Stepping away from their more regular projects, PostLast sees Julie Hough of fast-rising Irish experimentalists HAVVK and Stephen McHale of now defunct pop band BARQ combine to take their music into the realm of playful dream pop. A step away from both’s more established styles, it represents a firm change of direction, with spacey and beautiful EP ‘Pull Me Into The Open Sea’ firmly announcing their arrival.
“Starting PostLast was such a blank canvas so it’s exciting to see where it could go,” Hough says. “Working on something new totally took away any preconceptions of what the sound or vision would be. It is a vulnerable situation too, when you don’t fully know what the other person’s process or taste is going to be like. Even as we’re working on new songs, sending off new ideas – we tend to send ideas to each other remotely – is always a little nerve-wrecking, in a good way!”
“We began writing these songs without any defined direction of what they should sound like, or what the lyrical content should be, and I think the reason they gravitated towards a sense of wistful contentment was because of that lack of boundaries,” McHale explains. “Lyrically, the sea features heavily throughout, as do other themes of relaxation and life’s simple pleasures, such as board games and Halloween. It’s reassuring to know that creating without any sense of pressure resulted in something that contains more calm contentment than I would have expected from myself!”
“At the moment we’re working away writing for our debut album,” McHale continues. “We do have enough to do a live set for sure, but this project began and progressed a little differently from other projects we’ve been involved in in the past. We set out with the aim of just writing, recording, releasing, and enjoying the process, but we had no real sense of how the music was going to turn out or even if anyone would be interested in listening to it! We were always keen to play the songs live but the enthusiasm the songs have been greeted with over the last few months has made us realise how much we are looking forward to playing live!”
“Our live show is ambitious – and I say that both joyfully and with a little dread too,” Hough says. “We definitely want to perform live, but we didn’t necessarily write the songs with that in mind (lots of layered parts and backing vocals!). So when the day comes, I think we’ll be setting the bar pretty high in terms of a visual experience and will most likely have to hire about half of our friends to be in the live band too. Hopefully the other half will come and be in the audience.”
As for the firmly nautical angle, McHale says “Both Julie and I grew up on the west coast of Ireland so being absolutely battered by the sea and the weather in general was a consistent theme throughout both our childhoods!”
“I think having the visual and sonic influence of the constantly changing and awe-inspiring Atlantic Ocean can’t help but be represented in our creative work. We really leaned into those ideas on the song ‘Headlands’, where the combination of the guitar rhythms, reversed reverb effects, and a vocal melody that floats above it all was intended to directly represent the feeling of being washed around by the sea.”
“I think there is a lot of wisdom in recapturing the sense of wonder you had when you were a child, before your ego got involved and made you worry about saying something stupid or putting yourself out there,” Hough adds. “That’s the kind of nostalgia we’re tapping into, learning from the childlike wonderment that we can lose along the way when we get older.”
‘Pull Me Into The Open Sea’ by PostLast is out now.
