Share

What’s It Like Over There?, the brilliant third album by Circa Waves, is the record that nearly never was. Frontman Kieran Shudall was struggling for inspiration when he stumbled upon a notebook filled with scribblings in the band’s lock-up, discovering page after page of lyrical ideas and short story sketches that he’d written in a half-drunk, half-sleep deprived state whilst the band were touring across America on the previous autumn. It gave Shudall the shot in the arm he needed to get his band’s third album underway. The fuse was lit, and the disconnect of time and distance that Shudall felt as he scanned through the notebook, reading his own work whilst feeling like it was written by another person, would become the idea out of which What’s It Like Over There? would grow. It’s a record that fuses the visceral thrill of rock music with a slick pop sound, its themes of modern ennui, emotional fragility and all the inside-outs and upside-downs of relationships making it a record that could only have been made now.