Genre-bending duo lavender unveil their quietly brilliant debut album, we’re having a barn dance, and delve into its track-list in a Wonderland exclusive. 

Sonically subtle, almost subaqueous, lavender’s musical disposition fulfils its own intimate landscape. From the early promise of 2022 EP “all will be well”, the British duo have now today unveiled a tender and intricate debut album. we’re having a barn dance is ethereal folk, heart-rendering songwriting that depict the highs and lows of a year in the pair’s life, and glistening moments of musical nous. 

Unassuming yet toweringly creative, the debut album from lavender is well worth devouring over a sunny sunset. The talented twosome dig deep into the work for Wonderland’s latest track-by-track.

Listen to the album…

Read the track-by-track…

“lowlight:slowlight”

The opener! If the album is a sort of journey to locate and return to a multi-faceted/ever changing concept of home, this track is the prelude and the departing on that journey. Leaving with a pledge of reassurance and devotion. 

The track began with Adam recording a rough demo in his bedroom and sending it to Oskar shortly before leaving to cycle to meet Oskar and go to the studio. Whilst waiting, Oskar chopped up the demo and sampled it into a beat which he played to Adam when he arrived. Both really excited by the track we rushed to our old studio playing the beat Osk had made on a bluetooth speaker on the way. As soon as we got there the song just fell out and we took that beat and layered all the guitars, bass and vocals on top. One of those ones that just fell all together in a flash! 

Was the first time we’d properly experimented with sampling ourselves, and you can hear the above process in the track with the initial demo Adam recorded serving as the intro to the track and then evolving into post-sampling section. Remember cycling home after at like 4am after the first studio session and putting up an instagram story saying ‘we just made the best song we’ve ever made’. It was another level of feeling for us in the creation and kind of set a new bar for us to try and achieve that feeling going forward! From then we knew we wanted it to be the first track on our next body of work, starting a new chapter! 

“ifnotnowthen(when)”

This one is a beast buckle up for it. Definitely one of the most audacious tracks on the album. The song was created over a period of a few months that simultaneously coincided with a lot of life changes, which the song kind of evolved at the same time. As a result it kinda dramatically maps a transition from wide-eyed optimism through doubt and resolution into turmoil. The bulk of the writing/recording took place in the South of France where we were lucky enough to spend a week. Looking back it’s so funny because it was the most beautiful place we’d ever been, but we literally barely left the room we were recording in (which is pictured in the gatefold of the vinyl and some of the music videos). I think we went on one walk to the river, and one trip to town to get pizza and supplies. Other than that we were just locked in.

We then took it back to our studio in Limehouse to finesse it and polish it up. With so much going on in the track it was such a challenge to get it feeling right – with only the intended amount of chaos. There ended up being something like 290 layers of audio in this track, and we couldn’t run it on our laptop without it crashing…. And so many bounces and versions, we used to name them after whatever we’d eaten that day (I remember ‘lasagne mix’, ‘Caribbean platter mix’ and one was just ‘beans mix’). The last piece of the puzzle was the final section which we’d been working on for weeks and just couldn’t put our fingers on what wasn’t feeling right, then a slight rhythmic change in the sample (with it alternating between one swung phrase and one straight phrase) and it all just fell into place, and then I remember the most celebratory drive back from the studio blasting it from the car and shouting to each other ‘THIS IS WHY WE DO THIS’. One of the best memories from making the album.

“you&me”

you&me holds a really important place in the album, both for us as a personal mantra and in the chronology of the story of our experiences. In some ways it’s a sequel to “ifnotnow”, and in others it’s a prequel to barn dance. It’s built around a sample from the same track as “ifnotnowthen(when)”, but takes another segment and repeats mantras that we’d often fall back to during the ups and downs of the period in which we wrote the album. The second half of the track the sample drops out and it’s just Oskar’s swirling manipulations of Adam’s voice and guitars. This part also features Oskar’s favourite harmony on the album see if you can guess. It’s a recognition and reaffirmation that our relationship as friends and collaborators is the only thing we can control, and is the foundation of whatever this thing becomes.

“we’re having a barn dance”

I don’t think we ever set out to make a ‘title track’ for the album, because I guess in truth we didn’t really set out to make an album, but this was one of the first demos we make that felt like we’d hit on something new and was the beginning of a wider project. We’d been kicked out of our previous studio and ended up taking some time out of London in the early spring and set up a makeshift studio in a barn.

The track started with resampling parts of audio we’d used on other demos at the time, mangling them through our tascam tape machine and then chopping them up into the swirling synth parts that make up the bed of the track. Over that we added layers of a mixture of percussive elements (some recordings of using the room for stomp kick sounds, claps and clicks, and some midi drums). Once we had that together, the guitar and bass parts came pretty quickly.

The song is kind of a cathartic reflection on rhythms in cycles and frustrations, the shifting of dance partners and the gruelling nature of the dance.

“Cowboy Pancakes”

As with almost every track on the album, this was a demo that arose during that year(ish) long time period we were writing and recording the album. It stems from an old Hawaiian folk tune and was originally a sample of a Ry Cooder version that we couldn’t clear, instead we took a new approach by Adam recording a cover of the song, and then Oskar re-sampling the same parts to re-create the track in a way that ended up feeling fresher and heartier than the original demo. It’s a similar mosaic style sampling technique that we’ve used in a few other places on the album, taking smaller parts from across a record and re-ordering/stitching them together to express something with new meaning.

This track specifically, and the re-melding of the sample, speaks to close personal friendships, and an awareness of the fact that friends might be struggling, but a crippling ability to vocalise that concern. The duality of awareness and guilt of helplessness.

“lowlight (reprise)”

This track existed as a concept long before we even began to create it. It was born in the decision process that if we were to have lowlight:slowlight on the album, in the interest of this body of work being a true honest piece, there would have to be a reprise. From that point on it became a real blocker, I think at that stage we thought it was probably going to be an EP and it would be the 6th final track and the other 5 were done. It took 3 months of trying and failing to write it properly and have it feel right – exclusively working on it not writing anything else. Then it was November – we were living together at this point – one night Oskar resampled a part of lowlight:slowlight, ran it through tape and did some magic to it, came into Adam’s room and played it and we both entered the zone and the form of the song finally flowed out in one session. 

The lyrics were the last hurdle with parts of it still not feeling right/not quite being in the right place to write it. It was mid-december and it was snowing and to force himself to finish the writing Adam went on a big walk without a coat and said he wasn’t coming back until he’d got it. Was out and about for about 5 hours (did something like 25000 steps) and then came back freezing cold and definitely getting ill and recorded the vocals – which i think you can hear in some of the slightly flimsier/pitchy bits of the vocal take but hey that’s how it goes. It had definitely been a dam of sorts, because as soon as it was finished all these other songs poured out and it went from being an EP to having the first iteration of the album done within that week.

“Missing You”

This track is a bit of a turning point in the album journey. It’s the start of the B-side of the record. Whereas on the A-side there’s a lot of uncertainty and exploring a lot of questions, this track marked an embrace of uncertainty and acceptance that not all questions have to be answered with urgency and some can remain unanswered. So even though there’s pain and uncertainty in the song there’s just a dash of optimism about the whole thing.

The track is built around a sample from The Independents ‘Baby, I’ve Been Missing You’, which Oskar came across while stuck in London traffic listening to (our favourite radio station) Supreme FM (number 1 in North London!!). It’s probably the most direct sample on the album and repurposes the refrain from the original to express something we were both drawn to at the time for different reasons. For Oskar, that repurposed refrain is a metaphorical address to himself, celebrating a return to yourself after a down period of blueness. A recognition of work to come but a taste of life on the other side and an embrace of the uncertainty. For Adam it spoke to a contrast of companionship and isolation which was coming to a head. 

It’s a track (that by our own standards) was finished pretty quickly from its inception to completion. From flipping the sample to taking the beat into our studio behind the Lidl in Limehouse, the core of the track was done in a matter of weeks. The verses took a little longer to piece together as it felt a little more direct and addressing, and Adam was tied up with the lyrics for a while thinking about honesty & privacy – especially when it’s not always just your story to tell! Then we were in Sweden together and Oskar gave some great advice in that I can code things in references that only I – and whoever it concerns – need to understand and that unlocked the rest of the writing and allowed more unfiltered honesty. That process also helped crystallise a lot of bigger thoughts into little pockets of understanding. 

“way over”

Ah way over. We love this one. We had the beat of this one lying around for ages, and played a version of it in some early live shows, always knew we wanted to do something with it but it never came. And it just fell right into the album at the right time perfectly. 

Oskar made the beat in lockdown, and I went nuts I remember listening to it 50 times non-stop being like he’s a genius what IS THIS. Then spent hours layering vocals and guitars, and even got my housemates at the time (shoutout Sarah, Saritha, Tom & Molly) to sing on it to get a choir vibe going. 

Then it just lived as that for ages without any verse. And even when we played it live every time Oskar would be like ‘make sure you write that verse for it’ and I’d be like ‘I will I will’ and then obviously wouldn’t and would just kinda fumble through that part. We then played it at a co-headline show we did with Ted Jasper at Peckham Audio and it was a show in the midst of complete personal chaos, and I’d promised to write the verse and sure enough hadn’t and just ended up improvising again and it went fine but completely forgot about it. Then fast forward to the late stages of album writing and we’re sat in a pub at a Xmas party a few pints deep, having just decided we were actually going to make this body of work into an album and both were like ‘way over’ would be the perfect vibe and sentiment to follow missing you. The next day I remembered our manager Andy had taken a video of when we did way over from the show, and thought I’d watch it for inspiration – and he just happened to capture just that improvised verse part that we did and I watched it and cried and was like oh that’s exactly it. The lyrics and also Oskar’s bass part was also improvised and he played something he’d never done before and it was just perfect. And then bam recorded it that day – done. 

“cowboynowboy/life in the quadrant”

Cowboynowboy was such a quick one. I think this was made in 45 minutes and remained unchanged from that. Sometimes when recording something for the album I used to get a little frozen and in my head with it ‘like okay this is going to be THE guitar part it better be good’ and get a little too analytical (which isn’t a space to be able to play something with feeling). So this song was actually born out of kind of a loosening-up exercise before recording vocals for way over, to just write and record something from scratch with no expectation. And this song just came out! I think it was inspired by a big walk with a very close friend earlier that day talking about the joys to be found in different stages of life, having found ourselves in new ones. It was also the same day that Oskar had made the beat for cowboy pancakes and I’d just listened to that track before going on a walk and was HYPED. hence the cowboy reference in the title cause they were made on the same day. I remember putting them in a playlist called ‘just a couple cowboys’.

“harlequin/los días azules”

This one is the concluuuuusion, it’s a real victory lap. It’s the last track we made for the album and serves as a reflection on the end of a chapter, simultaneously looking back with fondness and forward with optimism.

The track’s title is a reference to Picasso’s ‘blue era’ and his representation of the outsider as ‘the harlequin’. For Oskar, moving out of London to be able to afford working full time on the album, isolating himself from friends in doing so. For Adam, experiencing a process of self-reckoning through a long period of turbulence. In a production sense, again the mosaicing of samples, sliced from across the record to try and re-imagine lyrics, chords and sentiments also felt like a parallel to Braque and Piscasso perspectives. We often joke that this album is lavender’s ‘blue era’ so it all tied it up nicely as a conclusion.

The original conclusion of the album was called ‘bill walton:win or lose’ (named after NBA legend Bill Walton), but as these things have a way of going, when we tried to clear the sample for that track we got rejected and had to find a new way of concluding the album. Bill’s love of the game never faltered amid his recurrent and constant injuries. That along with his love of music (particularly The Grateful Dead), and his cerebral ability to make players around him better through his passing, made Bill a perfect spokesperson for the album’s themes. On the day we really cracked harlequin wide open and decided it was going to close out the album, Oskar texted me a few hours after the session saying ‘RIP Bill Walton’ and I replied ‘yeah yeah harlequin is the one!’ and he replied ‘no, the real Bill Walton died’. We wanted to keep a bit of that sentiment alive and attached to the finale of the album, so the voice that you hear at the end is Bill’s.