In Conversation With Goat Girl
Image: Holly Whitaker
Stalwarts of South London's The Windmill, Goat Girl might be veterans of their local scene, but their return proves they are as dynamic and bold as ever. Having announced their upcoming studio full-length 'On All Fours', coming January 29th via Rough Trade, alongside lead single 'Sad Cowboy', the four-piece made up of Lottie Cream, Rosy Bones, Holly hole and L.E.D. have diverged from their confrontational past and ushered in a mature, vulnerable slant on their impudent sonic output. We caught up with Rosy on a rainy Monday afternoon, to find out what's new in the world of Goat Girl...
Hey Rosy… How have you all been dealing with pandemic?
I guess at the beginning Ellie was away in Cornwall, and we weren’t really doing anything at all. We didn’t have anything planned anyway for the summer, so it didn’t really affect us too much. We were just thinking about the artwork and the videos and stuff, so we had a lot of time to think about those things, which was good. For a while we didn’t do anything but then recently we were practising a bit – but now of course we can’t practice again. Me and Lottie live together so we can sort stuff out, and we were able to see each other quite a lot around the end of summer which was good.
Your roots as a band lie in South London – I read that you all crossed paths at various open mic nights, and obviously played at the Windmill. How has South London, the area and the creative scene, influenced you as a band?
It really helped us at the beginning find our feet, having a safe space to grow as a band and be surrounded by lots of inspiring people. It’s just a very nurturing environment; it helped at the beginning and still does, because there’s so many people making amazing things. It helped in that way for the band really, and with meeting each other – Lottie and Ellie were friends sort of from, like, teenagers, but then I met them at the Windmill, and we met Holly at the Windmill as well. It’s a good place to meet people!
Your eponymous debut was filled with angsty, confrontational lyricism. I’ve listened to your new record and it seems like you’ve moved away from that, showcasing a more vulnerable side as a collective. Was this an intentional direction change?
Yeah I would agree with that. It’s more inward looking than outward looking, it’s more personal. I can’t speak on behalf of Lottie or Ellie – it wasn’t like we all talked about it, and were like ‘let’s talk about these things now’, I think it was just what was going on in people’s minds and what people wanted to write about and express. I guess it’s maybe a more matured outlook than just being really angry, it’s more thought about, more reflective in a way.
You’ve also said that this new album heralds a new interchangeable approach when it comes to songwriting. How do you go about changing that creative process?
I think it was quite good, because when Holly joined the band we were still getting to know each other properly and just playing around. We didn’t really have that ‘oh we have to write songs!’, we would just do whatever. It created this nice atmosphere of, say, I’ll play guitar – even though I’m really bad at it, I do like to play it. Or play keyboard, or anything! We didn’t really write many of the initial parts on our main instruments. For some reason I really didn’t want to play drums for a while, I wanted a break. I’m quite musical and I really wanted to write melodies and stuff, and if I’m just playing drums I feel a bit limited, and a bit separate from everyone. So for a while I was like, ‘I don’t want to play drums! I’m not playing drums!’. And we were just playing around on other things, and learning back the parts that other people had written, and then playing drums again, and I thought, I love drumming again! I just needed a little break. And if you’re not playing your main instrument, you go about it in a very different way, and write things that other people wouldn’t think of writing, so it created an interesting fusion of lots of different ideas.
You worked with Dan Carey on the new record, what was it like working with him again?
We always knew after we did the first record that we were gonna do the second one with Dan as well. It took quite a long time to write, there were lots of changes going on and nothing was very stable, but then when things started to get going it all came together. We did quite a bit of writing on a farm, for a week or something, and then we did Dan’s second studio for a few weeks, writing there as well in the height of summer. It was so hot! The mixing desk was on all the time, and the heat that was coming off that was just crazy, and the air-con wasn’t working so we were just melting. Dan was very supportive the whole way. We recorded these demos and showed them to him – we weren’t 100% about them, we didn’t know if it was any good because we’d been at it for ages. You just can’t tell anymore, it could be amazing or it could be completely terrible. But he heard them and was like: ‘yes! This is it.’ That gave us the confidence to think we could make it an album. We just needed to do a little bit more work, and it would be there. We like to figure the track listing before we record, and then record it in that order. Dan lent us his MP3, and we made these drum tracks that I would listen to while we would practice the songs. It was more electronic, and we wanted it to be a bit more dance-y, a bit more on the beat, but not too robotic. So yeah, we did it to drum loops. We did it all last October, so it’s old, but it still feels very new because of everything that’s happened.
The song ‘Anxiety’ charts a personal battle with mental health. How important is mental wellbeing to you collectively?
We all struggle in different ways with our mental health. There are some things that we all struggle with. We’ve always been very open about our mental health – I never used to be good at talking about stuff, but being so close, if you’re not feeling good you can just be like ‘nah, I feel like shit’. And you can say that, and that’s ok to have people know that. Just putting things out there makes things a lot better. It’s very important to talk about it. It needs to be talked about more.
You’ve spoken of your musical influences in the past – the likes of Warmduscher, Meat Raffle and Bat-Bike. What else inspires you all other than music?
I really like films, but I’m not really a film nerd. Lottie’s well into her films, and knows loads of good ones and directors and that. But visuals, yeah; with the new videos, we wanted them to be more connected, leading on from each other. That’s a lot of being inspired by what we’ve seen, and also by the artwork that Toby and Aiden did for the album. Everything that’s in the album is inspired by something else to do with the album, if you know what I mean. It’s all in one world. I’ve also really gotten into gaming recently, and I love fantasy world stuff, I play a lot of Skyrim. And we’re just inspired by the people around us, by close friends and what they do!