I remember when we were recording the vocals, he would be like: ‘Oh, let’s do it one more time.’ “He had a lot of energy finishing the recordings,” remembers Strange of the period, in autumn 2021, the band spent working on music in the farmhouse. That felt especially true of Holm, the group say. “I think it gave us some kind of calmness, and maybe more boldness.” “I think we were less concerned about how people would receive the music,” says Strange of their time in isolation. Together, the four band members whittled them down to a tight 11 for the album that would become I Guess Nothing Will Be The Same. By the time they’d been in the countryside for six months, they had 20. They decided not to drink – it wasn’t the best idea for Holm, they thought – and with little else to occupy them in the evenings, started messing around with instruments.Ī couple of months in, songs were starting to take shape. There wasn’t much around apart from potato fields (they ate little else), and the four friends joked about embarking on a new life as spud farmers. They set up home in a disused farmhouse, and set about restoring the place, fixing the leaky roof and learning carpentry skills to furnish the spot. In 2019, Liss felt like they were getting back on track.Īfter the pandemic hit in 2020, the band packed up and moved to the rural home of Holm’s father, located four hours west of Copenhagen on the Jutland peninsula. I had some pretty dark thoughts.”īut with the help of his band and medical professionals, he had reached a better place. And then suddenly, the thing that you love the most is what makes you so sad. “You know – music was everything to me at that time. “I was so low on everything,” he told me. In 2016, he had voluntarily checked into a mental health ward for 22 days. They were excited about their new single, the soulful Talk To Me, and their six-track Second EP, which would follow later that year.īut as the sun’s light turned golden, Holm talked openly about his struggles. It wasn’t anything fancy, but the space had become a kind of sanctuary. Colourful, homemade tapestries and arty vintage posters hung on the walls. That summer of 2019, the band had welcomed me to their cosy studio in an industrial part of Copenhagen, a neighbourhood that felt very far away from the chocolate-box architecture of Tivoli Gardens. He suffered from panic attacks that made recording difficult and, at times, performing live impossible. As recounted in an interview I did with the band for THE FACE in 2019, Holm’s mental health struggles, exacerbated by the pressure of the hype machine, set him back. But the size of their following dwarfed their officially-released music they put out just six songs in four years. Liss found famous admirers in Pharrell and Jamie xx, and supported Vampire Weekend on a European tour. Their tracks married the sweetness of indie-pop with the strut of ’80s R&B. In 2015 they released their first singles Try and Always, followed by an EP, First, on XL in 2016. The band met at school in the Danish city of Aarhus. It is such an important part of who we are, and who we were together with Søren.” But along the way, we realised that it was an album we’ve been working on for such a long time. “At that point we were like: maybe we should just throw it all out because this is too tough. “When Søren passed away a year ago, I wouldn’t have expected us to be where we are now,” says Tyrrestrup, calling, alongside Strange, from Copenhagen a few days before their album’s release. Other moments, like when Holm sings, “nothing is wrong, but nothing feels right”, on Exist, can be flatly devastating.įor Holm’s bandmates Vilhelm Strange (guitar, 27), Villads Tyrrestrup (bass, 26), and Tobias Laust (drums, 26), it wasn’t always a given that this album would be released. Songs like Country Fuckboy can be joyful and funny. That loss makes listening to the record’s clever and witty songs, which draw from grunge and pop, Balearic and guitar-funk, a complicated experience. Their singer, the sweet, tender-voiced Søren Holm, lost his life to suicide last year, shortly after the foursome finished recording. Liss are a Danish indie-pop band with a remarkable debut album, I Guess Nothing Will Be The Same, out this month. It is something that no one should have to feel. It evokes a strange, year-long kind of magical thinking, per an acclaimed memoir by Joan Didion. It is the thing with feathers, in a vivid book by Max Porter. To capture it, authors have reached for odd, fantastical images. Grief is such an encompassing thing that stretches the limits of our comprehension.
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