Foto-© BLACKKSOCKS

Eine der interessantesten Newcomerbands des Jahres 2020, Vergleiche mit den Größen des 2000er-Jahre-Indie-Rocks – The Killers und den Editors – und direkt am Anfang ihrer musikalischen Karriere eine Reihe ausverkaufter Hallen und Festival-Auftritte: Sea Girls waren seit ihrer Gründung konsequent auf der Überholspur unterwegs und gaben nostalgischen Indie-Rock-Fans der 2000er Jahre endlich wieder einen Grund zum Feiern. So auch in 2022 mit dem neuen Album Homesick, das zuletzt erschienen ist und zu dem die Band für uns ein Track by Track mit allem Wissenswerten zu den Songs geschrieben hat!

1. Hometown

Set in all our hometowns when, like so many people, we fled the cities in lockdown and went back to the places of our parents and where we grew up. This song is the storytelling of what life is like now and what it was like when we were teenagers in our hometowns. I think of the little towns across the Midlands like Grantham and Oakham. Gloomy mid weeks, Fathers drinking too much during the week and school friends using drugs at the weekends.

A family friendly had died on a Friday night the second week I was in rehab and I felt like I only just escaped. I could have died. It hit home that that could have been me. I felt he took my place and I was the lucky one. I wasn’t going to let him pass away in vain and I wanted to dedicate something to him.

2. Sick

The pressure of the world in lockdown made this song happen. It’s a growing up song where I realize I’m no longer a child. It’s me in my bedroom at home ranting with my thoughts and going down the hole of being pissed off. It contains simple blunt facts about me and a lot of people’s lives at that time.

I was sick of everything – from things I used to love through to things that felt vacuous like consuming and buying. All the emotions were piling up and it’s me just asking for a reset, a childish solution. Then the realisation came that my attitude was bad and I was looking at life all wrong. My priorities are in the wrong place and I’ve let the wrong side of me rule. It was a turning point in the writing for this album where the songs became about worrying for other people and how they were feeling. The pivot where I started writing clearly with a bigger perspective. I literally feel myself growing up throughout the song.



3. Lonely

This song is about the cool kooky girl from school who I hung out with age 14-18 years old, the outsider I never went out with, the best female friend you wanted to go out with, but never did. It was written the day Ennio Morricone died, so it was in honour of him – a nod to the good, the bad and the ugly hence the lyric in the song “OK Corral” (Gunfight At The OK Corral)

. During lockdown I drove to the local shop a lot and would listen to the Prodigy on the way remembering being at school. Feeling so connected to young love. We both moved on and the band happened and life got in the way for the both of us. 

I picture being on tour or just getting home and a moment of “where is that person who will make me feel like I can share this”, so maybe it was that girl from school, maybe that was the fork in the road. The path missed.



4. Someone’s Daughter Someone’s Son

After a relationship falls apart this song’s about becoming just a son or a daughter again. How you are a team and then just an individual. It’s like starting again. I talk about how I felt so lucky to be with her, how it felt being left and how I realise she’s moving on. How we all end up back in your bedroom, going back to respective homes after splitting up. Becoming someone’s daughter and someone’s son again, as opposed to being a couple. This one was co written with Justin Parker (Rihanna, Lana Del Ray).



5. Sleeping With You

I wrote this when I lived in a flat in London. This song is about dreaming of your American ex-girlfriend instead of the girl you’re with right now. I’d go to her house in Camberwell and hang with her housemates, but I thought fuck it, just not going to happen – I still only had my ex-girlfriend on my mind. It’s like a warning to not waste your time on me as my heart is still with another, so I’ll only let you down. A song about not letting yourself love anyone else, although you know you should.



6. Paracetamol Blues

This is me imagining I’m going out with someone as hedonistic as I used to be, and as bad a person as I was. Thinking about what a relationship would be like with my ex’s friend who just asked if I wanted to get a drink, hanging out around bars in East London inspired by two people with confidence issues using partying as a prop. Although the story starts on picking her up from the hospital after a particularly heavy night out…



7. Again Again

This song is thinking about relapsing, choosing drugs over friends. The song is trying to personify the intensity and rush of it. Accepting the inevitability of it and the hatred in being boring. It’s one of the last songs I wrote ruminating on my previous life.



8. Lucky

When I was at home during lockdown I read a letter from my great grandfather who was in the second world war. Written on the boat going to D-day he wrote to my grandmother and her brother as children: “the guns sound terrible i have to go now, kiss Cynthia and Ben”. He survived but I barely remember him. The letter really hit me how lucky I was and that I should live the moment and not get sad like I used to.



9. Higher

Covid forced me out of London, I fled the city and went home to write the album. It was so weird being back in the place where I grew up, but I started remembering childhood stories and truths there through a teenage lens. So this was written as some fun on the first day of lockdown. It’s about being in LA and wondering if my girlfriend had cheated on me at a party, but choosing to forgive her in order to stay together. A story about looking away and forgiving whatever someone does to you. If it hurts too much, you can just get high.

10. Cute Guys

A late night phone call on a dark depressing night in winter with the girl you split up with which ends in desperation, jealousy and the realisation that you should just say goodnight and leave it there. Feeling in love but rejected and confused. As you wonder if she’s just hanging with cute guys and not telling you.

11. Friends

Friends is a kind of faux triumphant fantasy about letting go and trashing everything in arms reach. Recently when finding myself stuck inside indoors not being able to see anyone it got me thinking back to the first time I left home and how freeing that felt. There’s probably a sad moment when we stop wanting to be older and start pining for our youth. I suppose this song is about trying to recapture that feeling but ultimately it’s misremembered and cast in an almost heroic light. Everything back then felt very important but nothing really mattered.