Maybeshewill: Looking To The (re)Future

MAYBESHEWILL have long been considered one of the best and inventive bands in post-rock, but in 2016 they dramatically bowed out with a recorded live show that sold out almost instantaneously, in spite of their thinking that nobody would care. Then, having teased some new music and even being confirmed for festival appearances including ArcTanGent, they announced a brand new album entitled No Feeling Is Final; with that in mind, we couldn’t resist getting in touch with the band to get their thoughts on why now was the right time for their return, being as DIY as they can and what other bands could learn from it.

It’s early evening when we sit down with guitarist John Helps; the first thing we ask is what made now the right time for them to return? As he reveals, it’s something that wasn’t necessarily on the cards for a while but “everyone had still been making music individually for other projects, or just for themselves, and there started to form a bit of a collection of songs that we were all really into,” as he puts it. That enthusiasm and how natural it felt for them to start sharing work together again sparked something, “and it felt, like, extremely natural to start sharing that kind of stuff backwards and forwards, then to get in the studio and record it. But we’ve kind of, followed the songs really. Once the music started to appear, we had conversations about other stuff about you know, how we wanted to use the band to talk about these things that are important to us. But first and foremost, having some music that we were excited about making was the sort of tinder that has reignited things.”

Thanks to this newfound enthusiasm for the music they were making together and the distance from their last album (2014’s Fair Youth), they took stock of what mattered to them and what it meant to them to be in a band. As John explains, as they moved towards their initial hiatus, the band had started to feel less and less like something organic, and more like “a bit of a machine that we felt we had to keep feeding to keep existing,” he explains. “We had to make a record, and then we had to go on tour for three or four months of the year and dedicate the entire time to doing this band. It sort of took putting the brakes on and stepping away from it to realise, we’re not answering to anyone. We don’t have a record label that was pushing us to do that, it was just in ourselves thinking that was what we needed to do.” Stepping away let them come back on new terms, focusing on the music and the sheer joy of creation; “we’ve been able to take our time and enjoy the process of figuring out how to do the band in a way that works for everyone,” he explains.

Very much a DIY band, they’ve always done as much as possible in-house but haven’t been afraid to ask for some help; they’ve always managed and tour managed themselves, had the same press agent since day one, who they’re proud to call a good friend now. This new album is once more self-produced and this time, they’re releasing it on their own label, Robot Needs Home Collective, that they’ve been working on for some time. When we put it to him that it’s akin to AMENRA’s Church Of Ra, he doesn’t disagree. “In the intervening years [since going on hiatus], we’ve been releasing stuff from other bands, WAKING AIDA and we work with a musician from Leicester called GRACE PETRIE. So when we were talking about coming back, the idea to do it ourselves came up and I think, the challenge of doing that [self-releasing the album] was the most alluring thing,” he explains. So they’ve helped others out who don’t have necessarily obvious musical connections (GRACE PETRIE being a protest folk singer) but they are, as John puts it “on the same wavelength, perhaps ideologically or in the way we think about doing things.”

That ideology permeates the record from start to finish and while they’re an instrumental band so there’s no lyrics to speak of, they make their position clear with second track Zarah, which takes its name from Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South. There’s a sample of her maiden speech to Parliament where she squarely lays the blame for the current climate crisis at the foot of capitalism and ruthless exploitation in the name of profit, something that we must band together across borders to rally against. This was something that they were excited to do – and something Zarah herself was willing to do, recently sharing the single’s release on her official Twitter profile, too.

Despite the damning speech and the tone of some titles (We’ve Arrived At The Burning Building, Complicity, to name but two), he’s very clear that No Feeling Is Final carries a message of hope. As the album unfurls into closer Tomorrow, there’s a clear sense of there being a better world that can be built, should we choose to. At a smaller level, bands aren’t beholden to giant labels and don’t have to be machines constantly churning out new content and globally, we can fight the climate crisis and build a better world.

No Feeling Is Final is out now via Robot Needs Home Collective.

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