If you’ve ever wondered what ‘Brat’ might have sounded like if it was written by a bunch of skint twenty-somethings with a penchant for indie sleaze, then wonder no longer: Brighton quartet Lime Garden are back with second album ‘Maybe Not Tonight’, and it’s a hedonistic, reckless, banger-filled wet dream.
On 2024 debut ‘One More Thing’, the band – vocalist and guitarist Chloe Howard, guitarist Leila Deeley, bassist Tippi Morgan, and drummer Annabel Whittle – created, according to The Forty Five’s Rhian Daly, an album “that meshes relatable 20-something anxiety with the weight of trying to make it”. On its follow-up, those worries remain but they’ve been doused in gasoline and set ablaze – further chaotic fuel for a period that began when all four band members split up with their partners, and that they’ve translated into a record filled with neurosis, abandon, confidence, madness and hooks, hooks, hooks.
It’s – if you haven’t got the message yet – all kinds of fun. Written in an intense “tunnel vision” flurry of creativity and recorded in Brixton last summer, ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ channels the spirit of the sweaty indie disco into ten tracks that, in turns, nod to LCD Soundsystem, Elastica, Metronomy and a whole bunch of other dancefloor experts. It’s an album to neck a Jägerbomb and do something regretful to. We caught up with the band for an exclusive first chat about it all…
‘Maybe Not Tonight’ is loosely structured around the story of a night out – tell us what happens throughout the night…
Annabel: At the beginning of the album you’re getting ready – maybe you’re feeling a bit shit but you’re like ‘Fuck it, I’ll go out, it’ll be fun, whatever’. You get to the middle of the record and it’s like, ‘Yeah, this is lit!’ but then you start thinking you can see your ex. They’re with someone else who’s more pretty and you’re thinking, ‘God, I’m just a worm’, so then you walk home and feel fucking awful like you’ll never love anyone again and you’re lying in bed just thinking: ‘Why did I even bother?’ And that’s the album!
Sounds horribly relatable! Were you all going out and doing a lot of dancing when you were writing this record then?
Annabel: We all went through breakups like dominoes – we all fell, one by one – and that inspired us.
Chloe: We wrote it during a very chaotic time and we all reacted differently; me and Annabel were going out and getting pissed every single night…
Tippi: … and then me and Leila were isolation stations.
Chloe: I think a lot of people of our generation hit 24 or 25 and are quite hard on themselves that they need to have everything sorted. You should be in bed by 9pm and have your fucking clean girl routine sorted and all this shit, but most people don’t. There’s a part of life that’s so messy and so shit that we wanted to embrace and bring to the front. With ‘Brat’ coming out a couple of years ago, that was obviously a major influence but our take was that Charli has this very small view on what it’s like to go out because she’s rich and really famous and A-list. Whereas we come from a place where this is the reality of most people’s actual nights out!
There’s a part of life that’s so messy and shit that we wanted to embrace that
Chloe Howard
Do you think that chaos mode had a positive effect on the record?
Chloe: Definitely. When it came to writing the record, we were in tunnel vision with it. It was the perfect distraction for us where we were just writing all the time, and we really pushed ourselves to write the best songs we could. The element of despair we were feeling pushed us to our limits!
Annabel: There was an element of almost delirium that was quite helpful because it stopped us from holding back on the things where, if we were feeling a bit more sane, maybe we’d think, ‘Oh we shouldn’t do that’.
Tippi: I think this record feels a lot freer than we’ve ever been, and I think there’s a lot of bravery in it. We all know ourselves a bit more through that experience, and there’s a bit more confidence and a bit less imposter syndrome flying around.
The record is full of absolute bangers – the opposite of an overly serious second record – was that something you were consciously avoiding?
Chloe: We definitely went through a phase, I remember, right at the beginning where we really were thinking that this record needed to show that we’re not just four girls who are friends and it’s all cute. There was a lot of stuff we wrote that was quite serious and it took us a while to get back to the point of thinking: we’ve got as far as we have, and people like what we’re doing, so why should we change who we are as people or as a band? We should just elevate it and be more confident about it. Once we found that, we found our stride and the bangers just kept coming.
Tippi: I remember Chloe once saying that we’re back in the place of when we were 18 in the band and we felt like we were the shit. I think that’s definitely it; with the first record the idea was so scary, but this record feels like the most authentic piece of work we’ve made.
Chloe: Releasing our first album made me realise, in a positive way, that it’s not that deep.
Which is the rollercoaster of self-acceptance that the record’s opening track ‘23’ is about. How did your experience as being a hyped band and riding that train feed into the song?
Chloe: Massively. For us, we came out of COVID fresh where we’d never really gigged properly before, and we went straight into being on Ones to Watch lists and then released an album that went really well. But then there are a lot of new bands who are younger than you and cooler than you, who instantly rise above you and it’s like, fucks sake, why bother? You have to get over that, and that’s where that song came from. I had a dream where I was talking to my 16-year-old self and she was saying to me, ‘What the fuck? You’re not where we thought you’d be?’ But actually I am doing this thing, just in a way I didn’t expect.
Annabel: It’s hard sometimes because the music industry is crazy, but then you get this ‘fuck it’ attitude where you’re like, ‘Well we’re probably not going to be millionaires but we’re having so much fun’. Maybe it doesn’t look like what you were sold when you were 10-years-old, but we’re having a great time.
On ‘Always Talking About You’, there’s a ready admission that you want to be rich and famous – how high are the ambitions?
Chloe: We’ve always been dreamers; we’ve always thought the sky’s the limit and I don’t think that’ll ever change.
Tippi: We were literally saying on the train that we were the next Nirvana…
Chloe: We just did some photos with Steve Gullick who photographed Nirvana years ago and I was like, ‘Guys, I think when Steve looked in our eyes he saw the next Nirvana’. I just got that vibe from him, I don’t know why. So it’s that level of delusion and insanity…
How much confidence comes from how solid the four of you are as a unit?
Annabel: There’s so much sacrifice in it that you wouldn’t do it if [you didn’t love the other people]. I don’t know how people do this alone.
Chloe: I think we just match each other’s freak. We all get each other. If someone’s down, we’re all down; if someone’s up, we’re all up. It’s very much like a coven.
We match each other’s freak. It’s very much like a coven
Chloe Howard
Annabel, you produced parts of the record alongside Charlie Andrew [Wolf Alice, alt-J]. You mentioned PC Music as a perhaps less likely reference – why did that make sense to you?
Annabel: I just got really into that whole thing a few years ago and I thought it was really cool. I wanted to incorporate that element into the more guitar-y indie that we make. It makes it a bit more modern. The indie sleaze stuff is definitely an influence but we don’t want to sound like an indie sleaze band.
You’ve also mentioned that the record was influenced by ‘Sheezus’ – aka Lily Allen’s universally acknowledged worst album…
Annabel: It’s her best album!
Chloe: I just think it’s so silly, and yeah it is kind of bad but it’s good and she doesn’t give a fuck. The Lily ‘don’t give a fuck’ vibe is very inspiring.
Tippi: The way she writes lyrics actually really reminds me of the way Chloe writes lyrics sometimes. It’s so brutally honest that you feel like maybe you shouldn’t be listening…
Chloe: I’ve always thought she was so cool ‘cos she’s just not afraid to be a bitch and I think that’s inspiring. Not enough women do it!
If this is a night out record, what’s on the Lime Garden stereo while you’re getting ready?
Tippi: LCD Soundsystem
Annabel: Obviously ‘Sheezus’…
Chloe: Fcukers, Daft Punk, The Stone Roses.
And finally, what’s on the vision board to manifest when ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ comes out?
Tippi: A Mercury Prize nomination…
Chloe: AT LEAST! A Mercury nomination is the bare minimum. We want to tour Japan, play the Pyramid Stage…
Annabel: I want Elton John to call us.
Tippi: To be the next Nirvana…
Chloe: So just small dreams really!
‘Maybe Not Tonight’ is out April 10th via So Young Records. Pre-order via Rough Trade
