Ground Control Touring

“It’s been a weird journey”. The strange trajectory of Ugly is not lost on founding member/guitarist/vocalist Sam Goater. Forming in Cambridge in 2016 as a scratchy indie four-piece,  8 years on, via the tumult of lockdown, the band soar as an alt-rock sextet. With eight minute choral/folk/post-rock epics, tours with Black Country, New Road, and multiple sell out shows across London up their sleeve, Ugly now add to the pile their first major body of work to date, Twice Around The Sun. More than just a debut EP collating singles released by the band across a 2 year period, it constitutes a lasting monument to their last four years: to their defiant regeneration as a band, to the power of community, and the virtues of persistence.

The origins of Twice Around The Sun begin, as with many musical stories of late, in the distant haze of the pandemic. Having spent nearly two years on hold, the band rented out a rehearsal space in Bermondsey, South East London to work on new material. With Jasmine Miller-Sauchella (Vocals/Keys), Tom Lane (Vocals/Synth) and Theo Guttenplan (Drums) joining other founding members Harrison Jones (Guitar) and Harry Shapiro (Vocals, Bass) in a new look line-up, the band’s musical identity was completely overhauled. Meeting regularly during lockdown, songs were no longer written by Goater alone, then brought to the band, but instead worked on in unison - lyrics, music, structure, arrangement, all honed in a more transparent collaborative process. “We’d approach writing music from the ground level up.” Sam explains. ”It was the first time we’d all be contributing in that way,  it would be much more equal.”  Producing what Sam self-effacingly dubs “Slightly weird rock”, each track was meticulously honed into its own sprawling musical voyage, teeming with surprise, intrigue and wonder.

In many senses ‘Twice Around The Sun’ treats the listener to the power of this communal, collaborative spirit in which it was made. Relished on the EP, in all its glory, is that deeply uplifting art of singing and playing together as one. Rarely is a voice heard alone. With four dedicated vocalists in the group, the band carefully plotted out who would harmonise with whom, and when, for maximum and varied effects. While the vast majority of the EP was recorded at Church Studios in Crouch Hill with producer Balázs Altsach (assistant to Paul Epworth), many vocal takes were done in a makeshift bedroom set-up, enabling the band to record long into the night without those pressures of time and money.

All this intricate arranging can be clearly heard on EP opener ‘The Wheel’. Opening with two minutes of complex a capella, vocal lines wind in and out of each other while streams of elusive imagery drift and out of focus - “Little apple atom boy/Chewed himself through Maple Joy”. Grammar and meaning are side-lined in place of the sonic qualities of the words themselves, and the sounds they build when forged in choral harmony.  As with much of the music, lyrics were written as a “communal, sprawling thing”, Sam notes. “They maybe evokes a certain image, and that’s enough.The point of it is the way it is, as opposed to the message”. And with choruses like ‘Icy Windy Sky’, or ‘Shepherd’s Carol’ or ‘Hands of Man’ sounding so rich, booming and bright, imbued with such untethered freedom, lyrical meaning hardly seems to matter.

Not that they’re aren’t some more introspective touches here too. Jasmine Miller-Sauchella takes the lead on the EP’s only sub-5 minute track ‘Sha’, which holds as it’s refrain the Nichiren Buddhist chant ‘Nam Myoho Renge Kyo’ (which translates to ‘Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra’). The EP’s fitting closer ‘I’m Happy You’re Here’ provides perhaps the release’s most melancholic and soft-underbelly moment: “I’m not known to survive / On the gristle of others to keep me alive” grumbles Sam’s solo vocal in a rare moment of lyrical lucidity. But even here, these tracks bloom into majestic choral delights, the sound of quasi-religious, ecstatic group chanting on ‘Sha’ in particular almost lifting Ugly’s aesthetic values into the realms of profound ancient spirituality.

“Bands change. We could have potentially started afresh, but it’s quite nice to have this history”, reflects Sam. “It’s a good reminder about persistence, and the reality with any kind of momentum is that it’s a lot of ups and downs. It’s been rewarding in the past year to see things finally come to fruition. What we have at the moment works more than what we’ve ever had before. It’s lovely that people are jumping on board and getting behind it, as we are as well. For all of us in the band, we feel strongly about these songs.”