Delaire The Liar: All Their Labour
London alt rock trio DELAIRE THE LIAR planted their flag firmly in the ground as ones to watch with 2021’s Eat Your Own EP, a deeply personal and often harrowing account of traumas that blended anthemic melody with punk snarl and more than a tinge of emo. While they did want to tour and play as much as they could, the world had other plans, particularly when it came time to write new music. Vocalist/guitarist Ffin Colley had a health scare and a stint in hospital, but the second he was out, they found themselves raring to get writing.
“I got quite sick at the end of last year. Nearly died. It was pretty cool,” he grins with characteristic bluntness. “We wanted to get this EP out pretty quickly, but it turns out releasing music is actually quite hard,” Ffin laughs about the longer-than-anticipated delay from writing the EP and having it recorded by March, only to find they had to wait until September to release it while they took care of all the various bits and pieces they had to, as an independent band who have designed the entire EP package from the ground up.
“It feels like a proper milestone for us,” Ffin explains, “it’s really establishing who we are, where we want to go next and how fluid we can be in terms of how we present ourselves. It’s one of the most exciting releases for us.” Bassist and co-vocalist Em Lodge agrees; “having this new writing process has been stressful, but really rewarding.” That new writing process she’s referring to is a marked change from how they previously approached writing music. With releases up to Eat Your Own, they took a deeply personal approach to lyrics and songwriting, but Self Defence changes that entirely.
Instead, while they still draw on a core of personal experience, it’s far more exaggerated, weaving fictional tales centred around the concept of self defence and how far people will go to protect themselves or those they love. There’s a very good reason for that; as Ffin tells us, “drawing from personal experience a lot can be counterproductive to your own emotional progress. Revisiting experiences like that can be difficult and insincere to do when you’ve moved on from those places.” Instead, they opted to take a new approach that wedded this to tall tales that challenge listeners’ views on the topics.
Self Defence is “an EP where we look at different scenarios where you have to fight for yourself, or others and their betterment, and [it] has more depth than your typical understanding of self defence,” as Ffin explains. The four songs examine different scenarios as well as challenging the typical view of it as “physical, inflammatory or aggressive” to ask listeners to examine how they themselves might react. The first, angel number, examines the idea of love and shutting yourself off from it; it’s also the first DELAIRE THE LIAR song to feature Em taking the lead on vocals throughout it.
Talking about the decision to take the lead, Em says, “we recorded the demo with Ffin doing it, but when we thought back to Furnace and how much people liked it, [with that song] I reached a new confidence in my vocal ability.” Taking that chance turned out to be the best idea for the song; it not only suited her vocal range, but Ffin’s lyrics spoke to a part of her, too. “It’s focused a lot around love, not even in a romantic sense,” she begins, “I’ve always been a person with a lot of love to give, maybe to people who don’t deserve it. But that’s just who I am.”
Perhaps less directly relatable is all your labour, at least on the surface, as it’s about bank robbery; more specifically, as Ffin says, “it’s about a person’s house getting repossessed, and robbing the bank to make sure their family’s alright.” While it’s more fictitious than directly emotive, there’s definite lines to be drawn between it and the modern day. With a cost of living crisis squeezing families, rent hikes, food prices spiralling, interest rates out of control too, it’s very much about being pushed past a breaking point like those.
But again, Em explains, it’s still open to interpretation. Its lyric “they took everything away from me / I remember every anniversary” she related to something in her own life (other than the “put the money in the bag” line that, if you’ve seen DELAIRE THE LIAR live, you’ve seen Em scream with glee). “There are moments where you’re forced to make decisions that you either feel proud of or really bad about,” Ffin states. It’s one that relates both to all your labour as well as closing track forebodies, that examines the concept of self and the decisions we make.
“It’s about the self and how it fractures, how you present yourself to people in a situation and what’s your true core,” he explains. It’s the idea that we have to live with the decisions we make, and whether we own those decisions or instead choose to bury them and fracture our sense of self. It’s also partly inspired by THE CHARIOT, who Ffin laughs summed up their entire EP in just two lines of their song In; ‘we’re all capable of love / we’re all capable of cancer’. “You’re capable of both things – but what if you have to choose?”
Self Defence is out now via Rude Records.
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