FEATURE: Spotlight: Art School Girlfriend

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Art School Girlfriend

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I hope that we…

PHOTO CREDIT: Nathan Barnes for The Line of Best Fit

get some more current interviews with Art School Girlfriend. The moniker of Polly Mackey, even though she has been on the scene a few years now and actually started to get a lot of buzz from 2019 and 2020, there are many who do not know about the incredible music – including the new album, Soft Landing. It follows her 2020 debut album, Is It Light Where You Are?. There are quite a few interviews from 2020 and 2021, but there are very few from this year. Instead, I am going to start with an older interview that introduced us to Art School Girlfriend. I will then get to reviews for the amazing Soft Landing. The Line of Best Fit spoke with Art School Girlfriend in 2019 about her (Mackey’s) decision to produce and take ownership of her music:

“Having cut her teeth as a member of shoegaze outfit Deaf Club who parted ways back in 2014, Mackey found herself in a position where she nearly left music altogether, as she explains “I really had just got completely dismayed with music in general. I was working in the music industry at the same time and I was working for labels and magazines at the same time and getting really dismayed with the whole thing. So, when the band split up I kind of just ignored music for a bit and was only listening to whatever was on the radio.”

It was around this time that Mackey decided to pack up her bags and leave London for the seaside town of Margate, “I just got to the point in London where I was so broke, I couldn’t do anything. I had this sprawling metropolis in front of me and couldn’t access any of it.” Ultimately, this was a move that proved to serve Mackey well.

In the past few years, Margate has become something of a hub for creatives, but when describing the move, Mackey makes it clear that Margate was a different place when she originally made the decision to leave “I realised I was 24, which is quite young to move to one city and move to another one and start a new life. It was also terrifying, as Margate three years ago isn’t what it is now… There was nothing to do, and now it’s like the London ex-pat community and I’m so pleased I did it, because I’m surrounded by so many creative people, it’s like a little village.”

Her last EP, Into The Blue Hour, saw her team together a group of songs that were all tinged with the beauty and mystery of the night. “They are linked by a sense of malaise or feeling out of sync and were quite icy,” explains Mackey of the current that runs through the songs. “I don’t make them deliberately that way, but they tend to be quite sad and melancholy which then informs the lyrics quite a bit.” Despite that melancholy, Mackey is now ready to venture further afield and has begun to push the boundaries of her song-writing, and she has even returned to her teenage habit of keeping a diary.

“I decided to keep a journal. I used to keep one when I was younger, and I used to keep all my lyrics and notes separate, but I’m kind of keeping it altogether, so that is kind of changing how I’m working on the lyrical side as well.” It appears that the act of documenting her everyday activities has enabled Mackey to slow down and take stock, as she says “I remember I had one when I was eighteen and finished It and taped it up and when I was moving I cut the tape on it, and I read it and found it really interesting. Not just because I was seeing how I was feeling at the time, but also the everyday, humdrum things I was doing and you forget what sequence you had things in life, and actually I thought I could keep a diary and not be anxious about describing things completely it accurately or using poetic words but just writing what I’d done that day and that actually there’s actually something quite nice about that and keeping a record of that.”

This act of slowing down and taking it in has had a direct effect on how Mackey writes, which was exactly the effect she was looking for. “I wanted the track to be different to my last EP and to have a different theme and this one is basically like a booty call” explains Mackey of her latest sonic offering, a track that is fuelled by lust and experimentation with what the structure of a song should be”.

Prior to getting to some reviews, AllMusic Magazine introduced an album that ranks alongside the best of this year. Soft Landing has won plenty of acclaim from critics. If you have not heard it or discovered Art School Girlfriend, then make sure that you check out her wonderful music:

“Soft Landing follows Mackey’s 2020 debut album, Is It Light Where You Are? an album made in the wake of a tumultuous time and released during one. Soft Landing feels like Mackey’s true debut, a record of curiosity and playfulness with songs that sound like they are falling effortlessly into place. Stay tuned for more news.

Tracklist

1. A Place To Lie

2. Close To The Clouds

3. Real Life

4. Waves

5. Blue Sky feat. Tony Njoku

6. The Weeks

7. Laugh My Head Off

8. Out There

9. Heaven Hanging Low

10. How Do You Do It

11. Too Bright

When Polly Mackey – AKA Art School Girlfriend – released her first album Is It Light Where You Are in 2021, what was a shimmering debut felt to her more like a sublime denouement.

The Welsh producer and multi-instrumentalist’s record revelled in expansive dreamscape sounds and diaristic writing that stretched deep into the emotional peripheries of a then very recent heartbreak. A protracted two years later, Polly was able to tour the record – then, embarking on a new relationship, and reconsidering her creative mode. While the album garnered critical celebration for its visceral aural textures and lucid themes, for Polly, it was inflected with alienation. “By the time it was out in the world, I felt unattached to it,” she shares. “This new record truly feels like my debut.”

Soft Landing is the culmination of Art School Girlfriend’s contemporary artistic testament. It represents a tonal shift and tenure in a much more contented and philosophical state of being. The title presented itself to her through the frequency illusion: a turn of phrase thrown up in overheard conversation, and mentioned on the news. “‘Soft landing’ showed up to strike me when things were falling into place,” Polly says. “I was at that typical moment where you’re leaving your 20s and realising you don’t have to work toward this concept of future happiness. Going to the pub with your mates can be the ultimate. Lying beside the person you love, watching the sun come in, can be it.”

This album percolates in these “small euphorias”; elations of life you don’t have to reach far for. “It captures what a lot of people coming out of COVID have felt, looking for joy closer to home, in your immediate surroundings,” Polly says. “I am much more interested in capturing a time and feeling, than getting it perfectly right.”

Polly decided in April 2022 that she’d have a record by the end of summer: she booked in sessions and mixing before she started, and wrote a creative manifesto. “I really wanted to commit to a new energy,” she says. “Before, I was so worried about fixing things as I went along. That doesn’t allow for being instinctive, or staying true to how I feel in the moment. I wanted this to feel pure, energetic, instant.”

The manifesto for Soft Landing outlined a divergent style for recording and decision-making. It meant resisting the “infinite space” of the first album, which led to agonising re-records and rewrites. Plug-ins and perfectly programmed drums were shirked for instrumental improvisation, tape machines and effects performed live, and stream of consciousness writing. “How Do You Do It…” was totally improvised, played on a keyboard and sung into a tape machine in Polly’s bedroom. “It’s very different from how I worked previously. I’d have spent the year trying to find the right snare,” she says. It’s about being more curious, playful, and “getting back to the reason I started making music as a kid in my bedroom”.

The sonic palette combines Polly’s more leftfield, lo-fi electronic influences (that you’ll hear resplendent on her ambient Foundation FM radio show) with the music that first inspired her, like Pixies, early Caribou, and Warpaint: artists with electrifying energy that elegantly oscillate from electronic to instrument. “Out There” – an homage to LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”, written the day after she saw them live last summer in Brixton – propels itself with the dark atmospherics of Burial, and “Heaven Hanging Low” has the sun-breaking-through-the-clouds clarity of a trance anthem. “Waves” undulates with the sinewy avant-rock turns of PJ Harvey.

Most of the album was recorded at home, the rest at Crouch End’s Church Studios with friend and co-producer Riley MacIntyre, where Polly has recorded since 2016. Six of 11 tracks were written within two weeks, after she wrote “A Place To Lie”. “One track will pin the butterfly of what the record is going to be,” she says. “‘A Place To Lie’ was that. Everything flowed through it.” The track reflects Polly’s technical skills and a prowess for creating processed sounding sonics by organic means: “I didn’t want to look at a computer much.” Synths are replaced by manipulated nylon string guitars; live drums, guitars, and strings are played throughout the record; “Real Life” features birdsong and church bells from a memorable camping trip. Throughout, Polly deftly traces dance music’s spinal nodules, its crescendos and euphoria sweeps, and the shoegaze influence of her youth with gauzy, pensive tendrils of drones.

The sound design parallels deeply poetic and visual lyrics, a skill that was lauded on her previous record and EPs. “I tell people this is my joyful album, and they laugh – it still feels pretty fucking moody,” she says. “I like the light and shade, the joy can’t come without the melancholic – the queer trope of crying on the dancefloor.” Simple concepts and experiences are made sumptuous: “A Place To Lie” swells with the contentedness of waking up next to a lover, while “The Weeks” takes place in the summer lockdown at her girlfriend’s parent’s house in Devon, delicately threading the undercurrent of worldwide threat with the lush, hushed local surroundings. Folk and shoegaze arise again in lyrics with hazy, yet precise finality – ”I understand, I understand”, a willowy alto refrain on “Close to the Clouds”.

With crystallised focus, Polly’s favourite place has become the studio. In 2020, she scored for friend and visual collaborator Tom Dream’s film Shy Radicals. “In the last few years I’ve seen some changes for women in the studio space. I’m now engineering for myself and others,” she says. Polly intends to experiment beyond her ASG moniker, by producing for people outside of genres she works within, playing in bands again, finishing her Creative Practice MA, and scoring more films.

The words of poet Lucien Stryk, describing the work of Japanese haiku master Basho, resonate deeply with Polly and the record’s themes: “The poet presents an observation of a natural, often commonplace event, in plainest diction, without verbal trickery. The effect is one of spareness, yet the reader is aware of a microcosm related to transcendental unity. A moment, crystallised, distilled, snatched from time’s flow, and that is enough.”

An artist that once made music from the serrated edges of her wounds, Art School Girlfriend now sutures them with her small, intimate joys: Soft Landing yields soft power. “I had such a nice time making the record,” Polly says. “I’m at the age now that I know it doesn’t have to be loved or heard by everyone. I just want someone out there to find their personal euphorias with it”.

I am going to go back to The Line of Best Fit. They had a lot of positive things to say about Soft Landing. It is an impressive step forward for an artist who is going to be in the industry for many more years to come. Take some time out to explore and experience a tremendous album that should put Art School Girlfriend on everyone’s radar:

“Though she released her first record two years prior, the Welsh producer and multi-instrumentalist has already expressed a distinct feeling of detachment to those tracks, instead naming Soft Landing as a record that “truly feels like my debut”. Instead, she leans into the electronic explorations of earlier projects, and in turn, creates an intricate world of textures for the listener to feast upon.

Soft Landing is a product of two halves, a culmination of the interior world of Mackey’s solitary creativity at home and the formal collaboration of recording studios based in Crouch End. As a result, it seamlessly balances explorations in both expansive sound and intimate lyrics, evidenced on the track that started it all, "A Place To Live". An exercise in creative production, it’s also remarkably deceptive – components that appear on the surface as electronic transpire to be a product of live recordings, creating a tangible depth to its sonics.

Mackey further displays her progression on album highlight, "How Do You Do It". Though entirely improvised in the four walls of Mackey’s bedroom, it’s imbued with the feeling of infinite space, full of sweeping soundscapes and echoing vocals that stretch for miles. Other notable excursions include the 80s drum-machines and eerie distortion on "Heaven Hanging Low", and "Waves" with its shoegazing guitars that gently shimmer on the surface.

Upon reaching its final stretch, the distinction between tracks begins to blur, overlapping over one another. This doesn’t appear to be a fault of its repetitive nature, but rather a purposefully immersive twist, producing a soundtrack to a night-out that seemingly never ends. And soon enough, reality begins to split at the seams and Mackey has transported us to a surreal world entirely unfamiliar, as she sings, “Sliding through paradise / I was caught in the light / Pulling planets out of the sky / taking a bite.”

However, the record doesn’t anticipate a crash back down to earth but offers slow descent, just as the title suggests. Mirroring the realisations made in her own life, Mackey asks us to find these moments of other-worldly ecstasy in our everyday existence, noting that “I just want someone out there to find their personal euphorias with it.” For Mackey, these arrive in the simplest of moments; “Lying beside the person you love, watching the sun come in, can be it.” And instead of striving towards a perceived notion of happiness, Soft Landing is simply the crescendoing finale of a journey towards contentment”.

Just before rounding things off, there is one more review that I want to bring in. Although some gave Soft Landing a more mixed reaction., most noted how it was an evolution and confident release from Art School Girlfriend. The London artist is someone who everybody needs to know about. Someone who is going to keep on releasing incredible music:

“The effects of the pandemic are in many cases well documented, but in most not well understood.

One of the recurring ideas to emerge for musicians has been the return to old ground, of going home, being in isolation from their audience, the industry and the confirmatory aspects of their art.

Polley Mackey released the first Art School Girlfriend album Is It Light Where You Are? in 2021, but by then it felt like it had come from a different place, a sensation only magnified when the time came to perform the songs live, to the point she now admits that, ‘By the time it was out in the world, I felt unattached to it’.

Soft Landing arrives from a different headspace, one centered on accepting that little euphoria is still more than good enough: “I am much more interested in capturing a time and feeling, than getting it perfectly right.”

This willingness to mess with things also led to a more organic approach to composition, as out went plug-ins and software in favour of real instruments, tape loops and live effects. The result is an album of greater texture than its predecessor, mixing synth pop, electronica and occasional shoegaze into the kind of finished product that recalls Braids or Virginia Wing.

Mood wise, the general feeling was inspired by the contentment of a new relationship (Mackey’s partner is fellow musician Marika Hackman), but emotions are often dealt with obliquely, opener A Place To Lie’s skittering pads and airy sounding washes a continual source of motion that belies its theme of place and happiness.

The first to be completed, it was a piece which anchored the new record’s attitude, homing in on the simple contentment of waking up next to a lover whilst bathed in sunlight.

The edges of this new reality are never rough, Heaven Hanging Low’s graceful introspection circling round to religious imagery (‘Slide through paradise, I was caught in the light/Pulling planets out the sky, taking a bite’) followed by a devotional chorus of, ‘Pray and I Pray’.

Other references are more nuanced, even if the notions of desire and dependency swap places on Real Life, its strings impressing a sense of austerity whilst the subject is lost willingly or otherwise (‘Hands on the pane of a ceiling/Yeah, I’m coming upside-down to a real, to a real life’).

It was one of the first instances in modern memory, but the pandemic also brought a feeling of time standing still, of losing its meaning entirely; this smudged confusion is echoed in The Weeks, surreal experiences framing isolation in an otherwise idyllic house in Devon, the languorous patterns giving way to a rare, grunge-lite conclusion/collision of light and darkness.

If that feels like trauma getting some way in, by the foggy closer Too Bright a protective boundary has been fortified. It’s in Waves however that the most obvious sense of connection is offered; built on a languid patter of beats, the heavily retro-leaning chorus offers supreme, lovelorn pop.

There were no boundaries, no entry or exit signs to how the last three years has made us feel. Some went through the corridors unscathed, some didn’t, some may never have the tools for a true personal reconciliation.

Polly Mackey has made her peace with that, and accordingly produced a record about being in love with the spectre of guilt and disconnection as a rear horizon.

Soft Landing bravely doesn’t look back, a record whose layers take time to fully peel away and, even then, feels like not all its secrets will ever be yours to know”.

I normally spotlight new and rising artists for this feature. I feel Art School Girlfriend is entering a new stage of her career - and is someone that many do not know about. To correct that, I wanted to highlight her brilliance. Soft Landing may be an album that has passed you by. Make sure you catch up and give it a dive. I would urge people to…