Release and Resilience: Circa Waves Pull Together With 'Never Going Under'

Photo: Lewis Vorne

A new year might mean a fresh start, but let’s not kid ourselves. Without wanting to break your optimistic spell faster than most of us abandon those overly ambitious annual resolutions, all the world’s ills won’t be solved by a simple change of date.

Yet they’ll definitely feel more surmountable after hearing Circa Waves’ ‘Never Going Under’, a fearless and inspiring record that’s dead set on making our smiles a little wider as we steel ourselves for more inevitable battles ahead.

Melding upbeat pop hooks with driving indie-rock punch, delightful stylistic pivots and enough insatiable grooves to get the terminally self-conscious up and dancing, this Liverpool-based quartet are on a mission throughout a relentlessly anthemic fifth album that alchemises hardship into hope.

Prior to the LP's arrival and the band's massive UK tour, which kicks off later in January, we spoke to singer, guitarist, principal songwriter and producer Kieran Shudall about how fatherhood and the state of this increasingly confusing world fuelled their finest work to date.

You described your previous record, 2020’s ‘Sad Happy’, as relating to existential doom one moment and something inconsequential that had you laughing the next. Since then those extremes have only gotten more intense and polarised, so how did you write about everything that transpired in the last few years without repeating yourself, for ‘Never going Under?’ 

I don’t really aim to write about a specific thing. I sort of write in a stream of consciousness way when I’m doing lyrics. I think that’s the case for a lot of songwriters. The melodies start the lyric off because you’ll be singing vowels and whatever is deep in the back of your mind will rise out of that. I never think I need to write about current times or need to avoid saying anything about Covid or whatever, because if you limit yourself in that sense you won’t write as many good songs. 

So I wrote about all the stuff everyone’s going through, but I also raised a child through Covid. I’d never done that before. It was weird and so I naturally wrote songs about it. I still wrote about the desire to go out and get drunk with my friends, because when everyone was locked away that was all we wanted to do. You missed the simple pleasure of sitting in a pub across from your mates just chatting shit. I wrote about whatever came naturally and didn’t limit myself. 

It sounds like you don’t realise what the theme of the album might be until it’s completely done?

Absolutely. With ‘Sad Happy’ I never set out to write two sides of a record that was one sad, one happy. It just worked out well. And with this one, at the end, it felt like quite a resilient record about never giving up. That was why we decided to call it ‘Never Going Under’ and that song represents the whole album. So it’s only after the fact you can see what’s something’s about. Distance is great for perspective. In a few years time I’ll be able to listen to this record with more wisdom and think it’s about more nuanced things, but now it feels about release, resilience and togetherness. 

You’ve also spoken about this record as being a snapshot of the fear we’re all feeling today. What’s caused you the most concern and fed into that need for resilience?

I mean, fucking, how long have you got? Every time I turn the news on, which I try to avoid, there’s always something to be like ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Whether it be more climate issues, Putin’s doing something terrible, Trump’s done something bad, the Royal Family are up to...something. I try and avoid the news because there’s too much information about how shit the world is at the moment.

Even for people like ourselves, who are more mature and older, but imagine you’re a 15 year old on TikTok and everyday all you get told is about war, climate change, you can eat this but by the way you can’t eat that, it’s okay to be this, it’s not okay to be that. It’s a constant rage in your mind. That’s unhealthy for everyone. I’m trying to step off the grid a little bit when I can, but it’s difficult because everyone’s addicted to their phones.  

Do you think we worry more about the world our kids grow up in than they do? Because we can see the changes, a lot of which aren’t great from our vantage point and different upbringing, but when it’s all they’ve ever known does that make it easier for them than we might imagine?

That’s a good point. I’d not really thought of that. Maybe it was like when I was younger and my mum would worry that I was listening to rap music with swear words in it and I was like ‘Honestly, it’s not an issue. Everyone does it.’ But I don’t know if kids are handling it well. I think depression and anxiety in young people is higher. If you go on TikTok you can see what people are struggling with. I think it’s getting harder but people are resilient and can be strong towards all the negative shit that goes on. 

And maybe kids will have stronger minds than I’ve got? If I remember the 90s, which I kind of can, I don’t remember talk of terrorism. Obviously there were bits going on with the IRA, but I never worried about terrorist attacks. Climate change, I think Al Gore was banging on about the Ozone layer, but that was about it.

And the only news you’d see would be on the telly at 5 o’clock, which I probably wouldn’t watch anyway. There might be a newspaper knocking around the house, but it wasn’t crammed in your face by Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever people choose. Ignorance definitely was bliss for my generation growing up, but now it’s impossible to be ignorant.

You said ‘Sad Happy’ really distilled the Circa Waves sound. How has ‘Never Going Under’ built upon that refinement while also taking you in a new direction?

It’s fine little margins of distillation. We kind of wanted to make a guitar record again. With ‘Sad Happy’ we turned the guitars down a bit and focused more on synths and stuff. With this record, being away from playing live, locked away, I had this desire to turn my guitar up to 11 and fucking play a guitar solo or really loud power chord. That desire was so strong the songs came out like that.

There’s like four or five guitar solos, which is hilarious. I would never have done that five years ago. The guitars are loud and at the forefront of the record and drums bombastic, big and powerful. So I wanted to push myself production wise but, in a way, harken back to the music I used to love, which was indie-rock. And I hope [the opening title track] feels like a bit of a release. You wake up in the morning and put that on and feel like you can go and do anything. 

You’ve described Hell On Earth as a vent, but rather than it being a ferocious punk diatribe it sounds pbeat and cathartic. That kind of juxtaposition recurs throughout the whole album, so why did you choose to put the record’s darker themes across in such a way?

It’s probably something I should speak to a therapist about. ‘Why do you have to make all dark things dead happy?’ Maybe I’ve got a really positive outlook and wanna make the dark things seem better? I was always a big fan of MGMT. All their tunes feel like massive dancefloor bangers but the lyrics are quite sad and introspective.

I’ve always liked disguising sadder themes in euphoric tunes. T-Shirt Weather, our biggest song, is about a sadness that summers don’t feel anywhere near as cool as when you were a kid. Most people think it’s about having fun and drinking beer, but it’s not. I think better melodies come out of sadness or longing for something. If you’re writing songs about being happy the melodies would be shit. There’s something about strong emotion and feeling down that brings out better melodies.

On that song you also take shots at politicians incessantly lying. What are your thoughts on the current state of play in thr UK and the unbelievable things we’ve witnessed in the last year alone?

The fact we’ve got a fucking billionaire running the country who doesn’t have to worry about the heating in his home, or has never had to experience struggling with growing up and not having enough money to buy beans for his family, it’s just an out of touch government who seem to be giving all their mates hand outs of money, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Even the middle class are struggling to get houses. They just seem hell bent on destroying everything that was great about this country.

You’ve spoken about putting more of a focus on your lyrics over the last few albums, so how is your writing process different now than it was early on? 

I definitely nit pick lines more. I still rush and there’s definitely lyrics I always look back on and go ‘I could have spent more time on that.’ But I’m getting more patient in my older age. I sing about more serious things nowadays than I did early on, so they almost deserve better lyrics because the subject matter is of more importance to me. Writing songs about going down the pub, I struggle to write something quite profound, but when you’re talking about Hold On, which is about a friend of mine who suffers with mental health, a more poetic thing happens in your head. 

Is this the most autobiographically open and exposed album you’ve written, because some songs, particularly Living in The Grey, sound like you’re really putting it all out there?

Yeah, 100%. It’s still hard for me to speak to people about that one because I’ve never had so many messages after releasing a song in my life. Not just people saying they connected with it because it hit home, but also messages of concern like, ‘Are you okay?’ Which is nice. I am absolutely fine and have to remind them the song was about when I was younger. This is album five and I had these personal songs and thought ‘If I’m not gonna release stuff like this now then I’m never gonna do it.’ It felt like a good time to start being more open. Something just changed in my mind where I felt happy to be more personal.  

‘Never Going Under’ sounds like an album’s worth of songs that need to be played in arenas. How far are you from making that leap and what needs to happen for it to transpire?

I don’t know any more. There’s no real formula. No way of knowing. A song could blow up on TikTok tomorrow and then, all of a sudden, you’ve got a million more fans. I used to think about how to get the band bigger two albums ago and now it’s more a case that I keep my head down and try and write the best fucking songs possible. I don’t worry too much about how to get to bigger rooms now. If it’s gonna happen it’s gonna happen. 

Great art will make people listen, so I try to make great music and I think that’s the reason why, five albums in, we’re still able to play Brixton Academy, which we did on our first record. So we haven’t gone to arenas but also haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. I’m really proud of maintaining a band for 10 years at that level. I can’t tell you much about getting us bigger, but I know I can say about being consistently good. That’ll keep you in a job for a bit.

Circa Waves Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Mon January 23 2023 - OXFORD O2 Academy Oxford
Tue January 24 2023 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Thu January 26 2023 - NOTTINGHAM Rock City
Fri January 27 2023 - MANCHESTER O2 Victoria Warehouse
Sat January 28 2023 - SHEFFIELD O2 Academy Sheffield
Mon January 30 2023 - GLASGOW O2 Academy Glasgow
Tue January 31 2023 - ABERDEEN Music Hall
Thu February 02 2023 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE NX
Fri February 03 2023 - LONDON O2 Academy Brixton
Sat February 04 2023 - WOLVERHAMPTON KK's Steel Mill

Compare & Buy Circa Waves Tickets at Stereoboard.com.

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