Q&A: Girl Scout Steps to the Edge with Debut Album ‘Brink’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photo Credit: Lamia Karic
ON THE PRECIPICE — With their debut album Brink, Stockholm trio Girl Scout step into a confessional, revealing a band at a crossroads. After a string of acclaimed EPs and a buzzed-about tour with Alvvays, the trio found themselves standing on the edge. The album captures the uncertainty and introspection that come when pausing to consider the trajectory of your life. What to pursue and which direction to take. Saturated with nostalgia and a longing for the simplicity of childhood, Brink feels like standing at the edge of the unknown.
Mixed by Alex Farrar, Brink is a sun-drenched prism of Girl Scout’s signature indie rock with songs that sparkle and shift, refracting different colors of emotion with each listen. Across 13 tracks, the band explores their dualities. The album is caught between apocalyptic anxiety and escapism, capturing the all-too-familiar crossroads of feeling stuck while yearning for change.
“Brink came out of a time when I couldn’t really picture what the future might look like,” says vocalist Emma Jansson. “Somewhere between dread and anticipation; I was standing on the edge of something unknown, craving change but feeling stuck in the same old patterns. It was like real satisfaction felt just out of reach, and looking back at childhood and teenage memories made me realize how much had changed… Making this album became a way to work through those feelings — the confusion, the grief, the feeling of time running out, the reality of getting older — as much as it became a means of finding new reasons to keep moving forward.”
Girl Scout invites listeners to the edge. Brink emerges as a confessional for anyone standing on the precipice of change and trying to reconcile where they’ve been with where they’re going.
Photo Credit: Lamia Karic
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked when “I Just Needed You To Know” was released. I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what have you been up to since the last time we talked.
EMMA: It's been good. We've been working our little butts off. We recorded an album and we went on tour. We're on tour right now, actually, but we're doing a Swedish tour. We've been away for a bit, and then have a few days off, but we've been on multiple tours since then. The album has been the main focus for the better part of a year. We did a Swedish single with a band called Terra, somewhere in between there too. We did a little Swedish endeavor, and then we did the album. We've been in and out of the studio all of last spring and beginning of the summer.
KEVIN: We went into the studio for the album and then we went to the studio up until August. We went on tour with the Alvvays as well.
LUNA: You are about to release your debut album Brink next month and huge congratulations! What sparked the initial idea for Brink? What emotional or thematic ground did you feel compelled to explore this time around?
EMMA: We went back and forth for a while, like we knew that we were going to do an album after the last EP, and we started writing little snippets of songs and jamming. At the beginning of last year, we went back and forth because we knew we were going to do an album, and we wanted to do a little bit more chronological than we did the past EPs. We had some ideas of what the album would feel like or what the central themes were going to be. We were very open to seeing what came out, so as not to decide that this is going to be an album that feels like this, and then none that feeling very forced. We saw how we felt and tried to gauge where we were at and what we wanted to do and what resonated with us. In the middle of it, things started to come together, and you could zoom out a little bit.
Because before then, we knew the feeling the record had or what it came from. It was really back and forth for a bit. We could see that it was a depiction, or almost like a journal of our lives and where we were at mentally and what we were feeling at the time. I think we were all reaching a point in our lives where we felt like we were in a very uncertain age, or a place in our lives where you start reflecting on where do I kind of want the rest of my life? What direction do I want the rest of my life to go into? What does the future look like? I think we're old enough now that you can see how your choices set you apart from people that you grew up with as well. We have a lot of friends that aren't musicians, and you can tell that our lives are so different from some people that we know because we've chosen different paths. It might be people that when you got to know them, you had the same life, and now it's just so different. It was a little borderline life crisis throughout the record, and also a nostalgic element, or a sentimental element of longing for a simpler time. The general state of everything right now that's happening all over the place, it feels so uncertain and just feeling very alone in the world. It came from a very anxious place.
LUNA: You’ve described the album as a prism, with each song reflecting a different glow. Did you approach each track with a distinct mood or intention in mind?
KEVIN: I think the songs, a lot of the time, guided the way. We realized when we were sitting with the actual song idea that this is how this should be treated. It was like the song was telling us how it should be treated, rather than having an intention of where on the album it should be and how it should sound like. We tried to be pretty intuitive about where the songs wanted to go.
EMMA: I think it was a very song-by-song basis, and we didn't have certain sounds that needed to recur during the album or anything like that. I think we were very loose with rules revolving around the album and trusting that the sum would be something that felt like it made sense together.
LUNA: How was it working with Alex Farrar on your first full-length record? What was it like bringing him into your creative process, and how did he influence the sound of the album?
PER: The album is produced by us ourselves, but he has mixed it. We're massive fans of pretty much everything he's done. That's why we reached out to him in the first place. I don't know if we produced with him in mind, but he has a really big part in how it all sounds and how it all comes together. It definitely has his idea on the album.
EMMA: We worked with him on the last EP on all the songs. We really enjoyed working with him, and he's really good at taking these small, subtle and making small, subtle choices within the mixing of adding texture in places where, once you get the mix back, it makes perfect sense. He's very good at doing these little subtle touches in the music to emphasize the different parts. I feel like he understands our way of playing and writing really well. He's really good at adding texture and personality and getting what we want it to sound like without really having to explain too much.
LUNA: Did you take any creative risks or experiment with new approaches on Brink compared to previous releases? What felt different this time around in how you expressed yourself?
PER: We did for sure. The two big factors are that we had been longing for making an album for such a long time, and really looking forward to it and having a clear goal for ourselves, because in making an EP, it always comes down to just a collection of songs that you put together, because it's such a short format. We had really been looking forward to making something bigger that felt cohesive. And also in the process of making this, we had a lot more time than we have had when recording before, so we could really try stuff out and experiment a lot more. We definitely have some tracks on the album that are recorded in ways that we definitely wouldn't have on the EPs.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing who Girl Scout are right now?
PER: It's hard because it varies day-to-day. I really like all of them to be honest. I'm really super proud of everything.
EMMA: I love “Simple Life.” I love that song, or that's one of my favorites, because it's just so direct. It was so easy to make, and I feel like you get affected by the process a little bit. It's just so nice when something practically writes itself. I wrote it, made a demo, didn't rehearse it, did it live in the studio and it was done. That was pretty much it, so that's always nice, because it's not usually how it happens.
KEVIN: I'm going to say “Crumbs.” It's our last single that's coming out in a couple of weeks. I think I'm really looking forward to releasing that one. It was a pretty quick process with that song as well. It just appeared and was pretty clear right away. It felt great right away. It just played itself.
LUNA: What excites you most about this new era and what are you hoping listeners can take away from this new era?
EMMA: I think there's more seriousness in the lyrics, and we've always had a very light hearted tone on the EPs. There's moments of sadness and anxiety, but it's usually tied up with a little humoristic bow. Something that I'm really proud about this record, is that we're sitting in the uncomfortable parts a little bit more. It's a little bit more vulnerable than we've been before, and not trying to make it a funny thing. Musically, I feel like there's more subtlety to this album and it’s more mature, hopefully more mature, but I feel like the music breathes a little bit more. There's a calmness to this album that I feel we maybe haven't had in previous releases. There's moments of reflection and little interludes and stuff like that. It's more time to sit with it, which I really like with albums. I'm hoping that people will appreciate the space and the vulnerability. I hope people like the tone of the album, or can relate to the tone of the album, because it differs a lot from song-to-song, but I'm hoping that people can still see it as a whole.
LUNA: What is fueling your fire right now that’s pushing you into this new chapter in your career?
EMMA: The live show is going to be really fun. We're changing everything with this headline tour. There's going to be so much new material. We're reconstructing how we've been previously doing our headline shows, which feels really exciting and just letting people hear it, because we've been sitting on this for ages.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
KEVIN: Doing great. I'm super excited for all that is to come with releasing an album and going out touring, and just the anticipation of seeing how the album lands and everything, but I'm really looking forward to everything. I really feel like the album encapsulates a broader picture of who we are as a band, and I just look forward to revealing that whole picture.
PER: As for the rest of the year, hopefully just loads and loads of touring, that's the goal.
