“When you’re doing things on your own, they just take more time,” adds singer (and aforementioned podcast star) Mez Sanders-Green. “Some of these demos originated in 2023, so I don’t think we ever really decided to move away from music. I think we wanted to do it on our own terms. It’s the most freeing thing as artists to write for ourselves and just let it happen when it happens.

“We didn’t know if we were going to make another record,” he continues. “So we gave it a lot of love and attention, and we’re really proud of this one. It feels like there was a full community behind it – a collective rather than just us as artists.”

The album, titled ‘ABSTRACT / NATURAL’, sees LIFE veer away from their shouty post-punk roots and into something more nuanced. There’s still plenty of pace on tracks like ‘The Dollywagon’, but elsewhere folk bleeds in at the edges, with opener ‘Wild Grasses’ being driven by, of all things, an acoustic guitar.

“We’ve not written to a genre this time around,” acknowledges Mez. “Having our own studio gave us space to have fun and just enjoy being in a band. I had a very clear blueprint for what I wanted it to be, and I was very rigid with that throughout, but the band breathed life into the concept and made it their own.”

“Mez had a story in his head,” adds Stew. “It was really personal, so we had to interpret that musically, but since we’ve been away, we’ve all been doing other stuff, and we’ve got a much broader sonic palette to draw from. Lydia [Palmeira, the band’s bassist] has been experimenting with electronic, noise and drone, and I’ve been doing loads of ambient tape looping, all of which had an impact on the album. We wouldn’t have got that if we didn’t have a breather, but now we can add this stuff that comes from a completely different world to LIFE.

“There are a couple of tracks on the album that were actually recorded live for the first time without us knowing what they were going to be,” he continues. “So we just kept the original recording and built on top of it for the final release. That feels really special to be able to do, and I remember chatting to the rest of the band and trying to encourage them to be more improvisational, which we haven’t done before. I’d been doing loads of weird abstract improvisational stuff in my own time, so bringing that uncomfortability into LIFE was really cool to do. It got everyone out of their comfort zones and brought a new sound to the record.”

It wasn’t just the band who brought new influences, with LIFE involving a whole community of Hull-based creatives in the album, from inviting young artists to make the album artwork to friends helping on production and even just leaning on supporters to help inspire them to keep pushing on with a recording process that at times felt endless.

“It’s genuinely quite emotional thinking that it’s finally coming out,” says Mez. “Because it’s been a long, long process to get to where we are now.”

“There were moments where we didn’t think we’d get it over the line,” agrees Stew. “Just moments where we thought ‘we can’t do this, we don’t have the facilities’, but then other people would pick us up and carry us forwards. When we were losing energy, we relied on our friends and community to push us on and tell us to keep going. Not that we would have given up entirely, but I think without that positive energy from everyone else it would’ve been a much more gruelling experience.”

Always happy to shout about where they’re from, it’s perhaps no surprise that LIFE are deeply embedded in Hull’s creative community. The energy poured into the album process by those outside the band may have been absolutely crucial to the creation of ‘ABSTRACT / NATURAL’, but it wasn’t a one-way street. “We’ve produced other people’s records in our studio,” explains Stew. “There are not a lot of spaces in Hull where you can record, so to share the one we’ve made is really important. I’m a strong believer in letting people in and not being a gatekeeper to spaces, because I appreciate how hard it can be. Hull is quite a poor place in general, so people can’t afford to go and spend twenty grand making a record; it just isn’t feasible. If we can help other musicians to do what we’ve done, obviously we’re going to do that.”

“Everyone leans on everyone in Hull,” adds Mez. “There’s no shame in asking for help, because it’s a vulnerable area in all sorts of ways, and that leads to community-building, I think. We’re not the biggest artists from the city, but even if we can help others get to a point where they might go on to do better than we have, that’s really fulfilling.”

Being deeply embedded in the city they’re from has always been creative fuel for LIFE, but there’s a sense that this bond has only strengthened over time. Likewise, the band’s relationships with each other are a crucial element of what drives them. After all, when you’re fully independent and recording everything yourself, you’ll soon lose steam if you hate the people you’re with. “We’re just one entity at this point!” says Stew. “We can just go into a room and not even talk to each other, just start playing without saying anything.

“Because we’d built a studio around our rehearsal space, it meant we could just press record as soon as something started happening and capture moments that we wouldn’t have previously captured. If we’d not had that option, we’d have lost a lot of those random moments and not been able to be as spontaneous with it all.”

“Sometimes,” adds Mez. “These three would just be jamming, and I’d start talking shit over the top of it, and that’s it – ‘Print it, that’s a Number 1 record’. So much of this album came from being in the moment and just playing together without too much planning. I always had the idea that it would be about adventure, letting go of things, escaping. That was the universal theme, but everything else came about as we went along. Without sounding like a pretentious dick, it was quite natural, but it was also quite abstract, hence the album title.” ■

Taken from the July 2026 issue of Dork. LIFE’s album ‘ABSTRACT / NATURAL’ is out 19th June.