Human+ was our second OLDER album, released in 2021, and looking back now it feels tied to one of the strangest periods most of us have lived through. When we started writing it, the world hadn’t fully tipped upside down yet. The album wasn’t intended as a “lock-down album” or a political statement. It was really about individual freedom, identity and honesty inside relationships.
A lot of the songs circled around this idea that relationships only work when two people are still allowed to be themselves. Without self-worth, individuality and space to breathe, the “us” can become a battleground instead of a partnership. That theme runs right through the album.
Tracks like Talkback explored the exhausting noise of modern life, where everything becomes left versus right, outrage and intransigent opinions. But underneath all of that, we kept coming back to something simpler: how people actually treat each other behind closed doors matters far more than what slogans they shout publicly.
In particular the tracks Circles, Maybe and Coffee, all touched on those endless conversational loops people can get trapped in, talking around problems rather than through them.
A lot of the videos were created during lock-downs without really meaning to become “lock-down videos”. Renovating the house accidentally gave us these strange empty spaces to film in – bare rooms, no curtains, no furniture, bleak walls and odd lighting. It suited the mood perfectly. Underground probably captured that feeling most strongly. The idea of mentally checking out when the world starts to feel too loud, too controlling, too impossible to fit into. That sense of retreating underground emotionally while life carries on above you. Looking back now, the imagery of empty streets and stillness accidentally became very tied to that moment in history.
Switch is to date the only OLDER instrumental we’ve released. A simple musical loop that grows in intensity paired with footage of nature’s decay, emptiness and abandoned spaces. Even now, hearing it takes us straight back there. Not necessarily to fear, but to that strange feeling that the world had quietly switched from the old to the new overnight.
Oddly though, we weren’t miserable while making Human+. The songs simply happened to collide with the times we were living through. Humans adapt, we move forward and we survive. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Julie stopped colouring her hair and decided to just let it grow out naturally which somehow became symbolic of the whole period really. Holding on to some semblance of youth, onto the past seemed at the time to be pointless. There were ‘dress-up Fridays’ in the media to make people feel good during lock-down but we took the opposite path. We dressed down and stayed that way! Letting go and embracing a natural look was more in keeping with reality and has remained so in the years that have followed.
The album closes with Home, still one of our favourite songs. It was inspired by a very real health scare and the uncomfortable reality of wondering what life would look like if one of us was suddenly gone. It sounds dark on paper, but strangely it never felt dark to us. Home wasn’t written as a song about death, it was written as a celebration of a full life, a song about acceptance, freedom and returning to somewhere peaceful when your dance card is finally full. And thankfully, in the end, the all-clear came… but not until after Julie laid down the vocals (yes, she was singing her own funeral song!). Slightly awkward but all’s well that end’s well…
