Premiere: Weird Milk Shares New EP, “We Were Strangers”
Stream the New EP Below
Nov 17, 2021
Photography by Timothy Casten
London-based indie rock outfit Weird Milk initially made their name on nostalgia, recreating the feel of vintage ‘60s touchstones like The Beach Boys and The Beatles on their earliest singles. Yet, in the lead-up to their debut EP, the band have steadily taken on new dimensions, incorporating the punch of modern indie rock along with a healthy dose of explosive pop grandeur. Today the band is back with their full debut EP, We Were Strangers, premiering with Under the Radar.
The band kicks open the doors with the title track, a big hook-filled rocker bolstered by jaunty piano lines. After the opener’s relentlessly catchy choruses, the band then begins to explore new corners of their sound. The band crafts brilliant funk grooves on “Make It Alone (Lonely Boy),” punctuated by bouncing ‘80s synths. Similarly, they put a spin on their ‘60s influences with “See You Around,” marrying sweet harmonies with saloon pianos and explosive bursts of guitar.
Meanwhile, “Vienna” takes the band into upbeat ‘70s rock territory, and “I Wonder If” puts the piano front and center for a swaying, widescreen rock ballad. As adept as the band are at conjuring up the sound of days gone by, they equally breathe new life into the styles, lending fresh vitality to rock touchstones and to the world of British indie as a whole.
Check out the EP and read the band’s exclusive track-by-track guide below.
We Were Strangers
Charlie Glover-Wright: To start off with a huge cliché: this song came to me in a dream. In the dream I was in a haunted house. Ripped curtains, bare white walls, and everything had a green tinge. I walked through the ‘living room’ and just as I approached the next room a musical chorus jumped out at me singing “stranger danger stranger danger” with jazz hands. This kept happening over and over before I reached any other room in the house. I woke up and started playing it on the piano.
The first demo is a song about strangers and the dangers of trusting them. This did not make the cut with the band, they thought it was too weird. I shelved it. A few months later I came back from a night out all drunk and loved up ... I think I had met someone I really liked and I wrote the line ‘losing expectation will help you get what you want’ because everything good that happens to me seems to be when I am not trying to make it happen and it always catches me off guard. I woke up the next day and rolled over to the piano where I sung that line and the song wrote itself in about an hour.
Musically it’s a rocker! We wanted to start the EP with a “HEY IT’S US AGAIN!”. It’s supposed to make you get up and go. Get livin’!
Make It Alone (Lonely Boy)
Charlie Glover-Wright: I was all alone during the DO NOT SAY IT DO NOT SAY IT… lockdown and feeling very isolated and lonely. I had been writing miserable songs for months and I wanted to write something more optimistic. I set my drums up and set the BPM to 130…the fastest we have ever been. Listening back just put the guitar lines in my head and all I had to do was work them out and we had instant groove. The vocal melody came straight away and I powered up my microphone and sung it all whilst dancing on the bed.
At first, none of us really knew what to think as it felt very different to what we had done before but when we started to work it out together in rehearsals it became the most fun to play in the set. We wanted the song to be a ‘vibe’. Something you can put on before you go out, or at a party, or if you want to walk anywhere and feel BADASS. It’s supposed to make you feel good and you’ve got to go with it.
See You Around
Charlie Glover-Wright: A song that feels sorry for itself. It’s a half-hearted apology. It’s a break-up song but the narrator really doesn’t care about the break-up…or the person they’re hurting. Which isn’t very thoughtful. The song is split between the main character talking to this person and also cynically telling themselves to cheer up “try to enjoy life when you know the boat is going down”. And then they start to make excuses “well it ‘wasn’t I signed up for’”. Eventually, they agree to themselves to do better ‘trying hard to lose that selfish impulse’ which as you grow up you hopefully learn to do.
I love the music and the arrangement. We went full face-melting guitars for the intro and then Van Dyke Parks honky-tonk in the pre-chorus. We love to have these different sections or movements (sorry to sound pretentious) in our music. Once we’ve created the whole song, we then pay separate attention to all of the individual sections. We’ll have all of the normal band instruments tying them together and then we will treat each part separately. We try to find the part that’s special and exaggerate or compliment as much as possible.
Vienna
Alex Griffiths: Some songs just respond better to patience; allowing them time to naturally evolve is sometimes the best way to stay true to and realise that blurry silhouette of an idea you first had, at least for me — “Vienna” was one of those.
The lyrics felt more personal than anything I’d written before and I wanted to do those memories justice and convey the experiences I had at that time as honestly as possible. It’s also more like a collage of snapshots of a time than a linear narrative.
The original idea was born from one of my voice memos of some stream-of-consciousness drivel, meandering over repeated chord progressions on piano. I often write by looping an idea, layering it, and then improvising vocals over it. The words will be broadly nonsensical, but you find the melodies and record it all. Sometimes I’ll listen back and love a random lyric that came out and I’ll keep it, compile a bunch of them and then write the rest of the words around that frame.
When finalising the arrangement, Charlie and I were listening to a lot of Wings and that definitely reflects in the sound of the production as a whole. We demoed it together in our flat, laid down all of the parts, and refined the structure so that it didn’t drag on for 5 minutes. It’s much harder to strip things away than it is to keep adding more — it’s really is a discipline.
I Wonder If
Charlie Glover-Wright: Zach and I wrote this on the piano. Zach had already got all the first verse with lyrics so we used that as a starting point and trialed lots of different melodies for it to go into. It was me lying on the bed whilst Zach tinkered away. When we caught the right sounds they stuck and we moved on piece by piece.
It demanded a grand arrangement. We’re not quite at full orchestras yet so we tried to get wide and cinematic sounds from the piano and guitars. Playing on this was so fun as it only needed very simple parts to allow the amazing vocal part to take centre stage.
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