Cult London faves Goat Girl are taking on the world with their much-anticipated second album, ‘On All Fours’.

By: Aleksandra Brzezicka.

Even before they released their remarkable self-titled debut album in 2018, Goat Girl’s razor-sharp post-punk was a South London sensation. When the scene hailed them as one of the best upcoming bands around, it was both exciting and a bit suffocating for the foursome. Sticking to their guns, they holed up in Dan Carey’s studio to press personal struggles and growth into their brand-new record, ‘On All Fours’.

Amid the second UK lockdown, three of the dream team - Clottie Cream, L.E.D. and recent addition Holly Hole (minus Rosy Bones, who was otherwise engaged) - jumped on Zoom to talk about all things concerning their second album.

The album name itself, ‘On All Fours’, came as a revelation when Clottie was going through John Barth’s fleetingly-popular 1966 novel Giles Goat-Boy, the story of a human boy raised as a goat, and read the phrase aloud.

“We’d been talking about how we keep playing four-to-the-floor beats, and Lottie thought it was called fall-to-the-floor for ages, which we kept joking about, so it just kind of connected,” Holly explains.

They like to play word games, so the reference means more to them than just the idea that they’re stronger when working together.

“It was also primal, kind of animalistic... I don’t know if ‘urge’ is the right word, but it lends itself to that world. [The book’s] also kind of promiscuous and talks about being submissive or dominant, like sexual as well. It just sat with the vibe of the record,” she adds.

While their signature sound might now be a little softer around edges, there’s still enough grit and turbulence to it. It’s as powerful as before, but a step on.

“I think it’s weird pop music. I don’t know how else to describe it, because indie-rock isn’t doing it justice really,” Holly says, trying to self-label their sound-shift.

Wanting to encapsulate that sensation, they took Aidan Evans-Jesra’s drawn characters like Bow and Arrow Lady or CowToy and placed them into their dreary wonderland-based video for ‘Sad Cowboy’, directed by Jocelyn Anquetil.

“It was talking about this strange world outside that was quite surreal, from a perspective of feeling excluded from that and bewildered by everything. The visuals had to have this dream-like feel to them,” Clottie elaborates.

It’s the kind of dream that can quickly turn into a nightmare if you’re not careful where you step. Like every paradise-like place, this one also has its upside down, entangled in the ethereal.

The outside has always seemed a bit of an odd, scary place to be. ‘On All Fours’’ opening track, ‘Pest’, feeds off that primal fear of not being in charge of your fate.

‘On All Fours’ is a thirteen-track symbolic journey of self-consciousness and self-discovery that subversively ends on ‘A-Men’, a song of realisation that change is natural and a stay in your comfort zone should be only temporary. It’s a record that flows with such grace that it should be listened to exclusively as a whole.

Goat Girl are firm believers in spontaneity and a spur-of-the-moment kind of energy, and to create the coherent sound they wanted for ‘On All Fours’, their method of recording had to be adjusted.

This time around, they stuck to a plan.

In very Goat Girl-style, they tracked most of the songs in a day leaving space for extra layers, synth and experiments.

It’s not just in Dan that they’ve found support, with the band heaping praise on their local scene, too.

“I think it shaped my view of how music could be and how it doesn’t have to be like a really formulated thing,” shares Clottie. “It could just really be in a sort of embryonic state of it. I feel like a lot of bands we were watching at [South London venue] The Windmill were quite loose and free with their performance. It was all quite lo-fi.

They took the best of the world that fascinated them so much and filtered it through their one-of-a-kind Goat Girl power-lenses to create a sound that captured the energy pulsing in the walls of local music pubs and the anger of their inhabitants. The dystopian fantasy they put forward was a complex one, full of gritty guitars and back-alley jazz that escapes narrowness of post-punk and indie gutters.

“From a lyrical point of view, I felt like there was pressure,” says Clottie, “but it’s pressure from so many different angles. It’s pressure from that bit, it’s pressure from people expecting you to sound the certain way. I feel like that’s how music journalism works a lot of the time, sort of trying to box you in with a simplified version of what it is. It’s hard to break out of that once your image has been created for you. I feel like we were almost told what we were, which was Brixton punks, which just wasn’t us at all. We played at The Windmill obviously, but I don’t feel like we were punks. I don’t think that’s what we were trying to do.

Accepting an invitation to Goat Girl’s enigmatic world, you must expect the unexpected. Last time it might’ve been anti-establishment havoc, now it’s weird pop, and who knows what beats they’ll be dancing to in the future. Only one thing is sure - it won’t be boring.