In the past year, we've fallen in love with London's Dahlia Sleeps and the mesmerising stories they tell through their music. To celebrate the release of their EP this Friday, the group take us through the inspiration behind Love, Lost and why it's a special release for them.
Honesty
The only real thing we set out to do on this EP was to tell the truth in its entirety, even if that meant making ourselves very vulnerable. That ethos runs through everything from the lyrics to the artwork. It also meant separating ourselves from any expectations and only making the music we wanted to make.
Intimacy
Most of the songs on Love, Lost are about the many colours of intimacy. Physical closeness paired with emotional distance, unresolved feelings, the challenges we face at trying to open up – across all types of relationships.
Organic Sounds
We introduced organic sounds into this EP in a way we haven’t done before. A hundreds of year old harmonium, out of tune piano, live kit. Of course, you still have the electronic sounds, synthesisers, ambience that is at our core but our live set has started feeding back into our writing process and that has meant bringing in live instruments much more.
Poetry
Reading the work of writers who leave nothing unsaid, who are fearless, or who are just exceptional at their art has inspired us to make sure that nothing is included on this EP that doesn’t have a place. Picking up books by Nayyirah Waheed, Mary Oliver, Danez Smith, Yrsa Daley Ward, Audre Lorde, Kate Tempest massively fed into the writing process. The studio was full of these pages always. It also helped us to create an EP that tied together like a story – musically and lyrically - rather than being disparate tracks glued together.
Music (New + Old)
It’s funny, that rumbling sensation you get in your gut when you hear something that you just can’t put your finger on. You can’t figure out exactly why but it just seems to drag up something in you and inspire no end. We're always looking for that, it might be an entire song or maybe even just the sound of a single note or vocal inflection, but it feeds that motivation – it just pull all of the other things to the surface. You can listen to some of the songs that inspired us on our 2018 playlist.
Love, Lost will be available this Friday. Until then, enjoy their previous singles below. If you're in the UK, click here to find out where you can catch them live.
'Love, Lost':
'Settle Down':
'Storm':
