MT. MISERY

Image by Jodie Canwell

JASON JONES FINDS OUT HOW THE HARTLEPOOL BAND PROGRESSED FROM AN INTROSPECTIVE BEDROOM PROJECT TO LO-FI POP GLORY

“When I started making music by myself, before I met the rest of the band, I was a year or so out of uni. I didn’t really know what I was doing or what I wanted to do,” Mt. Misery frontman Andrew Smith explains frankly.

The Hartlepool natives are on the cusp of releasing their debut album, Once Home, No Longer, and while the songwriter – sharply articulate and charmingly modest – might once have been jettisoned by the throes of a post-academic lull, there’s no arguing that he and his bandmates have drifted their way towards a record that is as engaging and endearing as the lads behind it.

Initially a bedroom project for Andrew, the singer was joined by second guitarist Ste and drummer Lewis after just a couple of fledgling live shows. With bassist Eddie lending a hand onstage, Mt. Misery in its current incarnation was born.

For Andrew, it felt like an organic progression for a set of songs that had admittedly humble beginnings. “I had it in my head, maybe, but at the time when I was writing and recording, it seemed quite ambitious to start a band,” he says. “I didn’t really know anyone in my local music scene, so I just thought I could write these songs, record them myself, and just put them out there. That was the extent of my ambition, but it just kept growing from there.”

RICHLY TEXTURED BUT BOLDLY UNCLUTTERED, ONCE HOME, NO LONGER, IS A DELIGHTFULLY REALISED TAPESTRY OF LO-FI DREAM POP, PLEASING IN ITS FAMILIARITY AND FASCINATING IN ITS INTROSPECTION

The group’s sound is one of loving craft and aching warmth. Richly textured but boldly uncluttered, Once Home, No Longer, is a delightfully realised tapestry of lo-fi dream pop, pleasing in its familiarity and fascinating in its introspection. The album is made all the more impressive by the fact that the band, by and large, recorded the entire thing themselves in Andrew’s home studio, carving and fashioning the ten-song track list wholly in their own vision. Even the artwork was designed by Lewis himself.

To finally be on the brink of sharing such an intimate body of work – especially through the prism and fragmentation of a global pandemic – is an understandably surreal prospect for the three-piece. “It’s crazy,” Andrew points out. “But it’s really satisfying, especially because a lot of it we really have done ourselves. We did a bit of recording at a studio in Newcastle, but the majority of it has been done in this bedroom that I’m in now. For it to be coming out and for us to have taken control of so much of that process, it’s really gratifying. We got the test pressings back a few weeks ago, and it’s so exciting.

“Something like this, even though it’s quite low-key – putting out music in a physical format through a little label – when I started doing this, that would have been beyond my wildest dreams I think.” Everything Mt. Misery do is tempered by that natural humility, an unassuming decency that is as affable as the luscious slices of alt. pop with which they brim. If ever there was a debut album that could perhaps justify a smattering of immodesty, however, it’s probably Once Home, No Longer.

Mt. Misery release Once Home, No Longer via Prefect Records on 25th June. The band play The Georgian Theatre, Stockton on Saturday 26th June www.mtmisery.bandcamp.com