Interview: Goat Girl

When it comes to Goat Girl, you can believe the hype. Their politically conscious lyricism and catchy yet abrasive tunes — never restricted by genre — make for an invigorating listen, a reminder that music can be more than entertainment, and act as a documentation of the rage of a generation. When our future children ask us what we thought of Brexit or the Conservatives gaining power yet again in 2017, perhaps there will be nothing more apt than telling them to put on Goat Girl’s debut and let the raw anger sink in.

On their new album, ‘On All Fours’, the group show themselves yet again to be great documenters of our time. Trading punk directness for a more psychological complexity, the girls look at the impact of modern living on our individual psyches, including mental illness, everpresent misogyny and the racist guIer press. With the addition of new bassist Holly, who joined the band after Naima Jelly left in 2018, the band zoom called from Lottie and Rosy’s house to discuss the new album as well as writing together and subverting expectations.

So it’s been pretty crazy for you guys these past two years since the release of your debut. When did you start writing the material for the new album?

Rosy: It was kinda when Holly joined, wasn’t it?

Holly: I started playing gigs with you guys in like September of 2018 but we were touring a lot then so I think it was probably 2019 like at the beginning. We went away to a farm for like a week which was really good.

Rosy: We were practising at Ellie’s mum’s house in her garage quite a lot of the time, so we wrote a lot of it there and then a lot of it on the farm. It was more like we did a lot of jamming and then we had time to turn that into more structured songs.

Ellie: Initially we wrote a lot of songs and were just trying to work with them. But I don’t think any of us really liked them so we just grabbed them and kept a couple, reworked them and then we went away to the farm. For the first couple of months we were just warming up.

Lottie: Yeah I think initially, it was about us getting used to writing and collaborating together, I don’t think we did that before as much. [On the last album] someone would bring a song and we’d add our own parts but it never felt like it was created altogether from the same place. I think it took a while to adjust to the way we’re doing things now.

Holly, was it easy to find your place in the band from the beginning?

Holly: Yeah, it was weirdly easy — I didn’t find it difficult at all. We just seemed to get on really well. We started playing together and we didn’t really know how it was gonna go, if we would start writing together or whatever, but when we started jamming and it just felt natural.

I’d met some of the girls beforehand but we weren’t like proper mates or anything but we’d bumped into eachother before. There were lots of odd occasions — I bumped into Rosy a couple of times at the Great Escape and the Windmill, at just random gigs. And then Lottie and I ended up having a lot of mutual friends — my exboyfriend works at the Windmill doing sound and he also knew Ellie’s boyfriend and stuff like that. So it was just inevitable, I guess.

Read the full interview in Issue Twenty-Eight