No Longer Waiting In The Wings: A Conversation With Lemondaze

Photo by Derek Bremner courtesy of Warmth Agency

Known for their hazy walls of sound combined with raw emotional undercurrents embedded within their lyrics, the Cambridge-born four-piece Lemondaze have spent the past few years carving out a space in the UK underground scene through relentless gigging, earning praise from the likes of Miki Berenyi (Lush) and Andy Bell (Ride). Now, with a fresh label deal and their latest single ‘polari’ marking an exciting new chapter for the band, Lemondaze are poised to become one of the UK’s most compelling bands.

We caught up with Isis (guitar/vocals) and Jonty (bass) from the band to talk about how they got here, their evolution and the future of Lemondaze ahead of their upcoming release. 

How did Lemondaze first come together?

Isis: I always wanted to do something to do with music, and I think I decided maybe I wanted to start a band when I started sixth form. So, I first met Rosie, who’s the other vocalist and guitarist, in first year of sixth form – we were like 16. I don't know, we kind of listened to the same music and clicked, and we both played guitar so we thought we’d just, like, start something, and there were some iterations of it before it became ‘Lemondaze’, I guess. We had some other members too; I think we were on like our second bassist and he was going off to uni and we needed someone else and Jonty appeared from under his little rock. 

Jonty: Yeah, I begged to be in the band. Finn came later on, just after the pandemic, and I think when she joined the band, it kind of became a new project. So everything that had come before that was figuring us out, and then when Finn joined it was the start of modern ‘Lemondaze’. But yeah, all of us are incredibly musical people; I think we’re all drawn to want to be able to perform music, not just write it or enjoy it. I think creating it as well was a need, I guess. That sounds a bit cringe, but. 

And what inspired the name?

I: Rosie and I were at this houseparty, and we were trying to come up with a name for the band. We were drinking lemonade, I mean, like a mixer or something. I think we’d just turned 17, so naughty. And I remember us just going ‘lemonade, lemonade…it should be something to do with lemonade’ and our friend was like ‘oh my god, you’re the lemon babes’, so it sort of started out like that. Then we thought, ‘oh that’s a bit cringe’; we were trying to go for something that was sort of lemon-related but wasn’t –  we just kept throwing things around. And we were in the beginnings of figuring out what kind of music we wanted to play. We were really into Slowdive and were like ‘oh what if it's really shoegazy and dreamy and hazy’, so I think ‘Lemongaze’ was one of them that we threw around. But I don’t remember who it was that said ‘Lemondaze’ – I think it might have been Rosie – but that’s kind of how it came about and it stuck. And we’ve kind of gone through a love-hate relationship with it – we tried to change it earlier this year but then we were like ‘actually, no’.  

J: It’s quite often that – like we were in Rotterdam a couple weeks ago and I was talking to some guy outside and he was like “oh what are you guys named” and I was like “oh, it’s a really bad name” – kind of just apologising for the name; but he was like “no, that’s cool man” and I was like ‘not to us’. 

I’m curious, where do you pull inspiration from when writing music? Any films, TV shows, books – or just anything that gets the creative juices flowing when you're in writing mode?

J: Well we're all really into games. Halo 3 is our universal, like, favourite game.

I: Yeah, it started out [the writing of ‘polari’] with – well, Finn, the drummer, and I got covid at the same time and we think we probably got it at a gig we played, and we didn’t want to isolate by ourselves, so I sneakily got in my car and drove to hers so we could isolate together. We were like sick as fuck but we were like ‘We need to do something’, so we just played all of Halo 3 in one day and were like ‘their soundtrack is amazing’. It was kind of a weird feral moment writing ‘polari’ because we had this weird energy; I think we were kind of bored so like, I don’t know, the juices were kind of going, just sort of feeding off each other with this crazy energy. I think we’d been listening to a lot of Deftones at the time as well. So yeah, it was in between that and just sitting on the sofa – it was a sofa-bed so we were lying on the sofa really ill, playing Halo and watching Disney movies. The song is pretty energetic so maybe it came from, again, not being able to do anything and it was just like a release of that energy we were feeling at the time. So yeah, games are definitely one I think, or like moments, or just feelings even and just experiences we’ve had. 

J: Just to feed into that, I think we like to think of our music as very cinematic. Whether it be video games or any kind of visual media – like, I know that we all go away and watch films and are like ‘Shit that soundtrack to that film was amazing. I wanna do something along those lines’ or kind of discover something, or create a feeling just through visual media. Some stuff we’re currently working on is much more in that sort of space.

I know there was a bit of a break between your debut release back in 2021 and your upcoming EP which will be released in December.  What was it like to take a step back and hone in on your sound and creative vision? Was there maybe a breakthrough moment or song you wrote where you really began to see the clear throughline in the direction of your sound?

I: I think the gap between the releases was never intentional. Covid had happened and some of these songs actually date back – like one of them is from pre-covid. It gave us a lot of time once covid had died down to be able to sit and write and actually play these songs live. We spent all of 2021-2022 just gigging ferociously, I seem to remember. I feel like we just wanted to create that ‘live’ energy in our recording, and just experiment.

J: I think, in a way, that debut EP under the title of Lemondaze was for me a capstone on ‘pre-Finn’, our drummer. Once she joined everything really changed. And I think that some bands probably would have changed their name at the time because of how the entire energy of the band shifted. We kinda went from, I guess, things having slowed down for us, to, like Isis said, really just sort of gigging and gigging and gigging – really perfecting our live sound was a big goal of ours and also just taking our time. In that period of time as well, although a couple of the songs are quite old, we wrote quite a lot of stuff and that kind of came and went. And this EP is for sure about, I guess, the past four years of being us. We were like ‘Right, we’re gonna have five tracks that are just about us and nothing else. There's no expectations on this for anything, we just wanna have five tracks that we’re really proud of then build from that.’

In a way, the past four years have been honing in on who we want to be as artists, what we want to sound like, what’s our image, and I guess what our goals are. We’ve finally released music for the first time in so long but it definitely feels like a totally different thing; I think we’re a much better band now, we’re more true to ourselves, we’re more honest and pure – four years spent away just honing craft and figuring out who we are I guess. 

Does performing the music live allow you different liberties that maybe the studio doesn’t? 

J: Yeah, it's probably hard to capture live sound. We’re also a really loud band so it's hugely limiting what you can do in the studio and you have to be quite clever about how you record certain stuff. Our producer, Matt, kind of knew what we wanted to do, and is a bit of a genius. We did a lot of, like, trying to record as much as possible in one-go with this record; the guitars were kinda all done at once and we tried to just capture as much sound from as many different points as possible. It’s still really hard. I don’t think we’ll ever really probably be pleased at how the record sounds compared to live tracks, but I would also say that some tracks sound better on the record than they do live because they're so complicated. It's a bit of both, but I think, yeah, we definitely prefer playing live and how it sounds live.

Was there a favourite song from this project to record, and on the flip side, what was the most challenging song to get right?

I: I think we both know the answer to the challenging part, haha. The hard one was ‘terra’ only because I feel like we hadn’t quite finished writing it when we got into the studio. We’d never actually played it together and it was the one I think that went through the most versions. We were struggling to get it right and that day when we were recording it, it took so long. When Finn was recording her drums I think I passed out on the sofa in the control room because I was just so exhausted. 

J: Yeah, I totally agree. Compared to what we normally write and what we’re used to, it’s more upbeat, it’s more fast-paced, more aggressive and more rocky, I think. I remember quite late on in the session Matt, bless him, was working so hard at it and I remember him being absolutely exhausted ‘cause it wasn’t going quite right in the studio. But yeah, definitely our least favourite to record but I think we’re all really happy with it. I think it’s a fantastic track and when people have heard it, they like it too. But for me, my favourite was o-type; o-type from the jump when we first wrote it – it just came from 2 chords with Finn, and then we were just like ‘This is really good, we have to make a song’. And it was really easy! Besides the bridge, it kind of wrote itself and I just love that track so much.

I: My favourite one in the process of writing it was ‘gravemind’ – that's like our little baby. That was one Finn and I started together and we kind of wrote it all by accident, if that makes sense. It was just this complete flow state of adding bits – ‘oh maybe strings’, and then Finn starting playing some amazing string chords, and I was like ‘hmm what if we do slide’ and I didn’t even have a slide so I was using an elf bar as a slide. It was a bit chaotic but it's crazy how that came to the final version. That one has so many textures that are electronic but those sounds come from guitars that have been sampled into synths and things, so I thought that was really cool. We had a lot of fun experimenting with that one I think. 

How do you get to a point where you think ‘Alright, this is ready to be released’ and not overthink it? 

J: It’s really tough. I think we’re really bad with that kind of stuff – we’ll go away for like a week and not listen to it, and then listen to it, and then find something wrong. I think luckily the people we work with, especially for this EP, like Matt our producer, were just like ‘You’re not touching it. When our sessions are done, you’re not touching it.’ And he was like ‘Don’t listen to it either. When it’s done, don’t listen to it for a long, long, long, long time and then you’ll come away and be happy’, and I think he’s right. But yeah, previously we are chronic at it. There were quite a few different songs over the years that we’ve just rehashed and rehashed, and ended up never releasing. 

I: Yeah, I feel like he refused to send us the songs for a while too. But I do remember, didn't we have this really long call where he was like, live mixing it for us while we were there listening to it? That was quite fun actually. But I think some of them got to about five mixes and he was like ‘Just stop, the things are so miniscule that they’re only things that you’re gonna hear’ – and he’s right about that. Like, the reverb on the snare being half a second too short is not something anyone else is gonna notice. 

What do you hope to accomplish as artists following the release of this new project? Anything you want to tick off the bucket list or are manifesting right now?

I: The manifestation circle is, like, real. I think we’re trying to have kind of realistic things, ‘cause we could say like ‘Oh I wanna play the O2 arena’ , which I guess is not very realistic but I think focusing on next year at least, we’d like to play a few more festivals. We’d like to go on tour as support for a slightly bigger band, maybe play some more shows in the rest of Europe and hopefully release more! There are really big things we want to do, and have always wanted to, but I think it’s about breaking it down into something more manageable for us so we can sort of reach those things, otherwise your head gets carried away dreaming of crazy things you could be doing when you’re actually doing really crazy things now! Like when we played Rotterdam a couple weeks ago, it was the most insane thing ever. I’d never even been to the Netherlands before. It’s just a really beautiful city full of beautiful people and the shows were insane, and I think we played, like, the most fun show we’d ever played. So, I think it’s little things, you know.

J: If I was to be more lofty, I think I'd like to go play in the US. And I think a European tour would be nice next year. But I think again in more realistic terms, just get more music out. Like, I'm desperate to just record and release more music. But yeah, for me, bucket list is definitely an American tour.

I: I agree, ‘cause I know we both wanna do, like, a US roadtrip. The US is so different isn’t it?  It would be so cool. Or to play in Japan would be cool – shoegaze and the alt scene is so huge over there. 

Finally, what’s your go-to karaoke song?

J: I think it’s the same answer for both of us. Isn’t it? 

I: Love story by Taylor Swift. We do that every time we go to karaoke and it’s always a good one. 

Follow Lemondaze on Instagram to keep up with their future gigs and latest music, including their upcoming EP ‘subtext’ which will be released on the 5th of December.

---

Edited By Mahak Naddafi, Co-Music Editor