From guttural screams to nut-mix-fuelled cow moos, Goat Girl’s ‘Below The Waste’ is a testament to the band’s growth, resilience, and unwavering trust in each other.

Words: Rebecca Kesteven.
Photos: Holly Whittaker.

'Below The Waste' has been a long time in the making. Pieced together like a collage, the album is a snapshot of life experiences, world events, relationships, and hardships. It's full of metaphors about the ugliness of the oppressive structures of modern life, of stripping away barriers and taking trips down the uncanny valley. For the South London trio consisting of Rosy Jones, Lottie Pendlebury and Holly Mullineaux, it's also representative of them entering their boldest and most powerful era so far.

Hopping on a Zoom call early on a Thursday afternoon, there's a wholesome vibe from the offset as Lottie and Rosy introduce their dog, who remains to be stroked just offscreen for the entire call. The band have just returned from a small UK underplay tour. "It was fun to get out and remember that we have people that support us and our music," Lottie explains. "We've just been doing quite a lot of supports, which is also really fun, but there's something quite different and special about performing to your fans. We met such nice people along the way, and played in some really beautiful venues" - a chapel in Hebden Bridge being one of the highlights.

Goat Girl made their official return in February with the release of the dissonant, tension-filled lead single 'ride around'. In the (comical albeit quite unsettling) music video, Rosy is a priest, Holly a 'karaoke hun', and Lottie turns into a giant ("She's shrunk back down finally!" jokes Rosy). "I feel like, because of the song's immediacy, we wanted to come back with a slap-in-the-face kind of thing," Rosy explains. "For me, it felt like it encapsulated quite a lot of the elements of the album - the vulnerability, the heaviness, the uncanniness, the joy." Collaborating with close friends Luke Kulukundis and Matro Villanueva Brandt of Foreign Body Productions, who directed and produced it, the band brainstormed their pretty extreme ideas and left the duo to create their own interpretation. "The lyrics talk about stripping away social expectations and trying to be yourself, meet new people, embrace those connections, and form your true self - so they came up with this idea to have this building gang of freaks," Holly laughs. "It was so fun to do."

A mishmash of sounds, including voice notes, samples, dense orchestral arrangements, miscellaneous objects used in unconventional ways, animal noises, and blood-curdling screams are heard in 'Below The Waste', and the band also experimented with a tonne of different instruments. Some of which they'd never even played before. "Some songs had, like, hundreds of tracks on them! We added so many things," Rosy explains. "We added quite a lot in Ireland [Most instrumentation was tracked over a 10-day stint at Hellfire Studios]. We had a banjo, really fat synths, the taishigoto - which was a really fun one to play, but also quite tedious. We got Reuben, who plays synth with us, to learn the cello. Lottie played violin on pretty much every song, Lottie's dad played viola, and then we got our friend Alex to play flute and clarinet. We really wanted a bass clarinet, so we got that as well. It was just sort of like getting everyone involved."

"Me and Rosy also decided to play strings, as well," Holly says. "There's a lot of trying-to-do-orchestral or hi-fi things in a lo-fi way on the album. I think it's cool to have the sound of something being 'done' correctly, but we didn't want it to sound polished and perfect all the time." Lottie agrees, adding: "Sometimes we really had to strip back in order for the point of the song to shine through."