things out in real time. I had therapy but there were still things unresolved in my mind. So I turned to music for the answers”. “I’m being really open for the first time about where I’m at mentally. Overcoming that felt life changing," Aflie writes in the album’s notes. 

When times got tough, Templeman did what he always could: turned to music. “Music has been the ambition since I was a kid, it fueled me and kept me running,” he admits. “I feel like we all have the same amount of energy growing up and it’s about finding ways to convert that energy into good energy, and for me music does that”. He loves every part of his journey, including touring, where he has played across both Europe and the US. “Touring is intense, it’s hard,” he admits. “Whenever I started touring, I’d go to other people’s gigs and wonder ‘Oh, what time was soundcheck’ or ‘I wonder how their day was’ because I can relate to them now and sometimes you can see that in the artists when they’ve had a bad day, or you see that switch flick on and they might have had a bad day, but now they're playing music and they are having a good time. That’s what I try to bring to my shows”. 

As talk turns to new music (of Harry’s House he says “There’s some really good stuff in there, I’m glad that he’s experimenting and Peter Gabriel-ing it”) and the inspiration he takes from films (“Watching those films where there’s a downfall of someone, I find that quite interesting, and sci-fi”) it’s clear the passion for creativity burns brightly for Alfie. Now that his debut is out of the way, what next? For Alfie, the answer’s always been clear. Wipe the slates and go again.

“I’m working on my second album at the moment and it’s nothing like my first,” he says of clearing the decks sonically. “For me to really write a good song my mind has to be in the present, I don’t look back on the past too much anymore. That being said, I do incorporate nostalgia and things into the songs, but in a way that relates to how I’m feeling now and not back then”.

“I used to think all about the past when I wrote music” he smiles,”but now it’s all about the here and now, living in the present”.

Mellow Moon is out now.

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More about: Alfie Templeman