Before the Grammy-winning British indie-rock act alt-J makes a stop in Minnesota on their 2022 tour, they shared a four-song performance including tracks from their new record 'The Dream,’ and a familiar favorite.

In a recent interview with Mac Wilson, alt-J’s Gus Unger-Hamilton discussed the background on a few of the tracks that appear on ‘The Dream’⁠—read an except of their interview below, and find the full conversation here.

MAC WILSON: We're talking with Gus from Alt-J, you have a new album on the way called The Dream, will be out in 2022 and then hitting the road as well. So the first song that we heard from the upcoming record was "You and Me" and it sort of occupies a unique place because there's plenty of instances in the history of music where you've got a happy sounding song with sad lyrics. And "You and Me" is sort of different. It's a very ominous sounding song about what seems like one of the best days of your entire life. So compositionally did that start from a place of brightness or more like bleak tone that musically you think it has?

GUS UNGER-HAMILTON: It started compositionally more or less as a jam during a soundcheck when we were on tour in America somewhere. It was just like something that just came about really fast. You know, Joe kind of just like came up with this guitar hook. And we all just kind of like, you know, we're just locked into it. And luckily, somebody, one of our techs recorded it, and that was something we were able to work from back in the studio in London when we started working on this album. YI's definitely one of the more up tempo and upbeat songs on the album, I would say it's more or less about being at a festival, having a good time. But you know, possibly that that moment where you've been indulging--over indulging and you know, you start to sort of like, worry that perhaps you're tipping over into a little bit more of a sort of freakout. But, yeah, on the whole, it's a happy song, I would say.

There's a lyrical reference in the tune to Stellan Skarsgard and if people are not super in the know of his personal habits, can you give a little bit of background of what that particular allusion is to what he does?

Yeah, so the lyric is, "struck like Stellan Skarsgard to and from the bar". I think that, you know, Joe is a huge fan of films and Stellan Skarsgard has a particular kind of walk as an actor, possibly he does this walk all the time, but you know, he has a sort of like very confident kind of strut. And I don't know if Joe was thinking about that when he was at this festival that he was writing about in the lyrics, but certainly I think it's a nice, you know, I think people who are aware of Stellan Skarsgard and his work as an actor will immediately know what Joe's talking about there.

The other song that you've recently released is "Get Better", which is on the flip side of that--that's a beautiful sounding song that's about really, really gut wrenching loss. It really does a great job of capturing the small little details that go into knowing a person and then missing that person as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, lyrically, it's a very, very moving song. I think that, you know, Joe really nails it there with kind of, like, certain things like hearing the toilet flush at night, meaning that the person you live with has come home or, you know, sort of like putting their jar of Nutella in the basement as you can't throw it away. You don't want to eat it because you don't like it. But you can't throw it away, stuff like that. I mean it's very sad song, very moving song, but I think it's song with a lot of hope in it too. It was written during the height of the pandemic, it's about a man losing his partner to an illness. It's not specifically about Coronavirus, but certainly influenced by that. It's the closest we've come to writing a song that's directly referencing sort of current world events.

As we've just sort of dived into other records that are being released at this point, we're getting to instances where artists have had the time to write and record the entire record during the pandemic. So a lot of the press around a lot of these albums is like, well, this is dark times and this record is is a show of resilience. And Alt-J, you've sort of been upfront, like, "Well, this is a record that kind of reflects this darkness that's around us." So is this sort of a means of grappling with not just the pandemic, but just the general malaise in life?

I think that the last two years have been obviously bad in very obvious ways, you know, the loss of life and the struggles people have gone through mentally as well. But you know, I think they've also offered quite a nice reset for some people mentally. Giving people space to reevaluate what's important in life and space to take a bit of a breather and not live such a sort of hectic existences as we always generally live. I mean, speaking from experience, you know, my life in London here, up until March 2020 was really crazy. I was going out almost every night sort of like trying to catch up with friends all the time, like, just really kind of like overstretched, I would say. I think that actually lock downs and stuff, although it was, you know, set against a background of extreme difficulty for the world did at least give me an opportunity to kind of like, just take a bit of a breather. And I think that the album we wrote tries to reflect the fact that there have been positives and negatives to the time we've been living through for the last two years. I mean, I don't for a second want to downplay the negative sides of any of it. But you know, I think that, for us, having more time to make this album was a really positive thing, and I think that the pandemic did give us that.

External Link

alt-J - official website