Slow Crush: Bent But Not Broken

“I’ve just made friends with a cat, so I’m very happy!” is the spirited response we’re greeted with by Isa Holliday of SLOW CRUSH when we ask how things are going. It’s just a few weeks until the release of their second full-length Hush and she’s palpably excited to finally share their labour of love with the world.

“It’s not been mega, mega long,” she explains of the gestation period of the album. “We recorded in January this year and we had the majority of it written and all planned out at the time we did our last tour in February 2020.” The sudden disruption brought on by the pandemic, though, worked in their favour somewhat. “With the way everything was planned out in 2020, it would’ve been non-stop touring pretty much. So it was like there was no sort of, breathing room to be able to focus on finishing up the album [and] finalising everything,” she expands. “So that gave us that space and time to focus on perfecting everything that we already had and rearranging some stuff.”

It’s immediately apparent that Hush is a more considered and deliberated-over album than its predecessor; Aurora was by no means rushed, but the extra time granted to Hush’s writing and recording cycle has pushed them to new heights, even without being able to road-test any new material with crowds. “I think, we’re fortunate enough to have an area, aka the living room, which we sort of reorganised to give each other enough space to maintain social distance, and we made sure that it was ventilated enough,” Isa explains of their writing arrangements as they finished off the album during lockdown, though their initial method of “sending ideas through WhatsApp, just sharing different lines or ideas” is something they’ve actually done from the very beginning of the band.

These ideas can come from the unlikeliest of places, too; “it could be something lyrically or vocally that can trigger an idea for a song, or most of the time, it’s something that will be expanded on, just a sound,” Isa begins then laughs as she recalls one of these unlikely events. “We recently heard an ice cream van passing as we were practising and [we were] like, okay, record that, let’s see if we can build something on that!” Taking inspiration from almost anywhere to write lends Hush an ethereal but somehow grounded quality; it’s taken not just from personal experiences but “a feeling that is captured in the music” as Isa puts it. It’s a uniquely transportive album, from the soft beauty of opener Drown that then gives way to a dissonant Blue; it even closes on a particularly atonal moment with Bent And Broken but the most important aspect of the album is that it’s a journey. “I think everyone is kind of looking for an escape,” she theorises. “Especially like, now that everyone’s been sort of locked up. I think generally [people want] something that can give you the sense that you can just escape reality for an hour or so”.

It brings us to what SLOW CRUSH see themselves; the aforementioned closer, Bent And Broken is to them “a perfect example of how many different moods are captured in Hush. There’s a very sort of 90s indie vibe to that song,” as Isa puts it, “it is something that’s quite emotional in terms of lyrics and in the intensity as the song progresses. It doesn’t all have to be dreamy and it doesn’t all have to be heavy.” That succinct summary of their sound; a broad kaleidoscope of influences that’s mainly lumped under the shoegaze banner, but also draws influence from as disparate realms as noise and hardcore, is something they’re also very proud of. It means that there’s always something for everyone in their sound and lets them play some very mixed bills. “I think what lends well to our music, is that we can play [those] bills. It’s kind of a curse and a blessing, I suppose, that there’s no single bill that’s purely SLOW CRUSH. But then in a way, that keeps it interesting for everyone. If you have four hours of the same thing, you don’t have a palate cleanser.”

To describe themselves in some ways as a “palate cleanser” is an interesting one as the musical journey Hush goes on is primarily emotional in nature, a way of exorcising emotion and coming out the other side anew, rather than a personal document of their own lives. “I think that everybody should just find their own special connection,” Isa declares, “I feel that music is versatile, it can be personal. But at the end of the day, it’s whatever you like and it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks of it. So that’s, I think, the most important thing [about Hush], that they can like it how they want to and connect their own stories.”

Hush is out now via Church Road Records. 

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