After making such a positive impression at the first Temples Festival that they were brought back for a second round, Bristolian post-hardcore genre-benders Svalbard have topped a string of invigorating EPs with the release of their debut full-length One Day All This Will End, an unpredictable record that captures the band’s live urgency while showing a few sides that fans might not have known existed. Guitarist and vocalist Serena Cherry graced us with what turned out to be her first ever phone interview to outline this new chapter in the band’s development.
It seems like your appearances at Temples Festival gained you a lot of exposure. Did those shows feel significant to you?
Oh, definitely. We’ve played twice and both of them went really well – they were some of the best gigs we’ve ever played, and we were really honoured just to be asked back to play this year. We were a bit worried this time because we were on at the same time as Torche and we thought, quite understandably, that everyone would be going to watch them but the place was still packed while we played. It was really amazing to appear on a line-up like that, with all those bands that we love, and merch-wise we did really well both times we played, so it felt really good.
Do you see Temples making a big difference to Bristol’s music scene, and to the heavy scene in the UK?
Yes, because Bristol doesn’t have a lot going on in terms of the good side of the heavy stuff. Sure, we’ll get naff tour packages of reformed nu-metal bands coming through but we don’t get a lot of the bands that you see at Temples, like Portal or Converge, so I think it’s definitely made more of an impact on Bristol. They’re realising that there is a need for it over here, and it helps local bands like Sonance too because it gives them a chance to play something really cool. I feel like Svalbard have never really identified ourselves as a Bristol band because there’s not really a scene here that we can relate to but then something like Temples happens and it makes us feel like we’re a t home again. I think they’ve done an amazing job. I used to be into black metal and would travel to Norway to go to underground black metal festivals and now I see the same thing happening here, with people coming from all over Europe to see these doom and hardcore bands. I think that is really impressive.
After your set last year, I ranted and raved about to anyone who’d listen but unfailingly, I’d mention your name and people would say, “Svalbard? They’re Scandinavian, yeah?” Eh, no…
We’re not even named after the actual place. We took it from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, where it’s one of the settings, but then not long afterwards I started sponsoring some polar bears and getting letters in – obviously hand-written by them – and they were from Svalbard, and I thought, “Oh, it’s all tying together! The name’s for a reason…”
There does seem to be a recurring ursine theme in your art…
Especially polar bears. There’s a grace there and I think they’re quite misunderstood creatures. Polar bears, to me, represent the survival of nature in the face of climate change. We do like bears – all nature, actually.
You did the artwork for the new album, as well as for some of your EP covers in the past. It’s really strong, direct stuff. Who are your influences as far as that side of your expression is concerned?
I have two different styles. I do artwork specifically for the band, in that Mark, our drummer, and Liam tell me the kind of things and other albums they want it to look like and I draw to requirements, and then when I’m not doing that I have a whole other art thing, called Cherry Cats, where I make gig posters, cards and all sorts of prints, and that’s completely different. My influences, art-wise, are people like Jay Ryan and Tara McPherson. Their styles look nothing like mine, but if you saw the work I did outside of the band it would make sense. It’s all pastels and kawaii cats, Japanese cute kind of stuff. I like to make gig posters for bands where it’s inappropriately cute – I just did one for Full Of Hell where it’s cats dressed as unicorns flying around on rainbows. I never studied art or anything, I just try quite hard. With the band stuff, it looks fairly direct – the bird on Flightless Birds, and the polar bear, and the new one, which is just a wave, because I don’t really know what I’m doing and I have no depth perception. I just sit there trying until it looks passable. The Svalbard stuff is more like Richey Beckett’s. He does really amazing stuff but we can’t afford to use him so I sit there and try to make stuff that looks vaguely like his. The cover for the new one, the waves, was actually our second choice. I watched a film called Songs Of The Sea, possibly the most beautiful animated film I’ve ever seen, and afterwards I went home and drew the cover for what I wanted it to be. It was all these hills and trees that were bent over sideways, and inside the hills were burrows filled with animals that are normally hunted, like there was a badger set and a fox set. I just finished that one but obviously everyone has to agree on what it looks like and I don’t think they really felt it really represented the album, and then I reluctantly drew that wave and that’s the album cover. I’m being way too honest.
“I don’t want to be asked to play something because of my gender, I want to be asked because my band fit the bill. People need to remind themselves that positive discrimination is still discrimination.”
This was your first full-length. Did you find these songs more difficult than your EP ones, as I know you’re all quite fastidious when it comes to writing in general?
Yeah, it was harder to write for the album because we have a bit of an agonising songwriting process. There are so many songs and riffs and bits where we write them and, if it’s a little bit clunky or one person isn’t into it, we just get rid of it. For what’s on the album, there was so much more material that just ended up on the cutting room floor. I think we’re quite hard on ourselves when it comes to writing and it was quite hard with the full-length because before, when we were self-releasing, it just fell out in jams. There we go, we have four songs, and they all fit together and that was one release. With the album, there was a deadline coming up and you have to have everything together and fit for requirement. It kind of saps the creativity when you’re on the spot. We were in between bassists too so writing without a bassist, we had to keep in mind what they’d be doing. It was quite difficult and everyone’s incredibly opinionated in Svalbard, even with the lyrics. I’ll write the lyrics and have to condense them down to fit the songs, which I do over and over, and then I have to show it to the guys. If there’s bits they don’t like, that’s got to be changed as well, which is hard because you’ve fit an entire section of lyrics around one song and then you have to go back and rewrite it, change the word structure and then it doesn’t make sense anymore. It was hard, I’m not going to lie, but it was fun.
Lyrically, you’ve been influenced in the past by Karl Marx and Zygmunt Bauman. Are there any new influences at work on the new album?
I feel I’ve been a lot more direct this time with the lyrics and they’re a lot more openly political. Some of the songs before weren’t so obvious in what I was writing about so this time they’re more compartmentalised. Disparity is about another sociologist, Erving Goffman, who writes about the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, the inner self and the presented self and all the dissonance that can occur in this gap. It was written in 1959 but reading it I felt it was even more relevant now – the fragmented state of identity online and the discontent that brews when someone can have a projected self that is online, a perfected highlight reel, and a real self that’s never going to live up to that. You’re painting these portraits and staring at them, thinking you’ll never look or be like that.
Expect Equal Respect was one I’d spent ages putting off writing about because I didn’t think it was necessary to tell people to treat others with equal respect but I did an interview as we were writing the album and it had a question with the statement “Svalbard has had more success for being female-fronted, blah blah blah, what’s it like being a girl?” You get so many comments like that, that it’s your selling point or novelty factor, and my answer was, A – we’re not female-fronted, and B – every time you refer to someone’s sex in that fashion, you reduce them to it. Suddenly, I wasn’t the guitarist any more, I was ‘the woman’. It’s incredibly belittling to experience that. You feel like people don’t notice what you’re writing or what they’re listening to but they notice you’re a girl and they fixate on that over everything else that’s going on. There’s a lot of woman who do it now. There’s a thing in London called ‘Find the Female Headliner.’ It’s all stuff like Girl Fest and Women Fest – we got asked for something that was actually called Good For A Girl. I don’t want to be asked to play something because of my gender, I want to be asked because my band fit the bill. People need to remind themselves that positive discrimination is still discrimination. They don’t need to put up a wall and say “Find the female headliner.” No, just find a good headliner. If you make an issue of it, it’s like you’re highlighting it into this thing that it doesn’t need to be.
One other song that is quite important is the first song, Perspective. There seems to be a trend at the moment for being sad and negative, wearing your broken heart on your sleeve. I’m not saying people can’t express themselves – that’s a good thing. It’s what hardcore is there for, but some feel it gives them validation or more integrity to be as sad as possible. People suffer from depression and they suffer from the stigmatisation that comes with mental illness and I think it’s a really dangerous mindset to glamourise this. We’ve played with bands who’ve given the most audacious speeches between songs about how their pain is so important and that’s fine. I’m all for expression but it doesn’t give you conviction. You don’t need to actively promote your despair to give yourself integrity. It’s a little bit dangerous to hold onto all the negativity in your life for the sake of how you come across in your band.
On the new album especially, you do a good job of maintaining some level of mystery. It’s obtuse, but in a good way. Was there a conscious effort to create something that people would perhaps make more of an effort with?
I don’t think it was a conscious effort but I am very much aware of us being a ‘lean-forward’ band. When you do media studies, they talk about ‘sit-back,’ where you sit back and let it come bombarding towards you in an obvious way, and ‘lean-forward’, where you have to put the effort in. I think we are very much like that. People need to meet us halfway because not everything is obvious. It’s important not to give everything away straight away or to be so blatant or direct. I struggle with being direct at the best of times but we didn’t want the album to meet everyone’s expectations straight away. There’s quite a few new little things, like me doing clean singing and some of the more straightforward rock songs, where there’s not as much intricacy and it’s just riffing away on some chords, which we hadn’t done before. We definitely wanted to throw in a few curveballs so that it didn’t just sound like Svalbard, again. I wanted it to be a little bit diverse and hopefully surprising in places.
“We didn’t want the album to meet everyone’s expectations straight away.”
Did the compiling of the EP material for your retrospective help to direct the changes that you made on this album?
Yeah, definitely. That felt like a really good thing to do, a release where all the old stuff was there, together. It was what it was and you can hear the changes from the first 7” up until the Pariso split. You can hear people’s voices being heard more and you could hear my leads changing and us finding different approaches for songwriting. I don’t think we’d ever write a song like Melting Hands now, where it’s 8 minutes long and goes off on a post-rock tangent at the end for no real reason. It felt really nice to have the old stuff almost laid to rest, feeling that we can move on and expand a little. It’s our first release on Holy Roar too so it feels like a second chapter.
So would that make the Pariso split a bridging point between the two chapters?
Oh yeah. Writing with another band changes your creative approach, and that was the first one where we had to write to deadlines so it made us more focused and willing to try different directions. When we wrote those two songs with Pariso, I was so nervous because we were split into two groups – Liam and Mark were with Stu from Pariso and I was with Alex Fitzpatrick, and I thought, “Oh my God, they’re going to be really good and I’m going to be shit. They’re going to realise I can’t play guitar and rely on effect pedals.” I was really nervous that I was going to be exposed as a fraud at our first practice but it went so well. The Pariso approach to songwriting is very different from ours – very off-the-cuff and of-the-moment, full of energy and they don’t dwell or linger like we do. It was nice to work in that environment, where I wasn’t umming and ahhing over a lead section for two weeks. If it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t you move on. It made a real difference to how we write now and it feels nice to break the mould a little bit and do something different by collaborating. I think more bands should do it. Why not? If you’re both into each other’s band, something interesting can come of it and it breaks the monotony of writing as a four-piece all the time together.
Is there anyone else that you think Svalbard would collaborate well with?
Kvelertak. I would love to do a collaboration with them. I think all of their albums are so eclectic but they work. It never sounds disjointed and their there’s a real sense of fun about it, especially on their latest one. They’re not afraid to put in a poppy chorus. As a collaboration, I think our styles would complement each other quite well.
What about covers? Who would you like to hear cover you and which song?
I’d like to hear something done really differently, like someone’s interpretation of one of the slow songs, perhaps Leave It, the last song off the Gone Tomorrow 10”. I’d like to hear Katie Malco, who has the most beautiful singing voice and really amazing guitar tone, interpret a song like that, and make it all ballady and soft. It’s quite difficult because I can’t imagine our songs not being done by us. Maybe, to swing it the other way, have Nails doing one of our faster songs. Take all the beauty out to see what’s underneath.