Start Listening To: LICE

From punk roots to philosophical epics, LICE unveil the sonic and intellectual journeys behind their revolutionary sound.

Welcome to an exclusive Q&A session with LICE, the trailblasing band that has been reshaping the boundaries of punk and experimental music. Hailing from the vibrant city of Bristol, LICE started as a raw punk outfit but have since evolved into a unique blend of industrial, minimalism, prog, and techno. Their upcoming album, Third Time At The Beach, promises to be a three-part epic that delves deep into our struggles to comprehend the world around us. In this conversation, we explore the band's inspirations, the conceptual framework of their new album, their creative evolution, and the influence of Bristol's cultural scene.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

We formed in Bristol, started out as a Birthday Party-aping punk band, gradually brought in shades of industrial, minimalism, prog and techno, and now we’re the greatest group in the history of recorded or non-recorded music. 

Your upcoming album, 'Third Time At The Beach,' is described as a three-part epic exploring our struggle to understand the world. What inspired the conceptual framework for this ambitious project?

It began when we were finishing our debut album WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear. That album had been about dissecting our initial identity as a punk band, and how we saw the genre itself: questioning how ideas about the world were formed, lived in the music, and how that music lived in the world.

Around that time Silas started reading more philosophy, introducing me to broader ideas about language, economics and reification. We wanted to broaden our scope, with an album about the world, life, and how we explain it.

He stormed ahead, writing music inspired by his readings, while I floundered on the lyrics. Eventually we went on this walk, where I explained I was struggling with lyrics as I was still trying to catch up with him on making sense of all this stuff. He said ‘that’s the album’. He wanted me to get down ideas that might sound naïve or ill-formed later, to capture that process of learning and unlearning.

Could you delve into the thematic journey of the album's three movements? How do each of these parts contribute to the overall exploration of learning and unlearning in today's world?

The first movement (‘Unscrewed’, ‘White Tubes’, ‘Red Fibres’) is about the child being introduced to the world, hammered into shape by the prevailing culture, and realising they’ve reached adulthood with a blinkered understanding of the world. The second (‘To The Basket’, ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’, Scenes From The Desert’, ‘Mown In Circles’) is about re-evaluating fundamental concepts like money, nationhood and language, so the music is a lot more disorientating and alien-sounding. The third (‘Fatigued, Confused’, ‘Third Time At The Beach’, ‘The Dance’) is about embracing these news ideas and incorporating them into a renewed sense of self, so is more celebratory in tone.

Throughout the album, the focus is on change. The music shifts between genres, textures and recording environments, and the lyrics dart back and forwards in time because – for me at least – that’s how explaining stuff works.

"Red Fibres" has been highlighted as a muscular and agitated lead single. What themes and ideas does this song encapsulate, and how does it set the tone for the rest of 'Third Time At The Beach'?

This song closes the first ‘movement’ in the album, where the child reaches adulthood and realises their understanding of the world is limited. I wanted to present this as a conflict between the curious mind and the mind forged by societal processes, so it centres around a fight between two characters: shipwreck survivors, following the ship scene in ‘White Tubes’. The curious mind kills the other and sets out to map the uncharted land they’ve arrived at, which sets up the second ‘movement’ in the album.

Your lyrics span ancient civilisations, the Industrial Revolution, outer space, and encounters with historical figures. How did you weave these elements into the album's narrative, and what role do these diverse settings play in conveying your message?

A lot of it’s to do with association and comparison. If I’m explaining something in conversation, I’ll reference things from history, literature, science or other things I’ve read or heard about, so the lyrics jump between those references constantly. As we make our way through the day, all those things we consume are rattling around in our heads – informing opinions, being conjured up by things we see, being invited into comparisons with other things. It’s erratic, and lurches about, but I think that’s true to life. 

'Third Time At The Beach' employs vocal manipulation, field recordings, and collage-like production techniques. How did these experimental approaches contribute to shaping the album's unique sonic landscape?

If you’re making an album about re-examining your most basic ideas about the world, it makes sense to have a lot of weird things happen to familiar sounds. Vocals get pitch-shifted and chopped up. Pianos are glitched. The sounds of a metal chair or a creaky door project like exposed junk from a bin-bag.

The lyrics about gradual learning ended up being mirrored in the recording process: a collage of stems cut together from home demos, studio recordings, field recordings and a few vocal takes I did in my room in the middle of the night.

Your debut album, 'WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear,' was well-received internationally. How has the band evolved creatively since then, and what new perspectives or techniques did you explore in the making of your second album?

When you slay the dragon of writing your debut album, it liberates you to start over in a way. We wanted to write a really good, unusual rock record, and I wanted to write lyrics that worked in their own right as a piece of experimental fiction – we felt we’d done all that with WASTELAND.

With Third Time At The Beach, the writing was smarter but less precious. We threw in everything – all the new things we’d gotten into over the years we spent writing WASTELAND that didn’t fit that record. I started writing lyrics with a more conventional respect for hooks, repetition and musical pacing, which made them make more sense as lyrics but also made them weirder. We recorded it piecemeal, and kept old things we liked, rather than doing it in one go in a studio. It's more alive, and in that I think it’s truer to the ideas behind the album. 

As a band formed in Bristol, how does the city's artistic and cultural scene influence your music and thematic explorations?

Bristol is an incredible place for experimental music, and we’ve drawn a huge amount from these astonishingly imaginative, brash, inventive minds around us. We’ve also drawn from the DIY spirit there: in lieu of a real industry presence in the city, you get a lot of people starting their own labels, running their own nights, and managing themselves. We did all that starting out, which definitely informed the way we think about our band, and is probably the reason we like to make things so hard on ourselves creatively.

You've performed at major festivals and toured extensively. How does the experience of live performance inform your approach to recording and producing music?

Unlike WASTELAND, in which the songs were honed live before we knocked them out in the studio, Third Time At The Beach was largely written during the lockdowns when we couldn’t perform. In fact, we played almost none of the songs on this album before it was mastered, and we’ve been trying to learn them live after the fact – which has been exactly as hard as you’d expect. However, there’s a tendency to think about how some things might work or not work at gigs: when we put the techno beat in ‘White Tubes’, it fit with the narrative of being ‘hammered into shape’ but we also thought it would be fun live.

The album title, 'Third Time At The Beach,' suggests a recurring or evolving experience. What does the beach symbolise in the context of this album, and how does it tie into the broader themes of understanding and agency?

It comes from the title-track, which discusses three visits to the beach. Today we go to the beach as a normal act of recreation. Once upon a time, we also came from the beach. In the world of debunked science, there was also a theory called the ‘Aquatic Ape Hypothesis’, suggesting that at one point in our evolution we lived by the water like sea lions: a briefly popular explanation for how we went hairless, began walking upright, and (through dietary changes) developed more powerful brains.

This sits at the heart of the album. It’s all about life, and how we understand the stories of our lives: through experience, accepted science and the (much more fun) fake stuff.

What do you love right now?

Laurie Anderson’s new music.

What do you hate right now?

Sunburn (N.B. that’s skin damage caused by the sun, rather than the MUSE song of that name which is obviously excellent).

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

Architecture & Morality by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. A perfect pop album, which foregrounded my interest in experimental electronic music. They were also the first band I saw in concert, and are the band I’ve seen most often aside from those we’ve toured with.

Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for LICE's future?

In terms of specific things, I’d love to return to Reading & Leeds. Aside from that, I think the best thing about being in this band – apart from hanging out together – is meeting other people as weird as us, that get what we’re trying to do. We want to play for, meet, and get our records heard by as many of these people as possible.