Q&A: Lemondaze Emerge From the Shadows With Crushing New EP “subtext”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photo Credit: Derek Bremner
CAMBRIDGE POST-PUNK INNOVATORS LEMONDAZE — are back with a vengeance. Their new single “polari,” heralds the arrival of their upcoming EP subtext, produced by Matt Glasbey and set for release on December 5. This marks a defining moment for the four-piece, whose genre-blurring blend of post-rock, shoegaze, and grunge-infused intensity has earned them a devoted following across the UK underground.
“Polari” is a bruising yet hypnotic entry point into the world of subtext.
Recorded across London and Brighton throughout 2024, subtext captures a revitalized incarnation of the band. It’s an EP that shows Lemondaze embracing both experimentation and their core sound. While rooted in shoegaze and post-rock, Lemondaze flawlessly interlace breakbeat, grunge, and alt-rock, giving subtext a multifaceted edge.
Comprised of Isis de Chastelain (guitar/vocals), Rosie Heard-Edwards (guitar/vocals), Finn Fox (drums) and Jonty Freeman (bass), Lemondaze deliver a synergy that elevates every track.
Subtext promises to redefine Lemondaze’s trajectory, not as a return from absence, but as a reassertion of their undeniable presence that’s ready to dominate the underground scene with renewed ferocity.
Photo Credit: Derek Bremner
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
ISIS: You find very wild things in there that are sort of unrelated to what we sound like. We are really inspired by Deftones, Wolf Alice, lots of Massive Attack, and trip-pop.
JONTY: The band's origin is rooted in the UK 90s shoegaze scene. What we try to achieve artistically is quite close to that, but with quite a wide range of inspiration around that quite a lot of pop music.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
JONTY: A pretty cinematic one. We try to visually in our head, sort of paint pictures with music. I think it's very much trying to take you to a place or show you sort of in your mind's eye and conjure images. I don't know what kind of space that would be, because I think all of our songs are slightly different, but it's definitely cinematic.
ISIS: We like watching movies and diving deep into the soundtracks and asking what we could create to put on top of that? Or we're quite heavily into game soundtracks. It’s quite a wide range, but it’s fueled by a sort of emotion and just deep feeling. We want people to feel stuff.
LUNA: You just released your newest single “polari” which is a sneak peek off your upcoming subtext EP next month. Can you walk us through the inspiration behind the track?
ISIS: This song was initially written during COVID when we were in lockdown. Finn, the drummer, and I both got COVID at the same time, so we decided that we'd isolate together. We were feeling crappy, and we rolled out the sofa bed with blankets, playing all of Halo three campaigns in one day and were gaming the whole time. We were itching to write something, and it just came through a lot that we wanted to put the energy that we just didn't have at the time and we were feeling really shit and just ill and feeling sorry for ourselves. We wanted to feel a crazy feral energy and put everything into this song, and that's why it's quite energetic.
LUNA: “Polari” is accompanied by a music video. How did this concept come to life, and what story were you hoping to tell?
JONTY: That was made by Rosie and she spent weeks and weeks experimenting on a lot of editing software. I don't think there was really a narrative necessarily, just more of a visual guide, or visualizing the song, I think is the best way to describe it. It definitely falls into a lot of our visual aesthetics at the moment and how we're trying to present artistically, visually.
ISIS: She showed me what program she was using to do it, and it all looked way too complicated to remotely understand what she was doing, but she had these videos that we'd all taken feeding into this program that reacted with different inputs. You could put sound in and the image is moved and distorted based on those inputs, which I thought was really cool.
LUNA: Subtext is out next month. What themes or emotions are you exploring across the EP?
JONTY: The main theme was just honesty, really. I think that's the thread that runs through the whole EP. We spent a long time gigging and not releasing music. We wanted to create five tracks that were just us being honest with no sort of expectation about how they would be received. I think a big part of it was going to write songs that we believed in and we liked — some of the songs on the EP are quite old, and some of them are brand spanking new — I think that it's just about sort of for five tracks of just like directness from us in a way. I think that there is no overarching emotional tone more than it's just a small collection of us as people. The subtext title comes from it being a subtext to all of our lives.
LUNA: I would love to touch more on the creative process behind the EP. You worked with producer Matt Glasbey, who has collaborated with acts like Sorry and Alt-J. What was it like bringing him into your creative process, and how did he influence the sound of the EP?
ISIS: Matt was amazing. He was introduced to us and we clicked straight away. We did a few days of pre-production at his own studio, a little small one. I think he just gets us. He got what we were trying to do and understood our energy and who we are. We weren’t afraid to just go mad and experiment. He really encouraged us to try some new stuff out, so we got some really crazy sounds, and we did things that we never thought we could. We recorded at Salvation Studios in Brighton for all the live tracking. He kept us together and kept us going, and was just so supportive throughout the whole thing. He's just the loveliest guy. I wouldn't ever want to stop working with him.
JONTY: That was our first real experience of working with someone so accomplished and so professional and it was this huge learning experience of there's so much more that we didn't think we could possibly achieve and how you can really do a lot of detail-orientated work. It was just a huge learning curve for us. I don't think we really want to work with anybody else in the future, because he just gets what we're about, and we have such a good time with him. I’m grateful that we got the opportunity to work with him, and absolutely going to work with him in the future.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the EP — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Lemondaze is right now?
ISIS: We're going to have two different answers. I'd say “grave mind.” I think that's my favorite track on the EP. This is my baby. It's very different from a lot of stuff that we'd done, and it was nice to experiment. It was a song that came so naturally, and it was one of those songs that just came out and I wasn't really thinking about it, like everything we were doing was an accident. I was trying to create a slide sound for the intro and I didn't even have a slide, so we just used an elf bar vape as a slide and put some strings in this. What if we make the beat sound like this? It was one of those songs that wrote itself, which is weird, because that doesn't usually happen with us. I feel like the lyrics came out of me the same as well. It feels quite emotional to perform and listen to. It's probably the most complicated song that we have, texturally, there's a lot going on, and Matt did such a good job of mixing it and making it sound so expansive. I'm super proud of that song.
JONTY: I think for me, “o(type)” was the first single we released for the EP and sort of similarly, it was one of those songs that wrote itself. It was really easy to write. Going into it, we wanted to do something much more stripped back and more honest. A lot of the songs that we've written have been quite complicated. Texturally, there’s a lot going on, whereas, “o(type)” was very much like, can we write a song that is really simple in its structure and fairly simple in the way that it's played? I think it came out beautifully and it became a bit of a love song. I think it's not cliche, but quite overtly tries to be us being really honest. We hadn't really written a song like it before, and that's why it’s my favorite, just because it's left field a bit for us.
LUNA: What is fueling your fire right now that’s pushing you into this new chapter in your career?
ISIS: I feel like it's always just been for the love of it, like we love it so much. We love writing, we love playing and we love hanging out with each other. We're really good friends. We have been together for years, and it's just something that we've always wanted to do together and just seeing where it goes, we've got a tour coming up, which is so exciting. I think it's always about looking ahead and seeing what the next steps are, and just enjoying ourselves, really. Not everyone gets to do this or have the opportunities that we do and we've been really lucky.
JONTY: For the last four years, we've had this repertoire of work that we wanted to release, and I think pushing it out there into the world and saying, no, actually, we're here now. We're not just going to gig around and have fun. We want to be taken a bit more seriously as artists. I think that's really motivating, especially with what we're working on already now. I think it's a real acceleration of now we want to really push out work. I think there's this entourage effect of all these things happening for us and it feels like our time to say, we're here.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
ISIS: The rest of the year is easy because there's only one month left. Releasing subtext on December 5. We're following that up for the tour, so five dates, which is going to be really great. Then over Christmas, just passing out for two weeks, because I think we all need a bit of a break, and then just welcoming in the New Year. We've got quite a lot of plans. We’re seeing where the New Year takes us, off the back of a release as well, which should be really exciting. I can't wait to see what happens. We've got vinyl coming out too, which is one of the craziest things that we get to have on music. It's not on Spotify, so you can hold it.
JONTY: I'm just really excited. There's just so much happening right now involving us and the team that has created itself around us, which we're insanely grateful for. We're just super grateful, but also so excited about the potential in the New Year and over the next year, to hopefully try and get more music out and do a few tours. It's all just stuff super exciting. There's so much going on and you just want to create and really go for it.
Photo Credit: Derek Bremner
