LOCK had the pleasure of catching up with London-based shoegaze band sadplanet to discuss the release of their latest single ‘please’ along with their forthcoming debut EP ‘slowing down’
Hi sadplanet and welcome to LOCK! For our readers, could you please tell us a little about yourselves?
We’re Aiden (Guitar), Dan (Bass), Jeff (Drums), Kyra (Vocals), and Nick (Guitar). We’re all living in London and have been playing together for around 3 years now.
Your latest single “please” feels both intimate and overwhelming at the same time. What was the emotional starting point for the song?
Honestly the music came first, from Nick and Jeff playing around with a specific guitar tone and beat. It already had this joyous feel to it, but when Kyra started putting lyrics to it it started being infiltrated by the feelings she was having around a friendship at the time. Probably because it sounded so happy and exciting and romantic, she started writing it about a close friend at the time. Eventually though, some of her concerns about the friendship and its red flags and how claustrophobic it felt started to crack through in the lyrics, which is probably why the song is quite repetitive at the start and has such intimate lyrics. It gets really big at the end and changes time signature into 9/8, as a sort of break through the overwhelming relationship into a euphoric release of just ‘we are so happy to be here’.
The track moves from tenderness into a huge wall of sound. How intentional was that sonic shift in mirroring the emotional collapse of the story?
Sort of touched on this in the answer before, but the song came about while a few of us had different personal experiences in our lives at that time. Kyra’s lyrics basically mirrored a collapse in friendship that she was going through. Weirdly, even though the song is so big and upbeat, it’s quite confessional, but all that is sort of hidden underneath all the textures.
Shoegaze often creates a sense of distance, but your music feels very personal. How do you maintain emotional closeness within such expansive soundscapes?
The state of today’s world and society often leaves us in a disconnected limbo state, we feel like this is the strength of shoegaze is showing you can still have emotions in those spaces.
I think we’d have to disagree with Shoegaze creating a sense of distance. Whilst expansive soundscapes are baked into Shoegaze as a genre, we’d argue that emotional closeness is as well. Some of our favourite records within the genre have introspective and melancholic lyrics, cutting through the noise to the listener. The distance created by the sparkly, cavernous textures could be seen as an exercise in whimsy, hiding something closer to home inside, like a fairytale acting as an analogy- why not aim for the otherworldly?
The chemistry between the five of you is key to the band’s sound. How does the writing process typically begin within sadplanet?
We have a lot of fun, genuinely. It’s often a process of the 5 of us in a sweaty room, trying not to get distracted by how funny Aiden is. (We gave him a mic recently and there has been a noticeable drop in productivity ever since.) We do often write at home, all of us bringing a certain progression or melody or sometimes even an effect we want to try out, but then we always bring the ideas to the room. The flexibility of having a practice space means our songs always take a different turn to their original conception, which never gets old, ever. For our new releases we are writing and demoing the songs first so we can go back over songs more, add in and take away layers the more we listen, and it’s been exciting to try this other method of writing, where we’re getting more into the nitty gritty.
“please” sits within your upcoming EP slowing down. How does the title of the EP connect to the themes of this song specifically?
It’s all about processing, really, and you have to either stop or slow down in order to do that. All three of the songs nod towards different personal relationships, positive and negative. Feelings are just so big no matter what direction they go in and generally that’s why shoegaze is so great – you can achieve such specific sounds and capture so many different types of emotions with all the effects – and that’s what was great about the ‘slowing down’ project. We were able to try and tackle all the million things you feel just when you’re a human going about life with other humans, by throwing every sound we could think of at the wall and hoping some of them stuck and showed an outline of what we were trying to say.
What do you hope people take away from “please” if they’ve experienced similar friendships or emotional patterns?
Genuinely just watch out if it all feels too good and too intimate and too fast. If you feel like you’ve met your soulmate but at the same time you’re walking on eggshells and the earth is moving without you, something probably isn’t right. ‘So far it’s up, so far to fall’ is one of the lyrics towards the end and it’s sort of a warning: you’re having such a good time and you’re euphoric right now, but that means if it all falls apart it’s going to be such a painful process.
If “please” represents one emotional chapter of slowing down, what other emotional states can listeners expect from the EP?
This is probably the most emotionally fraught song. The rest of the EP is really more about acceptance and moving forwards. In all of the songs, though, there’s that thing that we all, as humans, do when processing relationships: fixating on certain moments and things people said. So it’s sort of an honest tribute to getting through relationships. Like, you’ll move on and you’ll become healthy and happy again, but let’s be honest, you’re not going to be able to just forget about somebody entirely.