Goat Girl: “We wanted to come back with a slap in the face”

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From guttural screams to nut-mix-fuelled cow moos, Goat Girl’s ‘Below The Waste’ is a testament to the band’s growth, resilience, and unwavering trust in each other.

Words: Rebecca Kesteven.
Photos: Holly Whittaker.

‘Below The Waste’ has been a long time in the making. Pieced together like a collage, the album is a snapshot of life experiences, world events, relationships, and hardships. It’s full of metaphors about the ugliness of the oppressive structures of modern life, of stripping away barriers and taking trips down the uncanny valley. For the South London trio consisting of Rosy Jones, Lottie Pendlebury and Holly Mullineaux, it’s also representative of them entering their boldest and most powerful era so far. 

Hopping on a Zoom call early on a Thursday afternoon, there’s a wholesome vibe from the offset as Lottie and Rosy introduce their dog, who remains to be stroked just offscreen for the entire call. The band have just returned from a small UK underplay tour. “It was fun to get out and remember that we have people that support us and our music,” Lottie explains. “We’ve just been doing quite a lot of supports, which is also really fun, but there’s something quite different and special about performing to your fans. We met such nice people along the way, and played in some really beautiful venues” – a chapel in Hebden Bridge being one of the highlights.

Goat Girl made their official return in February with the release of the dissonant, tension-filled lead single ‘ride around’. In the (comical albeit quite unsettling) music video, Rosy is a priest, Holly a ‘karaoke hun’, and Lottie turns into a giant (“She’s shrunk back down finally!” jokes Rosy). “I feel like, because of the song’s immediacy, we wanted to come back with a slap-in-the-face kind of thing,” Rosy explains. “For me, it felt like it encapsulated quite a lot of the elements of the album –  the vulnerability, the heaviness, the uncanniness, the joy.” Collaborating with close friends Luke Kulukundis and Matro Villanueva Brandt of Foreign Body Productions, who directed and produced it, the band brainstormed their pretty extreme ideas and left the duo to create their own interpretation. “The lyrics talk about stripping away social expectations and trying to be yourself, meet new people, embrace those connections, and form your true self – so they came up with this idea to have this building gang of freaks,” Holly laughs. “It was so fun to do.”

“I’d never heard the animals so quiet! They moo-d in the end”

Lottie Pendlebury

A mishmash of sounds, including voice notes, samples, dense orchestral arrangements, miscellaneous objects used in unconventional ways, animal noises, and blood-curdling screams are heard in ‘Below The Waste’, and the band also experimented with a tonne of different instruments. Some of which they’d never even played before. “Some songs had, like, hundreds of tracks on them! We added so many things,” Rosy explains. “We added quite a lot in Ireland [Most instrumentation was tracked over a 10-day stint at Hellfire Studios]. We had a banjo, really fat synths, the taishigoto – which was a really fun one to play, but also quite tedious. We got Reuben, who plays synth with us, to learn the cello. Lottie played violin on pretty much every song, Lottie’s dad played viola, and then we got our friend Alex to play flute and clarinet. We really wanted a bass clarinet, so we got that as well. It was just sort of like getting everyone involved.”

“Me and Rosy also decided to play strings, as well,” Holly says. “There’s a lot of trying-to-do-orchestral or hi-fi things in a lo-fi way on the album. I think it’s cool to have the sound of something being ‘done’ correctly, but we didn’t want it to sound polished and perfect all the time.” Lottie agrees, adding: “Sometimes we really had to strip back in order for the point of the song to shine through.” 

From opener ‘reprise”s recordings of rain and crackling tube sounds (courtesy of co-producer Spud (Lankum and black midi)’s “archive of weird noises”), to the chirping birds of Cornwall in ‘prelude’ – the band certainly made sure to make use of their pastoral recording locations, even getting the animals involved. “We were recording on a farm,” says Lottie, “so it felt it was pretty important to include the environment we were in on the record because I think it made a big impact on how we played together, and so it was a big thing to reference it. We wanted to record outside for the purpose of getting all the animals in the background, and I’d never heard the animals so quiet! None of them were making any noise, so Spud decided to shake some nut mix at them, and they moo-d in the end.”

“He was literally running with this nut mix,” Rosy laughs – and Holly laughs too. “It was so funny how it all started, because Spud didn’t actually communicate to us that he was going on this mission to make the cows moo. We were all just shuffling about on the grass, and next thing you know, Spud’s running halfway down the field shaking these nuts! It’s quite funny because he’s quite quiet, so when he does something mad you’re like, ‘What are you doing?!’”

With Spud as co-producer, ‘Below The Waste’ marks the first time Goat Girl have taken the reins on the production side. “I feel like Spud was the perfect person to work with. He’s so humble, and really just nurtured what we wanted and gave us loads of space to do what we wanted to do,” Rosy says. “He’d just be listening a lot of the time… like a safe pair of hands whilst we figured out whatever mad thing we wanted to achieve.” 

“I remember I said I wanted a sound that was like a metallic spinning sound,” recalls Lottie, “and he’s really good at just knowing exactly what you mean and just going and finding that material – finding a way to set up a mic so that it sounds right, and basically just bringing those ideas to life.” There’s a song on the album dedicated to him – a 30 second moment called ‘s.m.o.g.’ – Spud’s.Moment.Of.Glory. 

In addition to their collaboration with Spud, Goat Girl pen ‘Below The Waste’ as the most collaborative they’ve ever been as a band, too. Songs like ‘play it down’ went through a series of different iterations – from prog rock, to psychedelic solos, to a sombre ballad – and it was by trying it out with the band that it developed into its final form. “We’re not afraid to completely revert back to the beginning of a song again, take everything out, and just start from scratch. I think that’s a part of the writing process,” says Lottie. “We all had a thought and say over basically every part of it,” Holly explains. “There’s a lot of trust between us, and there was a lot of consulting each other to make sure everyone was happy.. We all just know each other more now. We know each other’s strengths. We’re lucky to have that.” Lottie agrees, “I think it’s evident when musicians aren’t playing what they feel is natural to them, there’s an uncomfortability there.”

Trust was important in lots of ways in the making of the album, they explain. Lyrical subject matter on ‘Below The Waste’ has its obscure and witty moments, but struggles with addiction, identity, and mental health were also major touchstones inspired by the band’s personal experiences. “It’s still scary,” says Rosy, “even when you’re as good friends as we are… I feel like this record was hard to write. We’ve been writing it since, like, 2020; it’s taken us a really long time. A lot happened to us personally – it definitely wasn’t easy.” 

Holly pinpoints a part of the album’s creation that was particularly emotional in this respect, the recording of ‘take it away’ – a song she says pretty much wrote itself. Encapsulating the desperation she felt about Rosy’s struggles against addiction, Holly explains that “it was so emotional to do it together. I put down the keys and sang, and the others just did whatever – which is what I wanted to happen. I wanted everyone to just do what they felt. It was just done in that moment, and it felt really emotional watching us all being there together having overcome such a difficult time. Then, on top of that, when we did the choir, Rosy’s family came down and sang. That was really special.”

Although it was scary, the band also make a point to say how cathartic writing the album was in response to the hardships they’ve all been through the past few years. “Finding our voices through guttural screams was very cathartic,” Rosy says. “There’s a lot more guttural sounds coming from our vocals on this record (like ‘tcnc’ and closing odyssey track ‘wasting’), which was really fun to explore. We were just left to our own devices for the vocals and then, doing the backing vocals, we all just started screaming. We couldn’t stop. And now we’re shouting and screaming live, and it’s quite healing.” “It’s not something that came naturally,” explains Holly, “but it feels really good. It’s empowering.”

On the album’s name, ‘Below The Waste’, the band explain it initially came into fruition from joking around (“We just chat a lot of shit, basically”) – but it’s also a bit of a double entendre. “We linked it to a lot of the themes of pulling back and delving underneath the surface. The different meanings that ‘waste’ has, and how it’s applicable to lots of things,” says Holly. And beneath the weeds, what’s uncovered in ‘Below The Waste’ is the beauty of genuine connection. Despite the all-consuming power of nature relentlessly sinking, swallowing, growing, pervading, the album reminds us to cherish the only constant we have: each other. 

Goat Girl’s new album ‘Below The Waste’ is out 7th June. Taken from the June 2024 issue of Dork.

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