• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

May 22, 2025 By Andy Von Pip Photography by Jack Dwyer

Emerging from the fertile DIY scene of South London, Sandhouse are a duo who treat genre less as a map to be slavishly followed and more as terrain to dip in and out of, something to explore, experiment with, and reshape. Caspar Holloway and Anna Sutherland first crossed paths at university in 2018, and it didn’t take long for their creative worlds to collide.

“We both separately wanted to start a band,” Sutherland recalls. “And weirdly, before we were even introduced, Caspar was doing a lot of DJing, and I went to one of his sets and loved it. A couple of months later, a mutual friend introduced them. “We got a band together and did a Battle of the Bands competition. Very classic university stuff,” she laughs.

At that stage, they were still finding their creative footing. “Caspar was deep into DJing and producing, while I was focused on writing,” says Sutherland. “Then eventually Caspar sent me a beat, I wrote over it, we recorded it, and we just never stopped.” Though their first project was brief, it made an impact. “We wrote a song, put it out, and it got like a million streams,” she says. “After that, we thought, okay, we’re definitely onto something.”

Their contrasting influences have become the heart of Sandhouse’s sound. “I’m into folk, guitar-driven stuff, grunge, rock” Sutherland explains. “Caspar grew up on hip-hop and soul, a lot of rap. When he plays me a song he likes, I usually like it too, but I’d never have found it on my own.”

That dynamic interplay has shaped their music in unexpected ways. Grunge guitars mingle with dream pop textures and sharp electronic rhythms. “It’s a funny mix,” says Sutherland. “When we started writing, neither of us had been listening to much guitar music. Especially not overdriven guitars. Then suddenly, we were making those kinds of tracks. We had to learn how to build sounds that actually fit the mood we were creating.”

This genre-blurring has become a defining part of the Sandhouse identity. ” One we were initially kind of accidentally creating,” says Sutherland. “But genres aren’t something rigid these days, people are doing innovative stuff all the time, and I think you miss out if you’re religiously sticking to genre. Like, most people making alternative rock these days probably aren’t exclusive rockheads. They’re listening to various things because they have Spotify accounts and it’s all there.”

She sees that openness as part of a wider cultural shift. “Genre is kind of just not as important anymore. There’s much less snobbiness now. It used to be quite suffocating. People are more ironic, more relaxed about what they like. I don’t think tribes are built around one genre the way they used to be.”

Their creative process reflects that same fluidity. “We spent a couple of years writing different stuff, trying to merge our influences,” says Holloway. ” Quite a bit of it wasn’t even close to what we’re doing now.”

“A lot of it,” adds Sutherland, “was about figuring out how we could write together in a way that brought both our tastes in and still felt like something we were proud of. ‘Bite Me Back’ was probably the song that kind of became a turning point in our evolution.”

This period of experimentation eventually led to The Circus EP, a release that captures that evolving musical chemistry between the duo. Beneath its shimmering melodies lies a more unsettling core. Sutherland’s hypnotic vocals are layered over Holloway’s expansive production, revealing a sound that feels subtly warped, emotionally bruised and at times even a tad sinister.

Lyrically, the EP explores themes such as anxiety, relationships and male aggression. The title track, “Circus,” examines the strange, voyeuristic nature of social media. “That one was the hardest to pull off, just in terms of getting it right sonically,” says Sutherland. “I wrote it when I was spending quite a lot of time snooping on other people’s Instagrams. I just kept thinking how strange it is, this culture of constantly looking at strangers online. They have no idea you’re watching them, but at the same time you’re putting yourself out there to be observed too. It felt really dark, in a way we don’t usually talk about.”

Sutherland explains that her lyrics often come from a blend of personal experience and a more performative persona. “The ideas definitely come from my own life, but there’s a character I lean into when I’m writing for Sandhouse. That character lets me explore things I might not express as myself. She’s more confident, more confrontational. So the songs reflect a mix of real experiences and imagined ones, or things I wish I had done differently.”

The shift toward this new sound coincided with a conscious decision to leave behind their old project. “We decided we wanted to write a new set of songs and rebrand. We weren’t going to be our old project anymore. We wanted to release a single every couple of months, and have that define what the new Sandhouse was.”

“I suppose the plan was always to work toward an EP,” adds Holloway. “We wrote like 20 songs with the intention of changing direction a bit. The best ones that stuck are the ones that ended up coming out. The sound was developing and we gave ourselves time to explore. It was a gradual process of figuring out what it was.”

“’Circus’, for example, didn’t even have guitars on it until it was ninety percent done,” he continues. “It was more like trip-hop, just a bass line. Then we added some shoegaze elements and it really worked.”

“Really, we only decided we were a guitar band right at the end of writing it,” laughs Sutherland. “But we felt it really added something.”

Holloway, who also has previously handled the production, now works closely with mix engineer Duncan Mills. “We built up a good working relationship with him, although admittedly I’m a bit of a control freak, but we’ve formed a solid team, so it’s definitely a big help.”

Sutherland adds, “Duncan is so accommodating. He wants everything to be done perfectly, just as much as we do, so we are certainly on the same page. In fact, we’ve also written another EP that we’re just finishing up.”

Their collaborative spirit and hands-on approach aren’t limited to the music itself. Sandhouse’s DIY ethos extends to the visuals. Their music videos have been made with minimal budgets and the help of friends. ” We don’t have a ‘team’ so it’s basically all us and our friends,” says Sutherland. “For example, the video for ‘Circus’ was shot underneath a bridge in Millwall with my boyfriend and Casper’s girlfriend. We’re lucky to have friends who work in film, so we’ve been calling in a lot of favours and as such we’ve been involved in everything, from planning to execution. Without our friends’ help, we couldn’t have done it.”

That same instinct for world-building extends even to their collective name, but comes from a much more personal place “My grandma is a psychotherapist who specialised in a type of therapy called ‘sand play,’” says Sutherland. “It involves drawing or creating scenes in a sand pit, which she would then analyse. Her clinic, which was basically a shed in her garden, was called the Sand House. So that’s where the band name comes from. Sadly, she has dementia now and had to sell the Sand House, but she’s happy the name is living on in some way.”