Search Results for:

LANTERNS ON THE LAKE

Lanterns On The Lake

Versions Of Us

    This self-produced fifth studio album follows 2020’s Mercury nominated Spook the Herd. Its nine songs are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities, facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies.

    Singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde has no doubt that motherhood fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” she says. “Motherhood made me aware at 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.”

    Mixed by the band’s guitarist Paul Gregory, in the bedroom of his home in North Shields, there is a sense of time and place that runs deep throughout this record. Given some of its themes, a biting irony is found in an entire previous version of the record being discarded. Mental health struggles and personal problems in the band had a big impact on how the initial version took shape. “Despite trying everything we could to make it work we reached the point where we just had to stop” Wilde explains. Drummer Ol Ketteringham parted ways with the band, something 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. “Philip brought an energy to the songs that reignited our belief in them,” says Wilde. “Within a few weeks we had a whole other version of the album and things felt very different,” Wilde continues. “We had changed the destiny of the record.”

    It’s a heartening idea. Despite the difficulties in its genesis, Versions of Us is the most empowering album yet from the band. In exploring whether we can change fate or are doomed to repeat the same mistakes in life, this powerful collection of songs ultimately alights on hope. 


    TRACK LISTING

    1 The Likes Of Us
    2 Real Life
    3 Vatican
    4 String Theory
    5 Thumb Of War
    6 The Saboteur
    7 Locust
    8 Rich Girls
    9 Last Transmission

    Lanterns On The Lake

    Gracious Tide, Take Me Home - 10th Anniversary Edition

      The band’s much-loved debut has been meticulously remastered at Abbey Road studios and will be released on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with gold foil print. Additionally, the album comes with five previously unreleased tracks recorded during the original sessions, details of which can be found in the track-list below.

      Fusing the most fragile and graceful end of the folk music spectrum to the most luminous properties of cinemascope rock, Gracious Tide, Take Me Home used a smorgasbord of instruments (guitars, violin, mandolin, piano, synths, glockenspiels, even a kalimba) to paint a variety of beautiful vistas, from the ambient ‘Ships In The Rain’ to the galloping ‘A Kingdom’, from the six-minute layers of ‘The Places We Call Home’ to the skeletal 73-second finale ‘Not Going Back To The Harbour’. There’s always been a compelling drama to Lanterns On The Lake; the way the opening track ‘Lungs Quicken’ shifts from dreamy restraint to a full-blown crescendo indicated the true power at their fingertips.

      Lanterns On The Lake formed in 2008 combining a group of friends who had all played in various bands on the local music scene. Hazel Wilde (vocals, guitar), Paul Gregory (guitars, electronics) and Ol Ketteringham (drums, piano) still comprise the core of the band whilst previous members Adam Sykes (vocals, guitar) and Brendan Sykes (bass) departed prior to the second album.

      Hazel commented at the time that. “A lot of lyrics were inspired by me and Paul moving back to the coast [between Tynemouth and North Shields], where I grew up, after we’d been living near the city centre. They’re also memories of growing up here, the feeling of homesickness, and stories of people around us and of the sea. The title Gracious Tide, Take Me Home seemed to sum up all the themes.”

      There might be a vein of sadness through this music - ‘Ships In The Rain’ was inspired by a local fisherman who went missing at sea, and ‘A Kingdom’ was inspired by the book letters sent home by WW2 soldiers – but there is just as much hope in ‘Keep on Trying’ and ‘You’re Almost There’, where fear and insecurities are banished by self-belief; “the feeling that you’re going places,” as Hazel says. Mirroring the sentiment of the album title, ‘I Love You, Sleepyhead’ and ‘Places We Call Home’ draw on the comfort and security of home, friendship and memory.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Lungs Quicken
      2. If I've Been Unkind
      3. Keep On Trying
      4. Ships In The Rain
      5. A Kingdom
      6. The Places We Call Home
      7. Blanket Of Leaves
      8. Tricks
      9. You're Almost There
      10. I Love You, Sleepyhead
      11. Not Going Back To The Harbour
      12. The Watchhouse And The Daughter
      13. Sapsorrow
      14. You Need Better
      15. My Shield
      16. Not Going Back To The Harbour (High Tide Version)

      Lanterns On The Lake

      Spook The Herd

        It’s strange – not to mention fundamentally disconcerting - to live through turbulent times. Yet as many feel like the world is slipping out of control, artists are enlivened as they seek to make sense of the shifting sands. Hazel Wilde of Lanterns on the Lake is now a songwriter necessarily emboldened. On Spook the Herd, the band’s fourth record, her voice and preoccupations rise to the fore like never before. In tandem, the band break new ground on a set of songs that are direct and crucial.

        Wilde does nothing less than dive headlong into the existential crises of our times. Beginning with the record’s title - a pointed comment at the dangerously manipulative tactics of ideologues - its nine songs turn the microscope to issues including our hopelessly polarized politics, social media, addiction, grief and the climate crisis.

        The world is brought into focus, but Wilde’s style is not declarative. She also proves herself a songwriter possessed of a rare talent for finding the personal contours to contemporary issues, fully inhabiting them to make them real. Recorded as live where possible, the band’s natural touchstones of gauzy dream-pop and monumental post rock still float in the air, but listening to Lanterns on the Lake now feels like actually sitting in the corner of the room as they play. As guitarist and producer Paul Gregory says of approaching their fourth album, “There was a sense of release in terms of what kind of music we felt we could make. The idea of what kind of band you’re supposed to be really disappeared. It was great; you felt you could do whatever you like.”

        TRACK LISTING

        1. When It All Comes True
        2. Baddies
        3. Every Atom
        4. Blue Screen Beams
        5. Before They Excavate
        6. Swimming Lessons
        7. Secrets & Medicine
        8. This Is Not A Drill
        9. A Fitting End

        Lanterns On The Lake

        Beings

          Two years on from the critically acclaimed Until The Colours Run, Lanterns On The Lake return with their third full-length record Beings. It marks another leap in the band’s development as they expand their range, pushing the envelope of their signature atmospheric rock and scaling new heights of absorbing song-craft.

          Work on Beings began in February 2014, hard on the heels of successful tours of Europe and North America. It proved to be a productive period. “The ideas came effortlessly and in abundance,” vocalist Hazel Wilde says of the writing process. “At first we had no expectations, no prescribed ideas of how we wanted the songs to turn out. We were just writing and playing together because that’s what we’d always done.”

          This was made possible by their setup, working in splendid isolation; writing, rehearsing and recording in their Newcastle rehearsal room meant the results were undiluted by outside influence. Imaginatively produced and mixed by guitarist Paul Gregory, it’s also his experience that helped yield such compelling results. This allows Beings to move seamlessly from airy, chiming beauty to dense, forbidding soundscapes - sometimes in the same song - while still feeling like the product of a cohesive unit, retaining the band’s spark. “We wanted it to be more raw,” Wilde says of the record. “At its darkest points, we wanted it to feel like you’d dived into the deepest part our dreams and were taking a look around. At its lightest we wanted it to feel like you were coming up for air.”

          Opening song ‘Of Dust and Matter’ strikes just such a balance. The band’s most sinister moment yet, it prowls out of a burble of radio static and feedback, propelled by ominous piano chords as its menacing pulse builds to a tumbling climax of almost discordant, warped guitar parts and the fractured drumming of Ol Ketteringham. “In my greatness I vowed to destroy all I am,” Wilde sings. “It brings out the best in me.”

          It’s an interesting early lyric, and it soon becomes apparent that this is a braver, more headstrong Lanterns on the Lake, a band now less about floating on water than racing across land, eager and with points to prove. Often their melancholy necessarily turns to action. “Fractured lives like faultlines, unto the breach my friends if you will” is Wilde’s call to arms on ‘Faultlines’, a critique of austerity, as the band turn in a cavalry charge with her voice as the clarion call.

          Wilde's lyrics also shudder with evocative and often surprisingly dark imagery in songs that attempt to understand the world around her, built from charged moments of universal insight. “There is a sense of the need to connect to something; the need to find meaning,” she says of the material. “There’s such frustrating injustice in the world, yet this feels like a time of disconnection where we’re encouraged to celebrate the shallow side of culture. This record carries that sense of yearning for something greater.”

          This gives Beings immediacy, depth and resonance as it touches on community, love, culture, politics and self-examination, and our own place and limitations within each. “I want to walk with the brave, give me a good day, I want to feel human” Wilde sings on the graceful ‘I’ll Stall Them’, exploring the importance of connection, kinship and reconciliation.

          Beings is the engrossing product of a band operating in total harmony to the point where their music creates its own idiosyncratic world whilst also distilling outside concerns into it. The horizons open to Lanterns on the Lake are now as broad as the sweep of these beautiful songs.

          STAFF COMMENTS

          Andy says: Starker, darker but still really beutiful, the Lanterns'third is an engrossing listen.


          Latest Pre-Sales

          158 NEW ITEMS

          E-newsletter —
          Sign up
          Back to top