Quietly eccentric five-piece Moreish Idols take Wonderland through their sensational debut album, All In The Game.
To be progressive is one thing. But to be subtle, and seamless, in doing so is a feat worth celebrating. All In The Game, the Dan Carey-produced, Speedy Wunderground-released debut album from Falmouth-formed five-piece Moreish Idols, is deft and unassumingly complex, built from swirling sax, tricky guitar work, piercing harmonies and impressionist lyricism.
It’s loose and free-wheeling yet assured and sonically articulate, the work of an outfit a near decade into their joint musical escapade with the experience and know-how to chisel a body of songs that truly represent who and what they are. Below, the band delve into the new record, one track after another.
Listen to All In The Game…
Read the track-by-track…
“Ambergrin”
Jude: This track was a slight outsider in the process, it arrived late in the game and it stuck around for a reason we couldn’t quite explain. It felt reminiscent of the Wilco sound we were exploring in [2023 sophomore EP] “Lock Eyes and Collide” but it needed to thrown into the mixer a bit. That’s why we decided to split the song in half to bookend the album. I was imagining a post-chaotic world were the survivors are leftover, exploring the beaches and reaching the same levels of happiness and fulfilment as we do now, which felt like a fitting introduction to the world in All In The Game.
“Railway”
Jude: One of the older tracks in the record, this song has been in our set for a long old time. Like everything else, it’s been through many different versions and has progressed with our evolving taste. I think I wrote the vocals quite near the time we recorded [2022 debut EP] “Float” and I remember really enjoying the half singing half talking pocket, it felt super comfortable to perform. Originally titled “Railway Graveyard” after a desolate train-wreck in Bolivia, I started describing my surroundings which formed into a character based on my older sister.
We could never quite nail a chorus for it but fast forward a couple of years and Tom wrote a beautiful melodic break which switched up the vibe completely, that accompanied by Annie Walton’s cello makes it such a heartfelt part of the album.
“All In The Game”
Tom: This song had a long and winding journey. I’d spent quite a while fine-tuning this very motoric pattern on the guitar that I thought had the potential to be something really cool. It it took me best part of a year really to get to the stage of applying any words.
I’m not sure why it took that long; but I’m convinced sometimes this stuff just reveals itself when the times right, or when you’re in enough of a state of openness to really let the right motions flow. I was nervous to bring it to the practise room, because of how large it’d become in my head. The lyrics had found their way into a very dark and existential place, focusing particularly around a sudden grim reminder of mortality that I’d experienced within my family that year. Luckily as soon as that motoric pattern begin in the studio, the guys found their place within it and the track began to write itself. There was some difficulty in all off us getting the tone right, and the speed, but I like to think it’s these awkward ones to play that have helped us level up as a live band. The final recording is really barely about the original guitar pattern, instead it leans massively on Dylan’s winding sax loops and Judes high guitar harmonies. It feels more like a big swarm of voices now which I think adds to the sort of haunting melancholy of the lyrics.
We chose to debut it at the speedy ten year party at Village Underground, totally underprepared and probably insanely rough around the edges. But it certainly led the way, alongside Dream Pixel (which we also played) in shaping the two main pillars of how our sound was developing around then.
I think we chose it as the album title because it seemed to represent a kind of positive resignation to what the world really is, and maybe what we as people really are. It’s not a bad thing that bad things happen or that life is unpredictable. We just have to sit back and enjoy the show.
“Sundog”
Tom: A sundog is a kind of light phenomenon. I guess throughout this album I’ve been drawn to a lot of existential or metaphysical imagery, and sundogs just felt like some weird alien thing that no one knows about.
The verses sort of focus on the cycle of life and the possible irrelevance we can all feel standing in front of a giant glowing orb or the Grand Canyon.
“Pale Blue Dot”
Jude: PBD is one of the older tracks on the record. We’ve been playing it since our first EP “Float” and it nearly made it onto “Lock Eyes and Collide” before we decided to keep it in the locker. It used to be the centrepiece of our set, weaving back and forth between this spooky ballad in the verses and a really raucous, heavy breakdown.
Sol: Named after the first photograph of the earth taken from space – the first to contain all of humanity in one single frame, Our past and present all in one image. The song for me evokes this feeling of being surrounded by nature, with the uncertainty of its origins , or its future. The fragility of The planet, and the way we are all dancing in a knife’s edge to survive and thrive. Toms says the song is about Ego death accepting we are all human and have flaws. I’ve come to think that it celebrates what could be something as micro as our dependence on the tiniest single called organism, to relying on our own species for our wellbeing. the beauty and brutality of life.
On the penultimate night of recording we hosted a listening party in the studio. After hearing the album all the way through for the first time, we realised we should use our last day in the studio to re-record “Pale Blue Dot”, this time in a much more laid back, acoustic style to give the album a bit of a breather. According to Dan, the following morning, we arrived one by one in the perfect order, literally rebuilding the track from the ground up. The song was close to being finished in just 4 hours.
“Acid”
Sol: “Acid” was a jam that came fully fledged at the end of a day during writing sessions. We discussed a new concept to us and then plugged into the desk pressed record and jammed. We had decided to experiment and write a catchy hooky track which didn’t use chords and to try more of a simple structure, minimal instrumentation and something which should be stripped back lyrically & not be too Song-y. Combining semi-pastiched lyrics inspired by the songs either side of it on the album to bridge side A and B and some surrealism in the vein of “Dream Pixel” or “All In the Game”. ‘Acid Getting on it’ we think encapsulates the feeling of doing something which can be unexpectedly pretty deep and horrifying, ultimately for a bit of fun. You might not realise that have to accept and embrace that the trip, which will inevitably introspectively have a dark moment or two until you end up tangled up in the surreal- ‘dancin’ in the mornin’ grizzled, grinning and probably a little bit disturbed.
“Slouch”
Caspar: This song came about from a jam we nicknamed King Slouch, a name I gave Jude. This theme developed as Jude wrote lyrics inspired by his journey, suffering with and eventually being diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis. Starting off as a laid back song cruising through verses and choruses, in the studio it transformed into a chugging, bass riff driven psych tune which better reflects the resilience in the lyrics.
Jude: “Slouch” nearly checked out in the studio despite being one of our favourites, it never sounded quite right. It wasn’t until we were sound-checking right before recording the rhythm track that Caspar and Sol started jamming a much more krauty version of the bass and drums. I always imagined it being a much more clubby song than the guitar heavy version we were originally playing, almost like CSS and it was such a eureka moment when they started jamming it, they saved the song and (for me) quite an important one!
“Out Of Sight”
Dylan: “Out Of Sight” revolves around a central riff laid down by the sax and guitar. The idea is to find a place of tension and suspension, articulated by the stabbing, somewhat shrill, dissonant and repetitive nature of the riff, and to hold it, pulling it up and out into a crescendo that sucks you through a wormhole right back to where you started. The sax helps build the tension midway through the riff by exhaling erie out of tune harmonic tone clouds. Jude’s moody, lowkey vocals interject after the scene has been fully laid out, sketching images of the worlds generated in the mind of an obsessive compulsive.
“Tiny Flies”
Casp: This song went through many iterations starting off life as a super washed out demo. Over the course of refining before recording, it changed key, mood and gained a breakdown to dubbed out free jazz outro. This song feels like it could have gone in many directions, the left turns we took with the arrangement we feel really add to the more introspective and thoughtful elements within the album.
“Dream Pixel”
Jude: “Dream Pixel” is a track that celebrates the fractals in your subconscious that animate together to paint the most vivid imagery and tell epic stories. We wanted to capture this idea through the production of the track, having mine and Tom’s vocals morphing in and out of each-other to create this unfamiliar, unidentifiable voice. In our dreams, it feels as if we were always one step away from chaos, which is how we got the idea for the unsettling disjointedness in the final breakdown, as if these fragments were falling apart, signifying the lack of control we actually have over our subconscious. Whilst the main body of the song has this kinda Todd Rundgren/Beck feel, the breakdown was partly inspired by the Aussie psych guitar bands like KGLW and Lazy Eyes, but produced in a way that referred to the more jarring aspects of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“Time’s Wasting”
Jude: We wanted “Time’s Wasting” to be a washed out fuzzy memory, kinda reminiscent of the endless cycle in Float. Dan got us to stop playing for a second in “Ambergrin” and to come back in with a low ‘boom’ to record the second half of the track. He wanted it to sound almost as if it was reflecting off a building in the distant completely fucked up and mangled ending on the optimistic chorus chords, hopefully offering an imperfect beacon of hope at the albums conclusion.
