On their sophomore album, Bless You & Be Well, Black Country band Chartreuse dig deep into the darkest emotions in search of answers. Whether it was what they were looking for or not, the quintet certainly found something of worth.
For years, Chartreuse have quietly been one of the best bands in the country. The Black Country four piece – made up of brothers Mike and Rory Wagstaff, Hattie Wilson, Rory’s partner, and Perry Lovering, Hattie’s childhood friend – have an inherent intimacy to their bond that effortlessly relays itself onto their tender, reflective and technically delicious sound. Since early now-folklore classics like “Three Days” and “Keep Checking up on Me”, the band have developed and refined, overcoming personal struggles to make their best body of work yet – new album, Bless You & Be Well.
After health obstacles and personal losses had plagued the past period of the members’ lives, the four members needed Chartreuse more than ever. They needed to step away, take a breath, and heal through their craft. To create their sophomore album, the band took shelter in isolation, taking a trip to rural Icelandic studio Flóki; at the nation’s tip, a five-hour drive from the capital Reykjavík. Here, they learnt, they wrote, and they found a direction within themselves.
The resulting album is a truly wonderful opus. The band’s melting pot of jazz, soul and indie rock is more focused yet fluid than ever before, with greater incorporations of idiosyncratic production choices, leaning into electronic elements and flee-flowing compositional structures. Having self-produced their 2023 debut album, Morning Ritual, for this second full-length the quintet enlisted The Smile producer Sam Petts Davies and engineer Oli Middleton, who bring out the best in the band’s unique and subtly thrilling sonics.
Lyrically personal, it’s best you listen closely rather than read thematic overtones from an outsider. Below, we hear from Hattie, pianist and vocalist, on the band’s deep-seated connection, overcoming life’s anguish, and the making and meaning of this dazzling new album.
Listen to the album…
Read the exclusive interview…
How did Chartreuse first come about? What’s the band’s origins?
We started in 2014 and are all from the Black Country in the West Midlands. Mike and Hattie started writing a few tracks together, and after a couple of weeks, we enlisted the help of Rory on drums and Perry on bass, and we’ve been making music together ever since!
The four of you have deep-seated connections through family ties, long-term relationships, life-long friendships. How does this aid in your ability to create cohesive music that represents you as individuals and as a group?
It allows us all to be really open with each other. If someone’s not sure about something, we can say it and move on or try another idea. We’ve been playing together for so long now that we kind of always know what each of us likes, so that makes the process easier. We have individual writing styles that seem to just make sense when brought into a band setting. It always ends up sounding like Chartreuse.
What lies at the core of the Chartreuse essence?
At our core, we’re collaborators. We’ve been that way since the day we started playing together. All of us being super involved in every aspect of the band.
What makes Chartreuse, Chartreuse?
That’s a tough one… it sounds cliché and kind of touches on what was earlier mentioned, but whatever we write usually just ends up sounding like us in some form, so we try not to think about it too much. Potentially how long we’ve played with each other informs our sound. The relationships in the band allow us to be a bit more delicate and understanding of each other, which would feed into the chartreuse world.
How do you reflect on your discography to date? We’ve been fans since “Three Days”.
Thank you! We’re still fond of the older songs although we’ve naturally just grown a little and it’s interesting to hear in the lyrics what was important to us at that time. It’s great to play some of the older tracks live though. Seeing people connect to them is always cool.
Congratulations on your new album! How are you feeling about the release?
We’re really excited, it feels like a real step up from our last record in terms of where we pushed ourselves as musicians. People seem to be enjoying the releases so far which is really positive, and we’ve been rehearsing them ready for our tour at the end of the year which has been really rewarding hearing them come to life in a different way. So yeah, we can’t wait to get it out there.
Why is the album called Bless You & Be Well?
It’s the oldest song on there, with Mike writing it like nine years ago. It just felt like a nice tagline to encapsulate the feelings on the record. It feels intriguing, and there’s a lot of personal songs on there. Being framed by the words Bless You & Be Well feels quite comforting to us.
For the making of the album, you took a two-week trip to rural Iceland. How was that experience? How did it influence the process and characteristics of the record?
It was insane! There were beautiful landscapes everywhere we looked, and it was nice to lock ourselves away for those two weeks and focus on the recording. It was good to have no distractions. We had a lot going on at the time personally, so to go to rural Iceland and work on the album was perfect timing really. It felt like the landscape and that focused way of working fed into the album for sure.
How is the album a progression of your debut 2023 full-length Morning Ritual?
We set out to write lighter songs. We didn’t mind exploring difficult topics lyrically, but sonically we wanted the record to feel different; more hopeful and also to have more fun playing it live, which we feel we’ve achieved!
You self-produced the debut but brought Sam Petts-Davies on board for this project. What was the reasoning for this?
Mike was the producer on the first record and that meant he was trying to be a musician and a producer which just led to burn out. We were treating the recording of it like a 9-5 job around our other normal jobs and it felt like it just went on forever. So when conversations started happening about producers we jumped at the chance. Sam’s wicked, he pushed us really hard to try things and move quickly through ideas which worked really well for us.
What informed the sonic decisions across the work?
Before going into writing the album, we all said we wanted the record to have a bit more of a natural feel to it. We wanted it to be more “bandy” with guitar, bass, drums & keys and then work up from there. We got a lot of that feeling from recording the parts live together in the same room, which we’ve not really had the opportunity to do before. The studio in Iceland was well kitted out, but we consciously only used a handful of gear across the whole album as we wanted it to feel connected and part of the same world.
The record was born from and tackles deep, complex issues. How did you navigate the emotional spectrum so impressively, resulting in such potent and relatable songwriting?
That’s a very nice way of putting it. It felt natural to make sure we were writing about these tough topics if we felt we wanted to, but also being true to what the songs needed. You sometimes have to put your emotions aside for a minute to understand sonically how something should sound, and we really tried to do that here. Because we moved so quickly, there wasn’t much time to dwell on the emotions until we came to put vocals down, and that’s when you need the emotion from the song to come out.
Aside from the album, what’s to come this year from you?
We have some festivals this summer, plus a handful of in-stores to celebrate the album release! Then we’re out on a headline tour across the UK with Moreish Idols supporting, then straight back into writing for the next project!
