The world may continue to spin around LONELY THE BRAVE, but through stolen moments and a desire to get outside of their comfort zone, they're in the best place they've been in a long time. Check out our latest Upset cover story.

Words: Steven Loftin.

Lonely The Brave trade in wide open spaces. Their music swoops and soars across a landscape of emotional vulnerability and reckoning. Since 2014's 'The Day's War', they've been building their arsenal of sky-high highway-peeling guitars and studiously furious rhythms. But with founding vocalist Dave Jakes leaving in 2018 to focus on his mental health, it was Jack Bennett who took up the mantle with the microphone. His gravelly voice brought a new texture to the group's 2021 third outing, 'The Hope List'. While it never managed to get its flowers thanks to a global pandemic, it did offer them a chance to hone in on what it is they do best. The group's fourth album is no different.

'What We Do To Feel' was constructed in stolen moments. Now, priorities lie with families and other ventures, with drummer Gavin 'Mo' Edgeley recently becoming a father for the second time, while guitarist Ross Smithwick is a restaurateur - that's not to mention Jack living up North. Time was not on the Lonely The Brave lads' (completed by bassist Andrew Bushen and guitarist Mark Trotter) side. But it's this kind of fact that they embrace with poise.

"Over the last, however many years, as we've all had to deal with, you know, COVID and everything else, and everyone has responsibilities outside of the band, so we've got to be realistic about the time we have," says Mark.

It would seem they're all the better for the constraints. 'What We Do To Feel' morphs the vast expanses for a more focused, detailed, and oftentimes fury-driven scope, with the addition of new flavours, including orchestral flourishes and small synth details. While not a total reconstruction of the familiar Lonely The Brave patterns, it's undeniably a foot forward for the band.

Still, there's no one specific genre at their core. As Jack mentions, "I don't think 'Victim' sounds anything like the genre of something else that's later on like 'An Even Tide' or 'In The Well' - it just sounds like a different thing."

Mark also notes, "I think it's fair to say we're trying to push ourselves out of our usual lane a bit with it, which is also really exciting."

This expanding mindset is due in part to the constraints they found themselves battling. "I think sometimes that lack of availability breeds creativity because you don't have the option of, you know, endless sessions," reasons Mark. Journeying up to Jack in Lapwing Studios in Yorkshire, before long, they'd knuckled down, and what had inevitably appeared thanks to the pressures wound up being the diamonds that make up 'What We Do To Feel'. Jack likens the situation to "a plumbing job or electrician, you go 'This is what I've got to do' at the start of the day, and then finishing it.

"Whereas [usually] with this, it's like right, go in there, here's your time, write a song and record it or demo it or something." Jack's past experiences with constraints "and just actually getting stuff down in a short amount of time" haven't always paid dividends as they have now. "Usually, if you try to rush things, sometimes it's a bit like, maybe you could have done it better? Or you [the opposite], there's quite a lot of procrastination, which I do all the time, especially when I'm just sat on my own, but as a collective, we seemed to thrive."

Jack's Lonely The Brave experience has been the product of various pressure scenarios. From his first outing with the band and its inevitably muted promotion to very much being thrown headfirst into the deep end with Lonely The Brave's triumphant live program ("I've never done a support show, which is random, they've all been headliners"), he's even amazed at how long it's been since he joined.
"It might be six years that I've technically been in this band now? Something ridiculous like that," he suddenly realises. "So in terms of actually having a stamp on the band… when we were producing this one, Mark was saying in terms of letting it do its own thing and the songs kind of go wherever they're going, I kind of cared less about what the outcome was.

His understanding of what Lonely The Brave is and means to both the rest of his bandmates and their fans was cemented at his first outing with them at London's Omeara in 2018. "The first show I did was a sold-out London thing; everybody's singing louder than me – I've still got ringing in my ears from that show!" This deep ending has been a consistent fixture of his existence with the band. This time around, just to see how far they can take things, they're stripping back. For the first time, Lonely The Brave will be doing acoustic sets to celebrate the release of 'What We Do To Feel'. "The whole thing is jumping at the deep end every week," he gleefully beams. "I don't think we've ever played a show where I've gone like, this is chill. A comfort zone is quite low in the priority of getting across a cool performance and seeing how it comes across," he adds.

'The Hope List' was Jack coming into the fray and trying to find his place. He knew the fans had a unique and deep set connection with Dave's inimitable vocals, not to mention the band itself was - and remains - such a well-oiled machine that, as he puts it, "When I joined, and just came down to do some vocals and stuff to try out, see if it was going to work and things, not that I didn't know this already, but the band basically sound like the band without a vocalist," he says with wide-eyed admiration.

With this, finding his spot initially was a more reserved affair. "The first album, I was like, 'Oh, I can't have too many effects, can't layer on the vocals too much because no one's gonna like that new singer'." Nowadays, it's a different story. "Six years in, I'm basically the oldest person that's ever existed," he laughs. "I've literally had two cats, a gazillion things have happened – more headline shows than I've ever played in any band previous, probably."

He describes Lonely The Brave as a band that can "very much sound like explosions in the sky, but it needs to be intimate and kind of small." Given he's been on production duties, his understanding of what Lonely The Brave should sound like is just as important as what they could sound like. This is an idea that Mark hasn't paid much mind to, an intricate detail that makes the whole thing work. "I don't think we've ever thought about what is ever going to sound like, and that's not me being flippant about it," Mark says. "Songs do what they want to do, and in my experience, if you try to fight it and try to push them in a certain way, it will very quickly tell you to fuck off."

Lonely The Brave respect the process in all its forms. They've paid their dues, they've travelled roads up and down this fair isle, and the core of their attitude remains the same. "[Being] able to explore those things is always exciting and getting creative with other ways of doing things and working out how we can make our live show better than it's ever been." It's the live arena that everything boils down to for the group. It's where their records explode into furiously euphoric moments, and 'What We Do To Feel' looks set to settle into that environment nicely.

"That's really the key part for me now," adds Mark. "Because the last album, the last campaign, everything else was during COVID, so we could only do a handful of shows, which is not very many shows in comparison to what we used to do at the beginning back, and now it feels really important to make this better than it's ever been." This is the only thing that matters to them. As Mark ends, "[Our] expectations are to be the best band that we can be. I think we're probably in the best place we've been in for as long as I can remember." ■