Acclaimed Newcastle-based outfit Lanterns on the Lake‘s recently released nine-song album Versions of Us is an existential meditation examining life’s possibilities; facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies. Ultimately, the album’s material may be the most hopeful of their growing catalog to date.
It shouldn’t be surprising that for the band’s frontperson Hazel Wilde, that motherhood has fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” Wilde says. “Motherhood made me aware of having a different stake in the world. I’ve got to believe that there’s a better way and an alternative future to the one we’ve been hurtling towards. I’ve also got to believe that I could be better as a person, too.”
Given some of the album’s themes, there’s a biting irony to the album’s creative process: An entire previous version of the album was scrapped. Mental health struggles and personal problems within the band impacted how the initial version of the album took shape. “Despite trying everything we could to make it work, we reached the point where we just had to stop,” Wilde explains. Ol Ketteringham (drums) left the band, something that Wilde says was “heartbreakingly difficult as we were and still are extremely close.”
The band scrapped nearly a year’s worth of work, regressing to song demos with just Wilde performing with a single instrument, as they began again with Radiohead‘s Philip Selway joining the album sessions on drums and percussion. “Philip brought an energy to the songs that reignited our belief in them,” Wilde says. “Within a few weeks we had a whole other version of the album and things felt very different,” the Lanterns on the Lake frontperson continues. “We had changed the destiny of the record.”
Version of Us‘ latest single “Rich Girls” is a big, heart-worn-on-sleeve anthem built around a relentlessly propulsive rhythm section, shoegazer-like guitar textures, buzzing synths, soaring violin passages paired with Wilde’s plaintive delivery and the band’s unerring knack for rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses. But underneath the brooding atmospherics is a narrator struggling to get past the unwieldy weight of life’s difficulties, and who expresses the desire to occasionally fake being happy, being sane or feeling competent and on on — if only for a few minutes.
The live footage of “Rich Girls” was recorded at the Old Church in Northumberland.
Discover more from The Joy of Violent Movement
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.