Younghusband

It’s a fresh approach taken for a record that oozes freshness from every note on it – a logical step from the busyness of their preceding album. When they released their second album, 2015’s Dissolver, it came with a string of impressive names attached to it. Released by ATP, produced by Loop’s Robert Hampson, recorded at Geoff Barrow’s Invada Studios and featuring Warren Ellis of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ sprawling viola work. The result was an album that calmly shrugged off the neo-psych label that some lazily placed them in the wake of their 2013 debut album Dromes, a record that Mojo gushed about saying “It pushes bittersweet melodies from under a reverb rug.”

By the time the subsequent touring for the album subsided the band had racked up almost a decade of being together, during which they had explored various avenues of contemporary guitar music from washed-out hazy swathes of enveloping guitars to seamless pop-tinged compositions. The four-piece of Euan Hinshelwood, Joe Chilton, Adam Beach and Pete Baker went on to do some other things for a while, such as playing in other people’s bands and having some time apart.

So with the band now in Greenwich in a barn, they undertook a new creative approach that looked to solidify the band and harness a new sound that was bubbling in Hinshelwood’s songs. “There were so many things we liked and disliked about our first two records,” he says. “We thought we’d try and find a middle ground. I wanted to bring us back to that place between the first and second record but with more confidence in songwriting. Maybe being a bit more extreme – a bit more emotional extremity and openness.”

Getting the band back together was a combination of rejuvenation and rustiness. “It took a bit of getting used to,” Hinshelwood recalls. “I certainly miss that two rehearsals a week and then straight to the pub but that’s what happens when you all grow up and your lives go in different directions, isn’t it? Things develop and change.” This change was embraced. There was a burst of creativity over two weekends in the barn in which the majority of the tracks were laid down. They were sessions driven by instinct and impulse. “I didn’t play the songs to the guys before,” says Hinshelwood. “For the majority of the record the band had only heard the songs on the day of recording them. We then went over the top of those bare bones but at the core of it I wanted to get something loose and gritty.”

Although it would be some time before the whirlwind of those loose and gritty sessions would manifest as a finished album. The time period spent on perfecting the album has been beneficial however. The end result of the new album – one awash with glowing guitar melodies, breezy pop moments and restrained yet potent songcraft – is one that feels emblematic of where the band are; not a record in which a band is still trying to find themselves but are comfortable with their identity and making music that perfectly encompasses that. “I think when we first started we were really influenced by things,” says Hinshelwood “That’s natural for a young band and moving on to the second record we tried to strip a lot of that – our identity has matured. I’ve always been about writing songs first and foremost, rather than having an overarching style. The style comes from the songs more than anything with us.”

Instead, the influences that are most noticeable on this record do not belong to other bands – although if you’re a fan of Yo La Tengo’s ever-shifting musical experimentations you won’t be disappointed – but with environment and a sense of time and place. “A big theme has been moving south of the river into open spaces,” Hinshelwood says. “In Greenwich there’s a lot of open space and there’s a water theme running through this record. I’ve spent a lot of time by the river down here and it’s been quite a reflective time.” Whilst emptiness is also a theme that runs concurrently and flowingly with the aquatic ones, this isn’t an especially sad album for Hinshelwood. “Emptiness keeps popping up but I feel that there’s a real optimism too. There’s a theme of optimistic emptiness. That feeling when you know that something good is coming or could come but you’re not sure where it is. That strange surge of optimism you get.”

Perhaps the most fitting metaphor for the new place that Younghusband find themselves in, both musically and geographically, is reflected in the album’s title. “One of the reasons we called the album Swimmers is because there’s a sense of collectiveness to swimmers but also a sense of individuality. They are communicating with each other in a way but they are also very much in their own space.