Rough Trade

Very Limited Edition Clear Blue Vinyl LP includes a signed art print on the Rough Trade Records webstore while stocks last.

Returning with 'caroline 2', the eight-piece collective embrace a bolder, more expansive sound. Going beyond their debut's explorations of repetition, slowness and space, the new album pushes further into dynamic contrasts — organic and electronic, raw and refined. Launched with the striking single ‘Tell me I never knew that’, featuring Caroline Polachek’s unmistakable vocals, caroline 2 showcases a fearless interplay of layered instrumentation, warped vocal processing, and moments of both euphoria and melancholy. Intentional and immersive, this next chapter solidifies caroline as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary music.

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The new caroline record begins with a guitar attacking in chiming spikes. Then, another provides slower, lower strokes, lagging behind. Then a direct but clattering beat of drums. All three instruments play in a different rhythm to one another, but also intertwine to form a beautifully lopsided loop. Jasper Llewellyn and Magdalena McLean sing in unison above the fray while the swirling sound beneath them builds and builds in intensity – trombone, bass clarinet and harmonium infusing themselves one at a time in layers as the sound hurtles towards escape velocity. Then, just as a sharp upward swoop of violin threatens to push things stratospheric, comes a colossal counterblast of electronic noise that cuts it all in two. That overwhelming plummet takes over entirely for a few seconds, before the initial attack of guitars and drums rallies back upwards in turn, the two sounds pushing and pulling in mid-air, then finally dovetailing – two sonic worlds moving as one. The opener to caroline 2 is well-titled; ‘Total euphoria’ delivers just that.

In one way, caroline’s second album picks up where its predecessor left off – 2022’s sublime self-titled debut concluded with ‘Natural death’, where they also explored the possibilities of interlocking off-kilter guitar patterns – but in many, many others, it finds them breaking new ground. Those two worlds on the opener are only the beginning. “One of the fundamental themes is the idea of different things happening at once, things that are very different from each other but also simultaneous,” says Llewellyn, who along with Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes forms the songwriting core of the larger eight-piece band. It makes for a record of extraordinary scope – where the organic and the artificial, the harsh and the beautiful, the pristine and the hazy all clash and combine.

It's also tighter than what’s come before. While the band had initially intended to follow a Talk Talk-inspired process – where free improvisations would be spliced together in the studio – what soon emerged was something totally opposite. Where their first record consisted of alternating long and short tracks – sprawling compositions interspersed with short experimental passages – here they present eight finely-cut gems. As central as repetition, slowness and space were in the past, caroline are wary of picking up any tropes. “Also, we just weren’t as interested in it as an idea and approach. I think we also became better musicians and songwriters and realised we could elicit the same feeling from a song in a more concise way,” says Hughes.

“The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,” says Llewellyn. “It’s more intentional,” adds O’Malley. Fleshed out over several songwriting trips, with the central three upping sticks to rural Scotland, with vocalist and viola player McLean then joining them in southern France, followed by writing sessions as a full eight-piece in Margate and Essex then recording in Ramsgate, bonds have become strengthened. “We were just about an eight-person band on the last one, but now we’re a proper eight-person band,” says Llewellyn.

O’Malley, Llewellyn and Hughes’ production skills have been sharpened significantly too. “We’re so much more technically proficient so we can think much more ambitiously, and with a lot more tools at our disposal,” Llewellyn continues. “We’re less afraid to use computers.”

The band’s influences have expanded vastly in that realm. They’re drawing on the “melodies and saccharine sweetness” of Petal Supply and Himera and the ever-shifting nature of Seth Graham and More Eaze’s hypnotic The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid. Hughes cites Danny Brown and Jpegmafia’s frantic Scaring The Hoes LP as “a big inspiration.” Llewellyn offers “the collaged, constantly colliding, layered, many worlds vibe of Mirror Guide by Giant Claw as a big influence on the overall vision.”

In Alex G, whose God Save The Animals the band played often when they toured America, they found a model for the mixing of ‘guitar music’ with vocal processors. This is a key feature of caroline 2. Voices are manipulated with heavy autotune and formant shifting at points throughout the record, allowing the band’s singers to shift between personalities within the space of one song, and also to make the juxtapositions between the acoustic and synthetic, the natural and the artificial, even harsher and more pronounced.

‘Tell me I never knew that’, meanwhile, welcomes a new voice entirely in Caroline Polachek, who the band DM’d after noticing a similarity between the song’s glistening acoustic riff and the kinds of melodies she’s worked with in the past. A mutual fan, Polachek agreed not only to contribute, but to push the song even further. “She was a force to be reckoned with,” says O’Malley. “She was singing for five or six hours, writing new harmonies. We called it at about half one in the morning, but she could’ve kept going.”

The record’s lyrics are one area where improvisation remained key – most emerged out of offhand singing, where words and scenes and images bubbled up to the surface through repetition. They are frequently deeply evocative, but what exactly they evoke is often shrouded. ‘Total euphoria’ alludes to a specific central tension – “did we ever talk about how you left them?” – but the details are unclear. ‘Song two’ quotes someone who never existed – “he said, he said, ‘it’s like lighting on sky’”. It also weaves intriguing threads between that song and others; ‘Song two’’s buried chorus of “now I know your mind” reappears on ‘Tell me I never knew that’ and ‘Coldplay cover’. The “lightning on sky” also returns on ‘Two riders down’.

Although it emerged through a similar process of sounds becoming words via time and repetition, the refrain of that song’s title has taken on a particularly deep resonance for the group; between their first and second albums the band saw the deaths of two people close to them – two riders – the father of clarinetist Alex McKenzie, and a close friend, Giles, whose love of extreme-weather hiking (which would leave his hands going purple with cold) is eulogised in the line “with purple hands, and the wind alive.”

Whether the juxtaposition of improvisation-born lyrics with intentional instrumentals, the contrast between different voices, the push and pull between pop artifice and acoustic depth, or the embrace of experimental electronic production, it all comes back to that central exploration of different sonic worlds. The serendipities, synchronicities and conflicts that can occur when they combine has been of interest for a while, the band note. When they took songs from their first record onto the festival circuit, Llewellyn says “it was disturbing at first” when the noise of louder bands in other fields or talkative audiences would bleed into their songs’ quieter sections, “but as time went on, we started to realise that the bleed was actually a part of the composition.” Hughes, too, recalls the joy he felt when on one early piece, the sound of a jet plane flying overhead came into key with the music he was improvising on guitar – “as a moment of worldly noise interacting with intentional song, it was perfect.”

On caroline 2, however, what were once incidental moments became an intentional centrepiece. On ‘Coldplay cover’ (a joke name that ended up sticking), half of the eight-piece started playing in their manager’s living room, the other half in the kitchen, while engineer Syd Kemp physically took a microphone from one room to the other – you can hear creaking footsteps as the urgent sound of a song being played in the living room gives way to the slow and meditative sound of the other song being played in the kitchen, the former still audible in the distant background.

For the mantra-like loop of ‘When I get home’, meanwhile, the band kept hold of demos from when they were figuring out and writing their parts, and then re-integrated those moments of tentativeness into the final version. Then, to add another layer entirely, they asked friends Daniel S. Evans and Jennifer Walton to record a bespoke ‘club’ track to lie buried in the background – playfully inspired by ‘You’re in the bathroom of a club’ nostalgia-bait YouTube videos. McLean’s wandering vocals – a simple ‘dah dah dah’ – resemble someone singing along to a trance tune on headphones, a hint towards yet another sonic world, audible only as a shadow.

There are many other worlds to be found across this record – ‘U R UR ONLY ACHING’, for instance, cuts sharply from a fluid studio take to an intimate demo from Nunhead Cemetery and then back again – but to merely list them all would be to do caroline 2 a disservice. What’s more important is what the band are doing with those worlds – the extraordinary music they extract from their colliding and coalescing. Take the closer, ‘Beautiful ending’, which like the opener is aptly titled (although the name stems from something Hughes misheard when McLean was singing nonsense). There are earthly sweeps of strings, starkly manipulated vocals, low resonant drones, fractured snippets of field recordings and a great heaving sound – heavily distorted acoustic instruments – all of which move in and out, on top of and beneath one another, sometimes with friction, sometimes with a sense of easy serenity. In a way, the song is caroline 2 in microcosm – a record that’s intentional but leaves room for the incidental. Constantly shifting, but consistently magnificent.