Well, here’s something I didn’t think would happen. caroline, the London-based experimental eight-piece we interviewed back in 2022, has teamed up with the Caroline Polachek for their striking new single ‘Tell me I never knew that’. (That’s her in the press photo above.) It leads their forthcoming LP caroline 2, which is due May 30 via Rough Trade and includes the previously unveiled ‘Total euphoria’, which made our list of the best songs of March. Check out ‘Tell me I never knew that’ below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
“We used to call this one ‘Backstreet boys’ because the opening top line felt like a Backstreet Boys song,” the band explained in a press release. “The main riff was written by Casper on acoustic guitar and stuck out as a really catchy, bouncy, hypnotic thing. We wrote the opening top line together and straight away we thought ‘this sounds like a melody that Caroline Polachek might sing’ in its hooky-ness. We sort of joked that we’d ask her to sing it but didn’t think it’d actually be on the cards, until about a year later when we sent her the half-finished song and she was up for it!”
“Caroline was amazing,” they added. “She wrote a load of extra parts that gave the whole thing such a lift, and then spent a few hours tracking a load of more improvised parts. We were still recording at about 1.30am when we decided to call it, but there was no indication that Caroline was the slightest bit tired or that she had lost any momentum in her ability to sing, even though she’d been singing for about 6 hours. It was an inspiring thing to witness! We did a little bit more re-ordering together with Caroline a few weeks after the session and then the song was finally there.”
The new album follows caroline’s 2022 self-titled debut. The group spent 18 months working on it across various writing sessions in the UK, with most of the recording taking place at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate. Their own Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes, and Mike O’Malley produced the record, which was engineered by Syd Kemp, mixed by Jason Agel, and mastered by Heba Kadry. It’s got song titles like ‘Coldplay cover’, ‘Song two’, and ‘Beautiful ending’.
“The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,” Llewellyn commented, adding “We were just about an eight-person band on the last one, but now we’re a proper eight-person band.”
caroline 2 Cover Artwork:
caroline 2 Tracklist:
1. Total euphoria
2. Song two
3. Tell me I never knew that
4. When I get home
5. U R UR ONLY ACHING
6. Coldplay cover
7. Two riders down
8. Beautiful ending
