INTERVIEWS LANTERNS ON THE LAKE

With their fifth album, Versions Of Us, Lanterns On The Lake have created the most empowering and triumphant body of work of their career thus far. Yet this monumental record very nearly didn’t exist.

“We’d begun working on the new album and we knew things didn’t feel right,” explains singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde. “There was a negative energy in the music, and the more we tried, the worse it became. I still can’t really put my finger on it; it wasn’t the relationships in the band, but there were other financial and logistical pressures. We’ve always been a band that’s tried to make music that has real heart and soul, and we could see that that wasn’t there.”

With their fourth record, Spook The Herd, Lanterns On The

Lake found themselves nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Now here they were just a short time later, wondering whether they were even going to make another album. “We always naturally put pressure on ourselves every time we come to record a new album, but in the back of our minds after Spook The Herd, to put it bluntly, we were all thinking, ‘We can’t fuck this up,’” recalls guitarist Paul Gregory. “We went back to the same studio in Ripponden with the same equipment and the same producer, Joss Worthington. It’s funny that you can take the same bunch of people and put them in exactly the same place and situation again, and for whatever reason, it just doesn’t work the next time around.”

After a lot of reflecting during an emotional and stressful time