As I walk down a quaint mews street in central London, searching for the address I was given to meet Declan McKenna at, my phone starts playing “Brazil.” It’s not a total surprise, as I had shuffled his discography on the way to our interview, but I am instantly struck by a new flutter of nerves. Like many others, I can close my eyes and picture the time in my life when this song was my soundtrack. I’m in my high school bedroom, getting ready for school, pressing replay over and over again. And now, almost a decade later, I have the opportunity to talk to the artist behind its magic about his even more exciting future.

I knock on the door and am brought upstairs to where McKenna is going over merchandise for his new album, What Happened to the Beach?. He moves aside some piles of posters he’s in the process of signing, and we take a seat. He’s back in the UK after spending time working in LA, and he seems happy about it. “I was there for a while, but the longest I stayed was like two months. I don’t think I could last much longer than that in LA.” He laughs.

Rising to fame after winning Glastonbury Festival’s 2015 Emerging Talent Competition and self-releasing his protest song “Brazil,” a track that criticised FIFA and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, McKenna has gone on to release two studio albums: What Do You Think About The Car (2017) and Zeros (2020). Now, still in his mid twenties, he releases his third, most experimental project to date: What Happened to the Beach?.

A funky, stylistic album with off-kilter guitar chords, infectious grooves, and a focus on pure soundscapes over narrative storytelling, What Happened to the Beach? shows McKenna stepping away from preconceived notions of what his songs should sound like, and into his own world of music.

What started in “weird little demos” from the isolation and intimacy of his home sprouted into something fresh and cohesive in sunny California, and is perhaps the most authentic one that McKenna has built. Bouncing off of ideas with collaborators, letting intuition drive the direction of each track, and focusing on creating music that he himself would want to listen to, McKenna was “really doing music in a way that suits [him].”

“Working in the music world, you wind up with friends who are either from LA or wind up living in LA at some point,” the English artist explains about his decision to pick up all of his ideas and make the project on the West Coast. “And there were producers and artists who I’ve been meaning to collaborate with. It had been a while stuck at home, having all these demos and just driving myself crazy feeling like I was doing something, but not really sure how it was going to materialise into a full project. So I got an Airbnb and I was like, ‘maybe I’ll find people to work with, but at the very least, I’m just going to be by myself working on this music.’” It turns out, all he needed was to find the one right person: Gianluca Buccellati.

The first producer McKenna worked with while in LA, Buccellati became his primary collaborator, producing the entire project with him and helping to steer his creativity in a way that felt new and exciting. Studio session after studio session, the two bounced ideas off of one another and pushed each other until they developed a completely one-of-a-kind sonic identity. “We just started and we didn’t really stop,” he tells me. “We were just constantly building and building. It wasn’t like I went into the studio with ten songs and was like, ‘right, these are my songs, this is my album. Let’s just spend two weeks on it.’ It was spending a long time just gradually building on this whole world.”

“Collaborating is something that has just become more prevalent, really, in the whole creative process for me. It’s an essential part of it. There’s no great project that doesn’t involve a large amount of collaboration, really,” he tells me confidently. “And that doesn’t mean there can’t be intimate moments that are practically all based off of my ideas. There’s some that are quite true to the demos that I originally made. But the vision as a whole — and for the majority of the songs as well — having someone to completely bounce off was really important. And then we brought a lot of other friends who were either living in LA or passing through onto the record. There’s a really fun party going on.”

After countless ideas and different combinations of tracks that could steer the album in a multitude of different directions – from more alt-pop to electronic – McKenna put together a project that felt like the perfect transition from what he is known for to what is yet to come.

Where his past music has often come with a clear political message or a concise story, this project pushed McKenna out of his comfort zone as he challenged himself to work in a different way. “The main decision that I made with it, which was a gradual thing, was that it was going to be okay to have the songs be somewhat less complete than before, in a way,” he explains. “They don’t have to be a full story in their own right or carry a really serious message. We could work on pure inspiration in the moment and let that be the song if it felt right, rather than overthinking it.”

Some of his main musical influences — Paul McCartney and Unknown Mortal Orchestra — are artists that create abstract tracks, focusing equally or more so on the sound than its message. As a result, he’s always worked in a similar way. However, it wasn’t until he met Buccellati that he thought there was space for him to further explore that side to his artistry. “I feel like when my career became music, I just felt like that wasn’t proper music or I couldn’t do that or something like that. Even though I was still making those ideas, they just sat around for a long time,” he explains. “It was just gaining confidence and realising that half of the music I listen to is like that and that sometimes I just don’t want to beat the same ideas into the ground over and over again. I want to be able to have a dynamic career and be able to jump into the different things that are in my music and that’s inspiring me at different times.”

“I think part of your integrity as an artist is your ability to evolve and change and move forward and go back and explore ideas at a time that feels right. At this time, music became a sort of hobby for me, almost like I was a teenager again. So I was leaning into music just being a release and it being that for the audience as well,” he continues. “And working with Gianluca [Buccellati], that’s just totally his attitude towards music. His whole ethos is, ‘we’re making something to make people feel like a badass, to make people feel good.’ And I’ve really bought into that making this album because I just felt like there’s more for me to give. It doesn’t mean that it’s the end of an era as such, but there’s definitely new beginnings.“

“I still feel like when I’ve taken the chance to speak out about different issues, I’ve tried to do it in a way that I actually think does something. At least at the time I released it, I felt like it was going to do something, going to reach people and sort of unify people on an issue. But I was just struggling to see the space for me to do that right now. It is partially because of the pressure of people being like, what’s he going to say next?” He pauses. “It’s not that I’ll never have anything else to contribute in that sense. It just feels like a different time. I’ve expressed a lot of opinions already. With this one, I hope to give people a bit of solace in what is still a quite difficult time. I’m just coming at it from a different angle now.”

It is the “incomplete” feeling of certain tracks that gives them their energy and — perhaps ironically — makes them as thought-provoking as their political counterparts. “I think I’ve shaken a lot of habits with music. Compared to other albums, when I pick up a guitar to play on a track, there’s almost no normal guitar chords, bar chords, which I used to reach for all the time. Realising that the composition on a record can be so many different things and not reaching for the same elements that I’ve previously reached for has just helped it feel a lot fresher.”

If deciding on the tracklist for the album was difficult, picking the lead singles was no less so. “I was like, ‘do I want to give away the whole sound of this album or not?’” He smiles. For a project as fresh and exciting as What Happened to the Beach?, it was a balance between sharing enough about the sound to get the fans excited without divulging the entire surprise. In the end, it was “Sympathy” and “Nothing Works” that led the release, teasing listeners and drawing them into this new world. “There’s something much more mellow about a lot of the tracks on the album, but ‘Sympathy’ as the first single made sense,” he shares, explaining that as the most “demanding song” on the album it felt right — “[making] people face the new era immediately, even though it doesn’t really give away the full picture.” While tracks such as “Elevator Hum” or “Mulholland’s Dinner and Wine” might be more representative of the album as a whole, “Sympathy” came in with a bang while simultaneously easing listeners into the new era.

Then there’s “Nothing Works”, the last song written for the album and one that feels a bit more familiar to the McKenna we’ve come to know — bringing listeners into the journey and letting them experience his process from his past to his future. “We’ve just been gradually going into the murky water of the new sound,” he tells me. And with these singles, he invites his fans into the water with him.

It’s difficult to pick a favourite track on the album, but the opening song “Wobble” is one that McKenna is particularly proud of. “I really like when I feel like I’ve done something with the guitar, like made a song that feels like a really special moment even when I just play it acoustically. That one just felt like I’d made the kind of guitar part that I’d listen to over and over again if someone else wrote it. I like that and how the melody sort of goes with it. It feels kind of goofy, but also kind of serious as well. It takes you right into the action.”

He also mentions “Mulholland’s Dinner and Wine”, for how emblematic it is for the project: “It’s so far away from what I had done before and I really let go to make that one. And that is the whole spirit of the album — just leaning into stuff being super characterful and fun.”

“But I could kind of have a reason why every song on the album is my most proud, because I just feel really excited about it and at different times I want to listen to different parts of it, you know?” I think that’s exactly how it should feel, I consider out loud. He pauses. “It’s a good thing… I’m not sick of it yet.”

Stream What Happened to the Beach? now…