Elder Island

When Elder Island went into the studio to record the followup to their critically acclaimed 2021 album, Swimming Static, they were determined to “turn everything on its head”. The trio are celebrated for their brooding indie-electronica that draws on their Bristol roots, creating vastly detailed and immersive soundscapes. But Hello Baby Okay marks a new era for the band, fuelled by a longing for transcendence and euphoria. An effervescent counterpoint to the current times, their new music is threaded through with a liberated energy, lilting funk-pop guitars, danceable beats and a renewed sense of play. “We wanted the joy to shine through,” they say. Elder Island’s Katy Sargent (vocals, cello), Luke Thornton (bass, beat-making) and David Havard (guitar, synths, programming) have spent the past decade building a dedicated fanbase on both sides of the Atlantic, with over 375 million streams worldwide. They’re firm festival favourites who’ve played at prestigious venues from London’s Roundhouse to New York’s Bowery Ballroom and who hold the unique ability to straddle both the live and club worlds: in 2022, they pricked the ears of superstar DJs like Solomun, who personally invited them to spin at his Printworks takeover. Across two studio albums and myriad EPs, they’ve crafted a genre-blurring sound world that draws on a sublime combination of strings, far-flung percussion, intricate loops and abstract lyrics. But in the lead up to writing their third release, Hello Baby Okay, Elder Island had been wrestling with a disillusionment they hadn’t before felt in their 12 years together as a band. The pandemic had upended their mammoth tour schedule and threatened to “flatline” the band financially, and they were under intense pressure to make music when they longed for space to recharge. For a time, they weren’t sure if and how they would continue. “I think it’s fair to say that none of us were in a great place when we started this album,” says Katy. “We needed to stop and reassess what was important to us as a band beyond churning out endless content.” Time for a creative reset. While Swimming Static was densely constructed, with instrumentation meticulously layered in the editing suite, its followup was a totally different process where “we did the complete opposite,” says Katy. When they went into the studio in 2023, they went back to their roots with free-flowing jam sessions, rekindling their sense of spontaneity while channeling the warm embrace of the dancefloor. “Our sound got pigeonholed into a chillout coffee-shop playlist space,” says Luke, but in fact, David continues, “DJ culture has been heavily influential on our approach to music.” It’s a large part of why they’ve put out two remix albums, with retooled songs from the likes of underground heroes Elkka, Batu and Matthew Dear. The band structure their live shows like a DJ set too, with momentum building gradually towards a giddy release, inspired by the marathon sets of masterful selectors like Theo Parrish. “We’ve all grown up partying together in Bristol,” says David. “We would go out all the time, buy records, and that’s bled into the writing and arrangement of tracks and the way we blend them live.” The result, say Elder Island, often surprises their fans. “People come to the shows and tell us that they weren’t expecting it to be so upbeat,” Luke adds. “But we want to ramp it up so that everyone can have loads of fun and dance.” Their trademark attention to detail is still present, each song its own standalone story in Elder Island’s cinematic universe, but the songwriting on Hello Baby Okay is more direct. “We were inspired by a lot of Nineties house music and club classics, where the simplicity of the hook and a clear message is front and centre,” says David. In other words, they’ve leaned into anthemic choruses and big singalong moments. Katy was drawn to the key threads of solid, assured relationships and commitment, which feel in line with latter-day Robyn or Hot Chip’s One Life Stand. “It’s about a mature love, an enduring love that you’ve worked on,” she explains. Lead single ‘Ordinary Love’ is Elder Island at their finest – smouldering, atmospheric, irresistibly rhythmic – and is where hedonism meets devotion. It’s as emotionally charged as it is danceable – and it might also be the only driving garage-house track to draw inspiration from Casablanca and The Lord of the Rings. “The turmoil at the end of Casablanca is: which guy is she going to pick,” says Luke, “and in the end Humphrey Bogart’s character goes against his desires and decides that she should stay with her husband.” Katy continues: “And in Lord of the Rings, everybody always fancied Legolas and Aragorn. But if you were going to choose someone to spend the rest of your life with, it would be Sam. He’s an earthy, grounded guy and he saves the whole saga. The concept of ‘Ordinary Love’ is about making the right decision of who to be with, with your head and your heart.” ‘Snapshot’, meanwhile, is the band’s first true love song, a stripped-back house track that charges forward with fidgety polyrhythms recalling minimalism pioneer Steve Reich, while a serene string ensemble surges over the top. Katy says she’d shied away from writing about love before because she “didn’t want people to know what I was writing about,” she explains. “I would make it very convoluted and bring in multiple themes, so you couldn’t really work it out. But over the course of making this album, our favourite motto was the old design motto: K.I.S.S – keep it simple, stupid. There was a simplicity in writing a love song.” Each track on Hello Baby Okay is developed with an innovative and visceral sound design that echoes its theme, befitting of the band’s background in fine art, photography and graphic design. ‘Faster Faster’ is inspired both by a Picasso of a cat and a lobster in a fight, the funkiness of African disco 12-inches and the compressed vocals of Bollywood soundtracks, emphasising the painting’s fun-spirited edge. Or there’s the sunny soul-pop of ‘Pink Lemon’, which is about escaping monotony, says Katy, and dreaming of being whisked away from the everyday: “I wanted it to sound like those old analogue holiday photographs where there’s a glare on the image, a bit of light and warmth,” she says. But with lightness must come dark. Penultimate track ‘Bigger Than Us’ – the album’s “unsung hero,” as Luke says – balances a downtempo beat with hopeful lyrics: “to romanticise the world is to be wild and awake”. ‘White Corridor’ is a slice of phantasmagoric trip-hop. And ‘Bang’ is the band at their most theatrical, taking its cues from Sixties psychedelia, film soundtracks and the BBC’s Uncanny podcast. “It’s hypnotic in its arrangement,” says Dave, and sounds not unlike Kraftwerk at a ghostly go-go disco. The track has the faint echo of a theremin, cello and contrabassoon, which Luke and Katy recorded in a spooky location in Bristol. “The song is about a clairvoyant, so we decided to lean into the horror and record these instruments in a crypt,” Luke explains. It all comes back to Hello Baby Okay’s guiding principle of playfulness. Call it the playful principle, if you like. It’s the sound of a band having newfound fun and trying to lift each other up when the world can bring you down. “We try to instil hope in a lot of the tracks,” says Katy. “Life can be so tough and I want our music to have a silver lining that helps get you through.”