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Irish foursome PILLOW QUEENS explore love, loss, and catharsis with their third album, ‘Name Your Sorrow’. Check out our latest Upset cover story.
Words: Linsey Teggert.
Photos: Martyna Bannister.
In the fickle music industry world, third albums are often underrated and overlooked. We make so much of the hyped-up debut, and that legendary ‘difficult second record’, but it’s that third time around, where uncertainties are shed and the shackles of expectation loosen, that can really show what an artist is made of. With their stunning third record, ‘Name Your Sorrow’, Pillow Queens go from being one of the most acclaimed bands of recent years to truly cementing their status as an astonishing force to be reckoned with.
“We’ve definitely felt a shift this time around,” explains lead vocalist and bass/guitar player Pamela Connolly. “It’s a different beast every time, but when we released our first album, the press around it tended to be, ‘Hey, there’s this band of four queer women from Ireland’, whereas once you get to your third record, that rhetoric has already been done, you need to escape that focus on who you are and for the focus to be on what the music is actually like.”
“We’ve found a lot of the questions we’re being asked are lyrics-focused,” adds drummer and vocalist Rachel Lyons. “They’re not necessarily leaning on buzz words like ‘queer indie band’, it’s been more about the music itself, which is always welcome.”
Considering that ‘Name Your Sorrow’ is their third album in under four years and that they worked on the record itself for over a year and a half, it’s pretty incredible what Pillow Queens have managed to achieve in such a short time.
“We never got to experience that first album cycle properly, as we released ‘In Waiting’ during the pandemic,” recalls Pamela. “When it came to our second album, it wasn’t that it was rushed, but it felt like we could have taken more time, but we were trying to ride off that wave and actually tour our first album as well as the second one at the same time. This record felt really natural – there was nothing about it that felt like we needed to get an album out as soon as possible.”
Though there was no sense of urgency, the band decided to do things differently this time around, setting themselves a strict schedule to begin with, working 9-5 in a windowless rehearsal space in Dublin to experiment and lay the foundations for the record.
“We held ourselves accountable, setting working hours,’ says Rachel. “I know that sounds real robotic, but it worked for us. It kind of comes from working full time; when you’re working full time, and your band is your hobby in the evenings, and then you go to having that space where you no longer have a full-time job, you need to fill that space. In Ireland, it’s a very Protestant way of working; it’s that Protestant guilt if you’re not always achieving or doing something.”
“We were actually really excited to do it like that; it was really cathartic,” adds Pamela. “It was almost like a puzzle, putting things together, feeling like stuff was growing organically and figuring ourselves out. Though we were strict with ourselves, we didn’t necessarily have a set timeline for finishing, and I think we came out with more than we usually would because of that.”
After several weeks in a windowless room, the quartet escaped to a rural retreat in County Clare along the Atlantic coastline of Ireland to further immerse themselves in the writing process before moving on to Analogue Catalogue Studio in Northern Ireland to record. There, they enlisted the help of Nashville-based producer Collin Pastore, who has worked with the likes of boygenius and Illuminati Hotties.
“The album gives you a true, straight-forward glimpse of what life is”
Pamela Connolly
“Apparently, he doesn’t record that many bands, but he listened to our demos and really liked us, so we had a meeting, and it was sealed,” says Rachel. “The connection was immediate as well,” Pamela confirms. “We were a little scared to be working with someone new, especially when we knew we were going to be together for the guts of three of four weeks, but we became a little family.
“He had a complete understanding of what we wanted and what it should sound like, and that was so integral to the process. We were so glad to have his brain on board – when you’re working on songs for as long as we did, you need that kind of outside perspective.”
The amount of time the band spent together working on the record, whether in the windowless room in Dublin or the cosy retreat in County Clare, lent itself to a new level of openness in Pillow Queens’ material. Metaphors are replaced with raw emotion, and with the space and time to create, ‘Name Your Sorrow’ was allowed to instinctively be the way it was exactly meant to be. “It just happens that because we were in such close quarters writing together for so long and consecutively, this album was only ever going to sound the way that it did,” states Pamela. “None of us were pushing it in any particular direction – it just is.”
“We’re all incredibly close anyway, but when you’re seeing each other every single day, there was no case of hiding things in the lyrics or manoeuvring around the meanings. We’ve previously tried to work in the emotion but make it a little more coded, but here it’s very much on the surface.”
The main themes of ‘Name Your Sorrow’ are clearly of love, loss and grief, and there’s a lot of catharsis at play. Take ‘Gone’, for example, a track which Rachel says came from “wine o’clock” during their writing retreat. The song details walking away from a failing relationship, brooding and building upon a thumping drum beat before building to a crescendo with passionate dual vocals, creating a sense of pure release.
“When you listen to it, you hear a big break-up, then it goes into life outside that, learning to exist again and doing things you’re not familiar with,” explains Pamela. “Then you fail, and then you grow and learn. It’s not an album that gives you that resolution of a happy ending – that’s not to say there are not parts of the album that have those glimpses of joy – but it gives you a true, straight-forward glimpse of what life is.”
‘Name Your Sorrow’ is an album that is equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting, vulnerable and defiant. When asked if there’s a song that they are particularly proud of, both Pamela and Rachel instantly answer with ‘The Bar’s Closed’. Though they describe it as a “slow-burner, not a crowd-pleaser,’ it’s the perfect example of the careful nuances of Pillow Queens’ sound, with every part of the song perfectly placed to ensure the listener feels every word of Pamela’s haunting vocal. ‘Spine-tingling’ is a phrase that’s sometimes thrown about, but as she mournfully states, “You’re not my life anymore, you’re not my wife,” you feel it like a dagger in your heart.
It seems fitting that a touchstone for this extraordinary record is the work of Irish poet Eavan Boland, specifically her poem ‘Atlantis’, from which the album takes its title. In it, the poet imagines that ‘the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it’. ‘Name Your Sorrow’ conveys this similar sense of searching and longing, of never quite being able to find the right word for the whirlwind of emotions you’re feeling.
“Eavan Boland is very prevalent for Irish people around our age – she comes up in school exams a lot,’ explains Pamela. “After the album was written, we stepped back and looked at what it encompasses. We came across ‘Atlantis’, and it just fits. It’s hard to talk about an album in its whole, so it’s nice to have a little totem to go to for reference: read this poem, and then you’ll get what we mean.” ■
Pillow Queens’ album ‘Name Your Sorrow’ is out 19th April. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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