Growing in Music and Authenticity: Arctic Lake
Image courtesy of Universal Music Group. Photo of Arctic Lake shot by Scarlett Casciello.
Talking with London based musicians Emma Foster and Paul Holliman of Arctic Lake was simply the best way to shake that midweek funk. Awkward Zoom introductions ensued at 9am Chicago time, 3pm London time. We chatted for about an hour before I bounced to my day job in true American fashion. Emma and Paul, in true London fashion, were on a post-show high laughing off slight hangovers and complaining about the rain. I was looking at the two of them sitting next to each other, wondering if they planned their outfits. Paul wore a white shirt, Emma’s was black; the true embodiment of yin and yang.
Image courtesy of Universal Music Group. Photo of Arctic Lake shot by Scarlett Casciello.
The three of us covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Arctic Lake has a lot they are excited about. Recently having made the enormous artistic step of joining Alesso, Marshmello, and James Bay at Astralwerks Records, Emma and Paul are excited for more shows, more music, and more magical moments like they experienced at their last show supporting the Manchester band, Larkins. What resonates with us most here at Humankind Zine are two holistic experiences they shared we believe any artist can learn from:
Prioritizing their growth as songwriters, helped fostered the confidence that comes from writing music that authentically expresses who they are as people navigating a human experience.
Understanding the beauty and necessity of being surrounded and supported by a network of long-time creative professionals.
In between talking shop, we shared some of our favorite live shows, joked about regional accents, and got to know each other on deeper psychological terms simply by sharing our favorite colors. Emma, simple and classic, chose green and blue. As a child, and now, she is comforted by their consistency. Paul eloquently contrasts her calmness with a touch of chaos. While he chose a deep red akin to Burgundy or maroon, he claimed he would never wear it, nor would he use it to decorate his house. He also doesn’t quite understand why other people wear it, but it strikes his fancy nonetheless.
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Tessa Martinez: Congrats on your new single “Lonely”, and the Vevo visual that is absolutely stunning. I’ll get the cliche stuff out of the way first. What’s life been like for you during the pandemic?
Emma Foster: Thank you. Well, the pandemic for us was, it seems strange to say it, sometimes you feel a bit guilty for saying it, but it was a positive thing for us. We were able to just breathe, there were no distractions and we just wrote more music than we have ever written probably since we got together creatively.
Paul Holliman: Yeah, I mean, for us it was great. We literally didn’t release anything, it was just solid writing until “Lonely” came out. That was the first thing we released from the set of songs written in that year and a half of lockdown. We were really trying to put together loafs of songs that we are really happy with and not rush, you know? Before, we were putting out stuff that was maybe a rushed a little bit. You write a song, you love it, and you want to put it out straight away which is really great, but at the same time it’s harder to follow it up with songs that go really well with at and still give the full package of our vision. So this time we really wanted to get a great set of songs together, and pair them with great visuals in a way where we don’t feel rushed. On that note, it feels really great to have something out there, finally.
Lonely by Arctic Lake on Vevo
T: Can you give a bit of insight as to what the transition was like from being independent to signing on with a label?
E: Musically I think the creative process is changed naturally because we always joke that we used to be quite sad individuals, when we were going through our post Uni process of having really young relationships and going through all of these things for the first time. Our music was really emotional, and connected to the state of mind of what we were going through. But the past two years we both got into a healthy place and feel super happy and that is what inspired us to really experiment and do the stuff we love rather than being like, well… we have this label now and we need to stay inside this box. The point of being artist is doing what YOU love, right? After signing with Astralwerks, I think that the creative process naturally became more dynamic because we were liberated from adhering to those rules. Visually, there is even more freedom because we have an amazing team around us. We’ve always had an aesthetic, but now the visuals can hopefully reflect anything we want.
T: When people are finding you on Spotify, they are within the genre of ambient, ethereal electro-pop. How would you like to define your sound?
E: Well, funny enough just to give you some background. We started off really rocky. The first song we ever made together was so rock it’s crazy.
P: It was terrible.
*both laughing*
E: Then we had a happy accident which was limits. Which started from… uhm.. I don’t really know how Limits happened.
P: We were at Uni studying music. It was the whole thing of everyone playing really loudly, doing loads of solos, just trying to impressive each other. We wrote Limits during that time and I was trying to teach myself piano and keyboard cause I’d never done it before, and I wanted to. I had only learned one chord shape and kept playing it up and down the keyboard. So I played like three chords, and I couldn’t play fast, I was just holding down the notes for like three minutes. I realized, once I stopped playing guitar super loudly, that wow, Emma’s actually got a really good voice. It was our first song that was chill and electric. When we released it, it instantly did much better than any of that terrible rock music we were making. Imagine that! Since then, we’ve been under the ambient genre. Our whole thing is we want to make music that is reflective of the lives that we live. We get a bit sad, we get our hearts broken every couple of years, don’t we? But we also have really great times, and wanna go out have fun, we wanna dance. So now we have two sides to our sound. We’ve got the slow stuff, more down-tempo, but the new stuff, like lonely is more up beat with a bit of pace in them, and still have all the emotion. What ties it all together is Emma’s voice. She’s got a nice style that just sits so well above it all. Now I’d say we fit nicely in more of the Alt-Pop thing, probably.
E: I would say that we are more Alt-Pop than we are Dance. The collabs we’ve done have been more in the realm of Dance. All the DJs we’ve worked with our wonderful. We are going to see Lane 8 here in London in December. I’m so excited to be in the crowd, and here it for the first time.
T: What are some of your projects nearest and dear to your hearts?
P: I mean, obviously the new one like that’s sort of a combination of what happened during the lockdown period. I think it’s the best song we’ve ever done, it’s the best production we’ve ever had.
E: I agree that “Lonely” represents a lot of us, and it is so fun. It was a beautiful song to start and finish… but my favorites are definitely unreleased. I think they have some balance that means a lot to me. There’s one that never really took off called “You Know All of Me”, that song its hard to me. Oh… what else? Oh! This song that Paul absolutely hates, a song called “What you May Find”—
P: I don’t hate it! I wrote it! For the record, I don’t hate any of our songs!
*both laughing*
E: I think I twisted Paul’s arm on that one a little bit. It’s unusual. It’s kind of a ballad, and lyrically I really resonate with it. So those two mean a lot to me because they are highly emotional.
P: Can I change my answer actually? There’s a song called “Cold Hands” on the EP from last year. That was the song that made us realize we didn’t have to only do slow music. Up until that point we had spent so much time trying to write new music but we couldn’t. We were stuck in the slow ambient sound, and it sort of lost inspiration. We were afraid to step out of our comfort zone. We wrote “Cold Hands” for fun, showed it to some friends and just fell in love with it so we decided to do it up for the EP. It was also the first song I felt like I had a huge hand in production wise, now I produce most of our stuff. It was really a huge turning point for us.
T: When you were invited to play the Reading and Leeds festival back in 2016, what was that moment like for you? It’s a festival with so much history and longevity… sounds like a dream.
P: Oh man, that was a few years ago now.
E: It feels like awhile ago. It was an amazing opportunity, but one of my worst performances to date! *laughs* So not a highlight for me. We were only babies. We still didn’t have a live set up that was fully embedded and understood. We had in-ears but they were not set properly. I could hear the people, I couldn’t really hear the music and I was like someone help me, someone get me off!
It was a funny live show.
P: It was really great for me because I went to Reading festival when I was like… 17? It was my first festival I’d ever been to, then a couple years later we were playing it. So for me that was a really cool thing to be able to do. All my friends came as well, because it’s sort of local for us. Not like a local festival, but its the nearest big festival to where I grew up. But it was a strange thing, like Emma said, because we had only played sort of normal shows until that point, and if you’re not the headliner you don’t get a sound check. You don’t have any idea of how it’s going to sound, if you can even hear yourself. Emma had a wireless mic, a pretty cheap one that was picking up frequencies from police radios and all that so yeah, it was a bit stressful.
T: How do you find motivation to stay confident in your performance in moments like that?
E: I think in that moments it's… the audience. The audience there was just so lovely. At the end of the day, they are there to see you so you just have to go out there and give it your best. I remember coming off stage and just wanting to cry because you know what your standard is, what you’re capable of. To do something that was, like you said, such a special moment for us so early on and not give yourself and the fans the show you know you can give is hard. But each time something like that happens we learn from it, and grow from it. In a way it’s a good thing it happened early on because we can look at it as a moment of building of skills in stage craft. It was a fall down on your ass moment, but I came back stronger. It’s part of being a performer.
P: I think Emma is playing it up a bit. It wasn’t bad. She sang pretty well. It wasn’t a train wreck. It was completely fine. She’s really critical of herself. I don’t think she realizes how good she is sometimes. A few bum notes is nothing. It was a festival, we didn’t have a sound check. We weren’t given the same as the headliners and we did really well anyways. But my motivation, simply trying to get through the first song without completely fucking up is the first port of call. If that goes well, it’s like okay…not lets get into it. The crowd is always a big part of getting to relax into it. It’s harder when you’re supporting another band, playing for people who don’t know your music, but 99% of the crowds we play for are absolutely amazing. Larkin’s fans were so great. No matter what, you always have to carry on and try to win them over.
E: Also in terms of preparation… I used to be a person with stage fright. But since it’s been two years since we’ve been on stage… these shows have been the least nervous. There is a lot of excitement and anticipation leading up to it that It’s been easier to channel the nerves into excitement.
P: One big thing is we re-did our whole live set up with our friend Sim. He’s dome Tom Misch, he’s doing KSI at the moment. We knew him from Uni, he’s our friend, and helps us out all the time. He basically runs our whole live set up so we can actually clearly hear ourselves, all the stuff that we just don’t understand. That takes the whole stress off getting on stage. It takes away elements of worry so that when we are on stage we can focus on the other stuff that we came to do. It may seem like a boring back end sort of thing, but it makes a huge difference.
T: What are some of your favorite moments or memories from your tours and performances?
P: Well for me, honestly it was last night. We played a London show and it was the biggest one we ever did anyways. It wasn’t even our fans, mostly, because we were supporting another band but their fans were just so amazing. We had our first ever phone lights in the air moment! Emma started crying, it was unbelievable it was great. So yeah, that’s definitely up there for me.
E: I am gonna say this too! It was unreal. Honestly I can’t stop smiling because it felt so surreal. I know so many performers say this, but this was the moment that the coin dropped for me. It’s been two years since our last London show, so to have that response when the majority of the set is new. It can be daunting, because our fans that were there probably wouldn’t know the new stuff anyways so it was just really special.
You can keep up with Arctic Lake on Instagram @arcticlake and YouTube.
