Alfie Templeman: "I was like, mate, I've just come out of being a kid, what's happening now?"

ALFIE TEMPLEMAN’s sophomore album ‘Radiosoul’ is a kaleidoscopic journey through his musical mind, as he embraces collaboration and pushes the boundaries of his sound. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Blacksocks.

Alfie Templeman wants you to know he's more than an indie pop boy. Yeah, he says it directly in our chat, but a spin of his second album, 'Radiosoul', is proof enough.

"It's not that I don't want to be seen as that; it's that I don't want to be limited to that," he explains, after joking he doesn't resonate with being a pop star or rock star and instead wants to be a Philly soul boy.

Still, with his sophomore record scratching nearly every itch in Alfie's full-to-bursting brain, Philly soul isn't miles from what he's capable of. 'Radiosoul' pinballs around as many genres as possible in eleven tracks without it feeling like you've got whiplash when the song changes.

"The whole idea of it was to essentially make a double album in a single album," says Alfie of his motive this time. "Just make as many different kinds of songs and piece it all together and make it sound somewhat cohesive. I always said it was incohesively cohesive, even though that makes no sense whatsoever. I had so many different genres in my head that I wanted to go to."

Kicking off the cycle with 'Eyes Wide Shut', a pop bop that recalls early Scissor Sisters, dropping the sultry, groovy title-track early on, and recently releasing 'Hello Lonely', which he calls "the definition of indie-pop, a hybrid of Dua Lipa and MGMT", it was clear he was hinting at losing the label.

A proper music nerd, his encyclopaedic interest in every corner of music lends itself well to the album's mood board. He goes for Beck-style slacker rock on 'Beckham', the chorus evoking the British mundanity of 'Parklife' as he reels off places in London he wanted to live; he nods to A. G. Cook's peppy production and autotuned vocals on 'Drag', 'Switch' aims for a spacey, Alex G sound, while 'Run To Tomorrow' rounds out the record with 90s Jeff Buckley flair.

His years of ripping off Nile Rogers' guitar style also pay off, as the legend himself appears on 'Just A Dance'. "That's how working with him came about," Alfie says, explaining the link up. "It just happens, and I subconsciously start playing like him. It's tried and tested and proven that that choppy sound sounds the best, and he's the one to do it."

Working with a tight team of Will Bloomfield, Justin Young and Dan Carey – the former two helping out on Alfie's debut album 'Mellow Moon', the latter coming in this time around with an equally varied approach, as his recent work is within the British and Irish post-punk scene but extends as far as Kylie's 'Slow' – it was important for Alfie to only work with those who 'get' him and his process.

While he's spent most of his career so far producing his own music, noting that creating 'Mellow Moon' involved a lot of playing around and figuring it out himself, 'Radiosoul' was a far more intentionally collaborative space.

"I don't do many writing sessions anymore apart from with people I have a good relationship with, staying with people I trust who understand my vision. I got down to that list of people over time because I work in the studio in a very particular way; I go from one instrument to another, and I'm very scatterbrained. I worked with a lot of other people who just couldn't put up with that at all, and they'd want to just get a good melody or a few bars of something where I'd want to write a massive song and go crazy putting in all these secret little bits that pan weirdly."

The team he's got on 'Radiosoul' allow him to do exactly that, almost every track starting small and swirling out into huge, layered anthems. Arriving at the studio with ideas "three-quarters baked, definitely not half", Alfie wanted to stay spontaneous and let the producers flip the song upside down.

"When you have that combination of people that still want to work together but also push on what you're doing and try something completely backwards and completely new that you wouldn't have thought of before, then I think those are the exact producers I want to work with. I didn't want to make it so I was sat in a room amongst a bunch of East London hipsters eating seven quid Pret A Manger sandwiches doing silly writing sessions. That's not me at all."

Although it wasn't about relinquishing control, it was about fulfilling his vision and replicating what he hears in his head, recognising that's not something that's always possible for Alfie alone. What makes 'Radiosoul' such a massive sonic step forward is a combination of ambition, time and collaboration.

"All the best melodies I've had are ones that come to you. You sit there, and you internalise everything, and the next minute, it's there. I do often think about that and how you can dream a song and hear it in your head and just put it down. How it materialises from just a thought is so interesting to me. It's incredible.

"This is why I worked with other producers this time, because on 'Mellow Moon', I had so many good ideas that I just wasn't capable of doing myself. On a lot of those early EPs, I used to go and record things, a lot of crazy ideas, but the problem was I didn't have the right guitar tones or the right synth lines and stuff and they'd kind of fall flat. It was such a shame that some of those ideas were only 85% instead of 100%. With this record, it was about making sure I maximised those ideas and made them as close to what I imagined as possible."

Reflecting not only on his debut full-length but on the numerous EPs he'd released since 2018, Alfie realised how much both he and his approach to making music had changed. Once able to knock out songs in a couple of hours, leaving his teens brought forth a new, self-critical side that forced him to think differently. 'Radiosoul' marks the longest stretch of time he's gone without releasing any new music, with his previous release schedule involving dropping gradually longer EPs every year until the album arrived in 2022. "You start off with a few songs that you think are good, then you go off and record a few more songs, and you think the ones before are crap, and you just keep going around in this spiral into craziness. Making this album was basically doing that."

It's obviously quite jarring to hear someone who's barely broken into their twenties talk about how they made music when they were younger, but, even if it's not on a Disney kid level, Alfie has grown up in front of an audience, and it's something that's taken a bigger toll on him than he thought.

"It was more difficult than I expected. I had a really busy year in 2022 and I needed some time off to be honest. I had hit a wall. I had a pretty busy four years of my life where I'd worn myself out a lot. For some reason, imposter syndrome hit me out of nowhere, and it was really strange. You're always going to have your highs and lows in this industry, and after so much of a high, it was like, 'Ok, here you go, you're at the bottom'. But it made me write so much better. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, feeling like crap when you're writing songs, but sometimes you do have to go there."

Closing track 'Run To Tomorrow' unpacks a lot of those feelings, but as he claws his way out, it leaves the record on a more positive note.

"That was a lot of this album, to be honest; just feeling a bit confused by the last few years and like, what just happened? I've left school and I've blinked and I'm 19 and everything has just gone by me. All these gigs, records, people coming out to see me. It's a lot to take on, and I was like, mate, I've just come out of being a kid, what's happening now? I'm a role model for people but I don't even know who I am? There were a lot of conflicting things in my head. Where do I go now? I was like, 'Ok, I just have to be me and do the same thing that I did all those years ago that made people want to listen to my music'."

It'll always feel patronising to say "He's only 21!", and even Alfie (who's kept his age in his bio since he started dropping EPs at 15) seems to be growing tired of the longstanding surprised reactions to his age. It'd feel even more patronising to say 'Radiosoul' is a record that's wise beyond his years, but it is one that requires expectations to be left at the door.

"It was about coming out of essentially what people bought into my music for: being young and being a teenager. I wanted to say, well, actually, in the last couple of years, I've grown up a bit more, and things have changed a bit. I've moved out of my parents' house; I live with my girlfriend now in London. I wanted to experience more of life, have deeper meanings to my songs, and focus on lyrics a bit more.

"I've always tried as hard as I can for my whole life to play as many different things, learn as much as I can, and really experiment with things. This album is a big stepping stone for that. I'd like to be seen more as someone who likes to experiment with different genres rather than just being pinned down to one. Every record I make, I try something new, something completely different. I think it's done a pretty good job of a) trying a lot more new genres and things I wanted to do and b) just being lyrically deeper and more dense. I think it's a really good bridge to what's going to happen next."

And what is going to happen next?

"I will do a 'Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavoured Water', I promise."

Alfie Templeman's album 'Radiosoul' is out now. Follow Dork's PLAY Spotify playlist here.