Interview: Nashville Indie Pop Artist BIZZY Updates Us on Her Tour & New EP, ‘I Don’t Get Breakups’ November 21, 2023 It’s hard to explain fully what went on there. There were points where some of us considered whether we could and should continue at all with making the record and pursuing a life in music. We made this huge decision to scrap the whole thing and start again. We’d already blown our small budget and the deadline to submit the album was just a couple of months away.” Lanterns on the Lake leave us in a moment of quiet, intimate reflection to ponder the truth of our reality. Tyneside’s Lanterns on the Lake release their much-anticipated album, Versions of Us. This self-produced fifth studio album follows 2020’s Mercury nominated Spook the Herd. Its nine songs are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities, facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies.

However, in common with the majority of records released in the opening months of 2020, any promotional push or live shows to showcase the album to a wider audience came to a grinding halt when the covid pandemic hit these shores. It was a shame, as songs like Baddies and Every Atom seemed poised to lift the band to another level. The band have also announced an extensive UK tour in late 2023 which includes a performance at London’s Islington Assembly Hall. It was during this break that Wilde began writing many of the songs that would go on to make up Spook the Herd. The band developed the songs over the course of a year before recording at Distant City studios in Yorkshire. This was the first time the group had gone into a studio to record. Wilde has commented that "We are a pretty insular band in how we work, and trusting other people enough to allow them to get involved is not always easy for us."The album was produced by the band and mixed by the band's guitarist Paul Gregory. [24]Metacritic https://www.metacritic.com/music/versions-of-us/lanterns-on-the-lake. {{ cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= ( help) Put another way, you don’t scrap an entire budget’s worth of recorded material and start over unless you really believe in your material’s potential. To Lanterns on the Lake’s credit, the version they’ve release into the world is phenomenal, intricate, and utterly immersive. Versions Of Us is a majestic career peak record from a band that has evolved constantly over more than a decade. It’s their fifth and most focused sounding album despite the difficulties in making it. The production belies being done in a bedroom, at points the instrumentation sounds widescreen and big budget without losing sight of where it’s come from. Lyrically, it’s raw, honest and painfully open at parts, a catharsis being used to make sense of what’s gone on and how to recover from it. Thumb Of War hints at conspiracy theories and falling out with friends –“I see you scrolling through the century, banging on about some warning”– and trying to convince them of their madness. The music lays out the drama, strings and guitars creating a lush tension than runs through before building to a swirling crescendo.

It’s fair to say that with all these changes, Lanterns changed the destiny of their fifth record. It’s an irony that’s not lost on Wilde and Gregory, given that a huge theme of the record is destiny and fate, and whether we can change our path in life. These were all lyrics that existed before the initial album was scrapped – they weren’t changed to reflect the turmoil the band had been through. We’d begun working on the new album and we knew things didn’t feel right,” explains singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde. “There was a negative energy in the music, and the more we tried, the worse it became. I still can’t really put my finger on it; it wasn’t the relationships in the band, but there were other financial and logistical pressures. We’ve always been a band that’s tried to make music that has real heart and soul, and we could see that that wasn’t there.”Credits | Where Soldiers Come from | POV | PBS". PBS. 11 January 2011. Archived from the original on 4 August 2013 . Retrieved 1 June 2014.

I hope listeners connect to the record and feel something that five humans made, that is coming from a very real place,” Hazel Wilde shares. “I’d like to think folks can find a sense of hope in there too. The biggest takeaway for me is ironic because it links to one of the thematic threads in the album – that we can change our destiny by making that decision to change the path that we’re on. In a way we ended up in the multiverse with a different album and one which is far removed from that original version.”Vatican This is about someone always being there for me, even at my most unlovable. String Theory This is a song about reflecting on what might have been and might, in some way, still be. It finds beauty and solace in the multiverse theory and the idea that out there somewhere, vibrating on their own frequency, exists another fully realised version of yourself where your story turned out differently. The nine songs of Versions Of Us are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities; facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies. Singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde has no doubt that motherhood fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” she says. “Motherhood made me aware of having a different stake in the world. I’ve got to believe that there’s a better way and an alternative future to the one we’ve been hurtling towards. I’ve also got to believe that I could be better as a person, too.” Archived copy". www.bellaunion.com. Archived from the original on 2 October 2011 . Retrieved 17 January 2022. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) But things took a dramatic turn and there was a huge shift in our mindset and approach to the whole thing once Philip joined to play drums on the album. We were able to approach the songs with a fresh perspective. We recorded the album again within the space of just a few weeks. It was a case of, ‘ Ok, we’ve nothing left to lose now, this is it.’ To me, it almost felt like this could be our final mark to make on the world. Things were recorded in a few takes, and we would move on. The music and the performances have a charged energy to them that we wouldn’t otherwise have had because of that.”