The Songs Behind: Labyrinthine Oceans

The end of April saw genre-blending four-piece Labyrinthine Oceans release their hauntingly beautiful new EP 'everyone was alive', an emotional five-track project that dives deep into the world of love, loss, and self-discovery. With multiple Songs of the Week appearances in the lead up to the EP's release, expectations were high, and yet I was still blown out of the water by the musical excellence on display throughout. Mixing genres like shoegaze, post-grunge and alt-rock, Labyrinthine Oceans have created a truly spellbinding soundscape that has to be heard to be believed.

The EP is a masterpiece, and I cannot reccomend enough that all musiclovers listen to it, but to appreciate the full brilliance of Labyrinthine further you need to see them live. Luckily the band have a number of must-see shows already announced for this summer, so be sure to head to a show near you.

May 29th - The Victoria, Dalston
June 20th - The Star in Shoreditch
July 11th - Off The Square, Manchester
September 18th - Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds

To celebrate the release of 'everyone was alive' and the upcoming live dates, I am joined by Labyrinthine Ocean's vocalist and songwriter Julia O'Neill-Walton to hear more about the EP and the band's upcoming projects, before I discover the songs that shaped Julia and the band through my 'Songs Behind' feature.

Last month you released your incredible new EP ‘everyone was alive’. What was the inspiration behind the EP’s name?

“So we actually had a couple of names in the running for it, all of them kind of centralized around loss and grief. The EP comes off the back of me losing my dad a couple years ago, so the name ‘everyone was alive’ was the one we decided to go with. I think the second follow-up one was ‘an empty chair at the table’. It's all about how your life is changed after a major loss or dealing with losing someone really important to you.”

Firstly, I am obviously very sorry for your loss and hope you're doing as well as you can be. Obviously given that last week was Mental Health Awareness Week, how important is it for you to be so emotionally vulnerable in your music?

 “I used to struggle a lot with sharing my emotions and the stories behind my lyrics, but I think being able to be open and explain what's behind it has become really important to me for in trying to help other people know they're not alone in those sort of things. I know especially when my dad passed away I was 18 at the time and I couldn't find much about losing a parent like at that sort of age, and I didn't know anyone who'd gone through that. So being able to give other people a platform to have something to relate to is really important for me, especially offering support through music. I've always used music as a kind of escapism and a way to deal with things, so hopefully our music can do that for other people.”

That brings me quite nicely onto something I was going to say about the way you've written the songs. You can tell they're clearly very personal tracks to you, but you've written them in a way that is quite open to interpretation so that other people can then apply their own situations to it. Was that quite a purposeful decision? 

“Yeah, definitely. I think not forcing a meaning on a song is really important, so whilst the EP is very much about grief and loss, I wanted it to be quite open-ended lyrically so people can put their own meaning on it.  Its also more interesting to me to be able to do that than explicitly give what it's about.”

With all your music, but also with this EP in particular, you haven't really honed in on one genre. You've got a bit of shoegaze, a bit of grunge and psychedelia. Was this a conscious decision to keep things quite open rather than narrowing yourself down to one specific sound? 

“Yeah, I think as a group of people, we've got so many different interests and musical tastes, so it’s really important for us to not box ourselves in one thing. I think that constraint can often stop you from reaching your full potential sonically too. We're bringing together a lot of different tastes, so it is better not going "oh, we're definitely this genre and boxing ourselves into it". Not doing that is really important so we keep it true to ourselves. Also, it just kind of produces more of an authentic sound between the four of us.

The first single from the EP, 'untitled' was released almost exactly a year before the EP's full release. How do you feel you changed as a band over that time.

"So 'untitled' was actually recorded before the line-up fully changed. We had parted ways with our old drummer at that point, but we still had our old guitarist in the band when we recorded it. I think you can kind of hear the difference between 'untitled' and the other tracks on the EP, despite us loving how it come out. I think you can definitely see a progression. The first single we recorded with this lineup on 'everyone was alive' was 'home', and it was the first song that we worked on that was by our drummer. He brought a different palette into the sound. I think we also recorded that quite early into Ellie joining the band, she's our new guitarist. It really felt like we were taking a different path with what we were doing from that point, and it was one that we really wanted to explore. 

Then after that we recorded the rest of the  EP together, so we explored expanding what we were doing sonically, trying out new things and not being afraid to depart from what we were doing before. It really does feel very different with this full new line up it's just like a completely different band almost, in the best way possible. So I think you can hear the development in the EP. Then also, if people have seen us live or seen what we've posting about how the songs have then developed in the past year or so. I think we've hugely honed in on a center point and we feel a lot more like settled and grounded as a project. We just finished up recording some new stuff and it all just feels so much put together and authentic I guess. It just feels like us which is really cool." 

Have you had a chance to test any of the new stuff out live yet?

"We have played most of them, I think there is only one we only haven't playe live so far. It has become part of the recording process. We wanted to make sure we play stuff live first, because playing songs live is very different to sitting and writing them in your bedroom, or demoing them out. It can give you a new choice for the sound and gives you a new environment to try stuff outbwith, especially based on crowd reactions and what people talk to you about after. There might be a bit of a song that you didn't realize was impacting people more than other bits. That's like a huge part of our development and we didn't do that as much with the with 'everyone was alive'. It didn't necessarily suffer for it, but I think if we re-recorded it now,  there would be some different sounds in there. But yeah, all of the new stuff will definitely be in our live sets for the foreseeable now."

What sort of changes have you made having played them live and hearing crowd reactions?

"I think a lot of it is just polishing it. The base of the songs are still the same, but then seeing how people respond live, you might not think that the energy is very high in the song and then you play it to a crowd and they're wanting to jump around to it. You can notice there's way more energy in a song and then putting that into the recording is really important. You can have a slight difference in recorded and live songs, but I think keeping it similar enough is really important. For the new ones we had a lot more time to work on them, which was really good. It has given us  a lot of thinking time for it, and we've put lot more layers in. We've put lot more thought into where the gaps in the sounds are. So we've got a bunch of percussion, we've got some like (???10:50??)Hammond organ and interesting other things. So I think it just feels a lot more full as we've been able to address anything that's been missing in them, which has been really cool."

When we first spoke you were Newcastle based, but have obviously shifted to being London based. What brought that shift around?

"I absolutely love the Newcastle scene and there's a lot going on, but there's not a lot i our genre.  I would love for that to change and there be a shift towards more shoe-gazey ir grungey spots.  But as of right now, there's not like a huge scene for anything. So we were interested in moving away and three of us were looking for universities to go to. So we kind of killed two birds with one stone and went to a uni in London, so we could also develop within the scene that's here. Cause there's a huge scene for our genres here, which is really, cool.  We've met a lot of people who are absolutely lovely and talented.  There's just so much more going on here for our genres, and hopefully we can bring some of that up north as well.  But yeah, it just all came in one package. Our guitarist is originally from London, but shes just finished her university course at Newcastle, so we've kind of done a swap. It's a lot of trains, but yeah, it is of out of necessity really, and it's going really well so far."

Despite the shift you still have gigs up north, including your upcoming shows in Manchester and Leeds. So firstly, how are you dealing with the traveling and the chaos of that? But also, has that helped you grow as a band playing to all these new audiences?

"It's quite stressful because none of us drive  and we don't like have like any sort of team or drivers or whatever. So it's essentially just a lot of relying on public transport with all the gear, which is not fun. But we make do with it, and I think it's what you'd probably call character building. But it's good fun, I think playing in other cities and really exploring different audiences is really, really exciting, and we love doing it. When we first started playing out of Newcastle and that local area, I think we played in Liverpool and Leeds, and we did one in London, and it just felt super exciting. We were meeting new bands and  people who were doing the same sort of stuff as us. It was just really, really inspiring knowing there's always new stuff to explore. We are very busy over summer, which is really cool. Its really cool to see these hubs of audiences developing. We can't wait to keep doing that."

You teased a bit there about exciting times this summer. I know you obviously have a lot of gigs announced already, but have you got any other plans coming up? 

 "We've got most of them announced for summer but we have quite a busy September coming up. We are going back to Europe in September which is really exciting  so we'll be announcing more about that soon. It's the most time abroad that we'll have done, and we've got quite a lot planned for that so I'm excited to announce that."