Palm Reader: Still Here, Always Evolving

PALM READER may well be one of the most respected bands of the UK underground in the past decade. A quick look at their musical output and it’s easy to see why. The Nottingham-based five-piece have just released their fourth full-length album, Sleepless. As with all their records, it reveals a band with an obvious desire to push boundaries and evolve, and, as always, they’ve done a great job.

The album follows 2018’s Braille, a critically-acclaimed record which turned its fair share of heads among the uninitiated. “I don’t know if the reception of Braille had an impact on us,” says vocalist Josh Mckeown. “I wouldn’t say it did, I feel like that was kind of the direction we were gonna inevitably go in anyway. When it comes to writing songs we only ever do what we want to do, we only ever write what we want to hear. So it wasn’t as if anything really informed any creative decisions other than at that precise moment in time what did we want to hear or what did we want to create. I mean it may well have done subconsciously, but it wasn’t like a conscious effort to replicate anything from Braille because of the response.”

Either way, as mentioned, the result marks an unsurprisingly significant evolution from its predecessor. When asked how they keep doing it, guitarist Andy Gillan tells us, “I think it’s a case of seeing what we’ve done previously and just looking at it a bit more objectively. You kind of look at it and go ‘these bits are great and seem to really resonate with people’, and ‘we really like these bits’, and for the most part they seem to dovetail. It’s kind of like a refining process.” “We were also quite conscious of the reception at shows,” adds Mckeown, “like what felt good to play live and what came across well and what we felt like represented us positively.”

Indeed, as a result of this refining process, PALM READER today are a far-cry from the chaotic hardcore band listeners heard on their debut full-length Bad Weather. “I think there are only a couple of bits on this record where you could go ‘they’re a hardcore band’,” says Gillan. “We will forever be influenced by it, because that’s a big part of who we were especially in the formative years. But it’s not like we grew out of it, we kind of just wanted to keep fumbling around in the dark and trying to find somewhere else to go and see what else was out there.” For Gillan, it’s an approach similar to Boston hardcore legends CAVE IN – “people still love that band regardless of the places they’ve stopped at on their journey.”

Mckeown adds, “we’ve always looked at the different aspects of our song-writing and creative output as strings to our bow as it were, and we’ve always wanted to try and find as many ‘strings’ as possible.” In fact, the frontman has never thought of PALM READER as ‘just’ a hardcore band. “I do remember feeling like we kinda stuck out a little bit, or didn’t fit in maybe is a better way of putting it. I’ve never personally felt like we were one of those bands. I’ve always felt like we were trying to push our sound in different directions, and it’s just now we’ve had more time to think about it.”

One of the most obvious ways PALM READER have pushed their sound on Sleepless in particular is through the extensive addition of textures. “I think we felt that with this record like there was a lot more breathing room to experiment with synths and fucking brass and everything else,” says Gillan. “A good friend of ours, Eric [Guenther] from THE CONTORTIONIST contributed a lot of the actual played keys and synth bits because he’s a wizard – and looks like one! He’d sent me all his parts and I was like ‘this is really cool but I think it’s just missing a little bit’. And then the little bit turns into another six-seven layers of little synth bits. I just love the ability to immerse myself in extra orchestration because you can take a rock song and make it this big. I think it’s fucking cool fun!”

In another first for PALM READER, Sleepless saw Mckeown make a conscious effort to look outside his own experiences when it came to writing lyrics. He tells us, “a lot of the time I’ll be writing lyrics and then after I’ve collected however many lyrics on a particular subject I’ll then realise what it is that I’m talking about and then there are other times like Willow for instance where that came from being told about a mother that lost her child.” From there, it’s a matter of finding the right song for the right words. “Whatever the song’s trying to say, if you can try and push further down that route then it has a lot more impact than you trying to force a subject matter into a song that doesn’t sound like that’s what you’re saying.”

For all their evolution, there’s no denying a common thread to all of the band’s work. Ever since their debut they’ve had a knack for marrying abrasive heaviness with beautiful melodicism. Gillan says, “I think we all love both aspects of it. So whenever something comes to being quite heavy, everyone will just jump on and be like ‘yeah, do this’. And then we can just put more discordance here and make it more percussive and more abrasive. Then we’ll come out the other end of it and it’ll be the converse of that and then we can go ‘more angels and unicorns and shit!’ We don’t ever really have many arguments about which way we think a track should go. It sort of builds itself and then we kind of bring it to life.”

It’s a strategy which has worked pretty well so far. 2020 marks PALM READER‘s tenth year as a band, a milestone they have mixed feelings on. “It feels amazing, firstly,” says Mckeown. “It also feels kind of surreal because… I mean none of this has ever been planned.” For Gillan, “it’s also in some respects a little bit sad, because there’s a huge number of people that we’ve met along the way that aren’t in our ‘regular rotation’.” This is something Mckeown feels too. “It gives you a chance to look back, it gives you a bit of perspective and like Andy said you kinda go ‘oh shit, wow, we’re the only ones left’.”

It’s definitely not easy for bands making heavy music in 2020, but it’s safe to say there’s no need to worry about compromises when it comes to PALM READER. “I think if that’s what the aim was, or that’s what the desire was, for our songs to be relevant in that sense, then I don’t think we’d be writing these songs,” says Mckeown. “If we wanted to be that relevant we’d be writing things that more people wanted to hear.” Gillan adds, “I think that’s the danger of writing for an audience, if the audience don’t like it, you’ve got nowhere to run. Whereas if you’re like us and write music for ourselves – we’re still here!”

Sleepless is out now via Church Road Records.

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