The duo, made up of April George and Matthew Thomas, brings a genre-defying album that features sounds familiar to fans of the duo, who came onto the music scene back in 2014. The album itself speaks to a sense of nostalgia, addressing growth and navigation, how the two have transformed as artists, their current state, how global events have impacted them, and how things have shifted post-pandemic. It also includes personal explorations of letting go of trauma and embracing a chapter in their personal and professional journeys. 

This is set against the backdrop of their sounds, which can't really be confined to a single sound but rather a fusion of various influences they carry and have infused into their music, specifically on this album. The melodies that flow across the eleven tracks really showcase this variety, not only sonically but also lyrically, as they tell the stories that have brought them to this point in their career.

April & George took us through the album, breaking down each track and explaining how the album came to be.

‍“HELLO”

APRIL GEORGE: We wanted to treat the opening track like a score to set the scene and tone for the album. The sweet, sweeping strings gently place you in the middle of our chaotic world and give you a brief moment to breathe before “Very Bad News” detonates in your face.

MATT THOMPSON: The “hello” samples come from our friends and family. We started using these to open our live sets and to ground ourselves before we began playing. After tour, we knew we needed it to open our album. 

‍“VERY BAD NEWS”

APRIL GEORGE: This song is a sonic explosion, meant to catch you off guard and throw you into the fiery energy of our pure rage. It opens up with a computer voice that sounds almost like one of those esoteric self-help tapes from the 80s. The lyrics were born from my frustration with feeling trapped in the capitalist rat race. I’ve worked a 9-to-5 job while simultaneously pursuing music ever since we started, and needing to do so has bred a lot of frustration for me. When I commute to work, I have a lot of time to think about how cornered I feel, how cornered many of the 99% truly are, some unknowingly. One day, I found myself meditating on the idiom “a fish rots from the head down” and how it reflects the times we’re living in. Very Bad News is a middle finger to the corrupt people and systems that have us all in their tight grip.

“DO WHAT YOU KNOW”

APRIL GEORGE: Do What You Know is an ode to my childhood self; I wanted her to know that life gets better and that we eventually muster up the courage to pursue our dreams. It’s also a reminder that sticking to the virtues that you’re raised on, staying in lockstep with your moral compass, will take you far. It’s funny how all of the cliché bits you might brush off when you’re younger turn out to be pillars that you cling to in your adult life.

MATT THOMPSON: It’s a simple alt-pop tune with a ton of nuance and subtle complexity. It’s our attempt at making a traditional pop record which, funny enough, just so happens to be full of noise. 

‍“TWO EVERGREENS”

APRIL GEORGE: This song is very close to my heart; it’s about my grandmother, Elsie Wilson, who passed away. She encouraged me to be a musician and bought me my first violin; I still play it to this day and named it after her in her honour. I grew up in her home in Portsmouth, VA; she lived in a small ranch-style house bookended by two evergreen trees. I’d climb them as a child in the summer months and get sap all on my hands. Her home meant safety to me, and that warm, all-encompassing feeling inspired the lyrics.

MATT THOMPSON: We initially wrote this song to a different arrangement years prior, and it didn’t quite stick. When I found it in our scrapped drafts, I knew it needed to be heard, so I spruced up the composition, broke out my $50 second-hand acoustic guitar and even sang a little background vocals. Ultimately, I needed to give April all the space she needed to tell her story. 

‍“STANDING IN PLACE”

APRIL GEORGE: Disorder is as beautiful as it is terrifying. It’s a lesson every artist learns when journeying through the not-so-glamorous parts of their career: you have to get comfortable with walking confidently through the dark; doing it scared is the only way you will get to where you belong. We see this song as a sort of final goodbye to our past selves as we evolve and transition into a new form. 

MATT THOMPSON: This one has a maddening time signature that probably drove our drummer, Foots, insane when we recorded it. We threw everything into this record, including 4 of our talented friends who became our choir. 

‍“ROT”

‍APRIL GEORGE: This interlude serves as a palette cleanser right before you dive into the rest of the album; it’s a short experimental motif that we treated like a micro-score. At the time, we were reading a beautiful graphic novel called Stages Of Rot by Linnea Sterte. It takes you thousands of years into the future and chronicles how alien organisms and humanoids on another planet live within their extraterrestrial ecosystem. It centres around a whale-like alien that died and shows how its carcass feeds the ecosystem and organisms that need sustenance. It got me thinking about dilapidation and preservation, about how time is the devourer of things, and about how this album is a fossilisation of our essence and identities as artists.

MATT THOMPSON: We have a bunch of these ambient pieces that we planned to include on the album, and this is one of the interludes that stuck. I love the scratchy melody and the textures that bounce around. It makes me feel like I’m in an old pinball machine.

‍“BLESS MY HEART”

APRIL GEORGE: This song features our good friend Tony Kill, who we worked with on our EP You Are Here in 2018. It’s an ode to our favourite bands growing up like Gorillaz, Stereolab, and At The Drive In. We admire how they can wrap heavy subject matter in layers of surrealism, shielding it from sounding preachy or forced. Living in the D.C. area - so close to the heart of American politics - makes it hard not to doomscroll your way into despair. This song is our way of reckoning with what it feels like to spin beneath the heavy hand of capitalism.

“LOVE UNSPENT”

APRIL GEORGE: This song is another one that’s dear to me; during the pandemic, two of my friends passed away, and I found myself thinking about my relationship with grief. I stumbled upon the ball-in-a-box analogy, which states that we grow around the grief we hold. It never disappears; rather, it becomes a part of you, evolving with you. The lyrics spilt out from there. 

‍MATT THOMPSON: Very heavy Curtis Mayfield influence here. Specifically his live rendition of “The Makings of You” performed at the Bitter End. We were inspired by 70s soul quite a bit throughout the writing of this album, and I think it’s most apparent here. 

‍“GROTTO”

APRIL GEORGE: After finishing our EP Pit of My Dreams, we found ourselves at a crossroads. The pandemic forced us to be still after years of pushing, and we found ourselves looking for comfort and reassurance that we were on the right track. Rejecting projections of doubt from others and standing firm in the belief that you’re enough on your own brings you closer to that kind of reassurance. This song bloomed from that realisation.

‍MATT THOMPSON: It’s the first song that we wrote for Traditional Noise, and it reignited our will to keep going. We were directionless after Pit of My Dreams. After I stumbled upon the guitar melody, and April sang that first bar, everything became clear.

‍“MODIFY YOUR TRADITION”

‍APRIL GEORGE: This is another micro-score, a final vignette before we close the album. Matt wrote a passage about tradition that illuminates the album's core theme. It says “The thing about tradition, it’s all around you… it silences, it pierces, it compels, it restricts.. it’s safe.” 

MATT THOMPSON: This interlude is a reflection of the album’s core theme. We’re fascinated by the idea of tradition and how it informs our faith, our fears, our perception of the world, and how the world perceives us. It can be a safe harbour or a cage.

“MORNING STAR”

APRIL GEORGE: Morning Star is about ancestry; I found myself meditating on what kinds of words, songs, ideas I wanted to leave behind for generations after us. I thought deeply about my heritage as a Black American growing up in the American South, about all of the suffering that my people went through and how we overcame incredible odds. This song is a requiem for those who died before us; when you think of a morning star, you can either think of the weapon of war or the North Star, a signal of hope and freedom for the enslaved. My sister is a clinical psychologist, and she taught me a lot about epigenetics around the time we were writing this record. I learned that the trauma that we face in our ancestry gets passed down through our DNA. While I wrote, I thought about how not only has generational trauma made its way through my lineage, but also how incredible resilience and strength have been passed down through our DNA as well.

MATT THOMPSON: The first version of this song has a beat on it, and it goes crazy, but, like “Two Evergreens”, additional production would only distract from the core theme of this record. The beat is really crazy though…