Rosie, on your end, I understand that you wrote “No Repair.” I find that the outro in your writing is a little more hopeful. I want to know if that’s intentional between you two, or if you guys bring that out of each other naturally.

RLD: I feel like I’m maybe a more optimistic person than Chris, am I justified in saying that?

CS: I think the difference is more that “No Repair” was written a little while after a traumatic event. I was in the traumatic event, that’s a prospective-based [thing]. But yeah, generally, Rosie is a little bit more optimistic than me, which isn’t super difficult.

RLD: I feel like in my art, I’m always trying to write towards hope. But, Chris makes a good point that “No Repair” was started… I started writing it a year after the difficult thing that it was about, and that distance is definitely important. And I think there’s a sense of acceptance that comes through in it as well.

CS: If I wrote “Massif Central” now it would basically be a karaoke song.

After that situation was sorted, which I hope it was, what did that feel like?

CS: It was an immediate catharsis, a crushing relief. I’m a permanent resident in Canada now, so I feel a lot more settled. I think really it was just this feeling of… I’m from the UK, I’m not sure I consider that my home now, because I haven’t really been back for a meaningful length of time in a while. I’d just moved in 2019 to Berlin, and then moved back to Montreal. So I really didn’t have much of a concept of a home. At that point, Montreal was kind of the closest thing to it, just because I’ve lived here for a while. All my friends are from here, at this point, or most of my friends are from here. So, to feel kind of rejected by that homeland was a bit of a blow. And so I think now that things are settled, I feel I feel a lot more settled as a result.

On the production side of things, I was looking at the liner notes of I Held the Shape on Bandcamp. I see you both produce everything, either individually or together. In terms of that process, are you guys just doing your own little snippets on the side and then filling out each other’s? How do you manage recording in two different places?

RLD:  Chris is more of a producer than I am for sure. And you’ll notice that his name crops up a little more in the credits than mine. But when we’re writing, we both like to be in our own space alone and come up with the ideas in the sounds, and then we’ll send things back and forth. So a lot of the ones that are co-produced between us are ones that either I came up with the bare bones of and then would send to Chris, and he would flesh out the arrangements. Or alternatively, Chris would come up with the bulk of the sound on his own, and then send it to me, and I would figure out the synth sound for this section or add a chord change for the next section or things like that.

In terms of that songwriting, how has the experience of making this record changed your songwriting or moved it forward?

CS: We wanted this album to be a real showcase of what we can do, songwriting-wise. So I don’t know, harmonically. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here. 

RLD: And stylistically, too. I do have anticipatory fears of people writing about the album and being like, ‘It’s all over the place. It’s not cohesive, it doesn’t make sense.’ My hope is that it kind of touches on these different styles and has the  throughline of our essence and our core sensibility that runs through all of it.

It’s interesting that you touch on people writing about the album, Rosie, because I know you also work in music journalism. I don’t know if you consider yourself a critic, a writer, or a journalist, but there’s the timeless perceived separation between artists and critics. And I’m curious how you feel about that.

RLD: I think it’s definitely perceived because I think there are more people who do both and go back and forth than are generally acknowledged. Someone who comes to mind is JJ Skolnik at Bandcamp, who’s writing and is then also very involved in making punk music.  I think there’s a lot of music writers who are totally involved in their local scenes and making music and making stuff happen. 

If you follow the discourse on Twitter, every few weeks, some musician will come out like, ‘Music criticism is bad, music writers don’t get what artists are doing. And we do it for the fans.’ And I think, I don’t know, there’s an unfortunate perceived antagonism between the two, when to me, the job of a music critic is to add meaning and depth and provide an interpretive framework for the art. And when you’re an artist, and you read something by someone who totally seems to get what you’re going for, I think that’s a really powerful feeling. Which is not to say that critics should write for the artists, it’s important to be independent as a critic, but I think that there’s also a symbiosis that can happen between the two In an ideal situation. 

I’ve also read reviews with criticism in them of our work, and that makes me reflect on what we’re doing. And something I take forward in a positive and constructive way. So I think that the two really feed each other.

More than people would see from the general division. 

RLD: Totally. I mean, the only people who benefit from the kind of antagonism between music writers and artists are big business in music, who are trying to just draw eyes away from the fact that no one is getting paid. Writers aren’t getting paid, musicians aren’t getting paid. So we’re not enemies.