Boston Manor: Sunny side up

Boston Manor's 'Sundiver' is the sonic equivalent of throwing open the windows after a storm—bright, brash, and full of the kind of hopeful aggression the world needs right now. Check out our new Upset cover story.

Words: Alexander Bradley.

Have you ever experienced cute aggression? That strange urge to smush your pet's adorable face or pinch a newborn's chubby cheeks? It's a curious phenomenon, supposedly a way of channelling overwhelming positive emotions. If you've never felt it yourself, you've probably been on the receiving end, confused by the intensity of such affection. This sensation - where love and aggression intertwine - is the closest comparison to what Boston Manor have tried to capture on their new album 'Sundiver'.

Henry Cox, their singer, describes it as a "visceral reaction" to "being flooded with all this colour and brightness and energy." That reaction is an album that is "upfront" and "in your face," according to guitarist Mike Cunniff. "I think there's like a positive aggression. It's almost like a positive force of love and the desire to make things better and make things change and to be a better person, and sometimes it needs to be a little bit aggressive; especially with this time we're living in at the moment," he adds.

'Sundiver' arrives as a direct response to the claustrophobic and brooding predecessor 'Datura', with their differences, by design, being night and day. With birds chirping, the album opens with "Could you please open that window / let the new world in?" on 'Datura (Dawn)'; an obvious rebuke to 'Datura (Dusk)' which started the last album and asked that same window to be closed.

The contrast is striking, and no track embodies the album's radiant core more than 'Fornix', the first song written for the record. With his gaze set on British society and watching people fall into far-right rabbit holes, Henry decided to feel hope rather than despair. "I believe it can be undone / I believe that everybody is able to love," the chorus goes. The idea is that it is never too late to change, and we shouldn't write people off. "A lot of people from our side of the political spectrum would say, 'Fuck these people, they're too far gone,'" Henry explains before adding, "Everyone is capable of change. Everyone's capable of love. Everyone's able to love and deliver it."

"But then I started thinking about how that kind of philosophy works across all mediums, and not just about people and politics, but about self-care and your own kind of change," he explains.

Incidentally, arguing with "far-right freaks" (Henry's words) solves nothing, but making an album that is permeated with hope certainly makes things seem a little brighter.

It would have been so easy, expected almost, for Boston Manor to have gone the other way and come up with another 'Glue', which used politics as a chew toy, or another 'Welcome To The Neighbourhood', plunging themselves again into the seedy underbelly of suburbia.

Instead, thanks in part to the pandemic, Mike found escaping the doom and gloom was more productive than leaning into it. He spent a lot of time in lockdown revisiting all his favourite albums. It did wonders for his mental health and "[it] helped me go into like a parallel world, and I kept that in mind when writing this record. I was like, 'I want to take people away from this'," he reflects.

"Escapism is the whole other side to the album," Henry notes.

There is no better escape on the album than on 'Sliding Doors'. While singing of portals and different worlds, it is also the band's most punishing-sounding song yet. Coming directly from Mike's delve back into his favourite records, the track boasts a vicious riff and churned-up vocal sound straight out of the Deftones playbook.

The song finds Henry pushing his voice further than before as he screams "Everything is just getting worse" at the top of his lungs. It's not like it's the first time he has screamed, but it comes more frequently this time around, and, having played a few of these songs already, he is taking the extra strain on his voice in his stride… for now. "I'm just sort of yelling really high, and it just sounds good."

"If there's no screaming on the next record, you know that it all went to shit," he adds with a laugh.

That time revisiting some of his most influential and formative records during the pandemic has resulted in an album full of references from the late-90s / early-00s. You'll find nods to Portishead, Garbage, and Smashing Pumpkins, but then also some dance-pop and R&B sounds come as a surprising addition too.

"I don't think the late-90s / early-00's pop music is given enough credit because that music goes so hard as well. The likes of NSYNC and Destiny's Child and all of that kind of stuff," Mike offers, and Henry is quick to back him up, confessing his love for Missy Elliott and adding, "Pop was on a different tip in the early 2000s. It was so versatile. I fucking love it."

Inspired by the freedom that pop had at that time and its ability to absorb influence from a wide range of resources before it, Boston Manor have worn their influences proudly on 'Sundiver' while remaining true to the fundamentals of their sound. In turn, they've managed to authentically balance some of their heaviest moments as a band with numbers like 'Horses In A Dream', which has a sound befitting of being the new tenants of Backstreet Boys' haunted mansion from 'Everybody'. The pop boyband feeling is ramped up on 'Dissolve' and is instantly followed by 'What Is Taken, Will Never Be Lost', the most poignant moment of the record as Henry recounts losing his grandfather, which is given this Portishead meets 'Cry Me A River' treatment.

While the breadcrumbs have been there from the very beginning of Boston Manor, such an overt foray into celebrating the pop bands of their youth could be seen as a risky move. Thankfully, they have no such concerns at all.

"Maybe we were quite lucky in that we sort of took some big risks earlier on in our career," Henry considers and instantly conjures memories of the fresh-faced, bouncy, pop-punk band from Blackpool that first started to make waves over 10 years ago now.

"We're lucky to have such an open-minded and understanding fan base, and it's part of the fun; you know that you're not going to get the same record twice."

"There's always a median sound that's going to fluctuate in one direction, but there's always a kind of through line with all of it that feels like our band. I also don't think that it's fair to experiment for experiment's sake; I don't think that's clever or difficult," he adds.

"We experiment a lot behind closed doors, but everything that we do put out, even if it is left-field, it's very considered, and, we hope, that people will appreciate it and enjoy it."

That experimentation is what took Boston Manor to the countryside in Welwyn Garden City to record, with a few hundred demos for this album. Knowing 'Sundiver' would be something of a sequel to 'Datura' meant that there was a vague structure, lynchpin songs, already in place, but everything else underwent a vigorous metamorphosis. 'Heat Me Up' was a Cardigans-style song. 'Container' had at one point been more of a garage beat, then transformed into something that sounded like 'Bonkers' by Dizzee Rascal, too. "There's so many, so many weird versions of that song," Henry explains. "I'm glad we got there in the end, but that was our Everest making that song sound good."

That sort of experimentation is the driving force behind Boston Manor's aim to never retread old ground in the knowledge that making the same record twice would only make them weaker. But, ultimately, Boston Manor are making music for themselves. If you don't like it, that's fine. "There's so much shit for people to listen to and enjoy. People's attention spans are super, super short. If they don't love the record, then they don't need to love the record. There's no one that's gonna care about this record as much as we do. That's the hope, but, at the end of the day, life's too short, and you've got to make shit that you like," Henry quips.

The accumulation of their experimentation, wearing their influences more proudly, and the finale for their two-album arc comes in 'DC Mini'. With the help of Heriot's Debbie Gough, the closing track is a soaring shoegaze number. "It resets and starts again," Henry soothes as the noise spirals.

Talking about this track, there's a sense that it is their crowning achievement of what they want to make on this record.

"A lot of shoegaze, I like the idea more than I like it," Henry admits. "I like the idea of wall of sound guitars and this almost… ambience. Something that is so loud and heavy that it becomes almost kind of like a wash and becomes ambient even though it's crushingly loud. We tried to play with that at some points on the record."

They tried that approach on the instrumental track 'Morning Star' with more electronics, but on 'DC Mini', Mike realised a dream that comes from a love of blackgaze. It's a sound that the guitarist worked obsessively to perfect, and now, having cracked it on 'DC Mini', there remains a suggestion that the more atmospheric, pulverising sound will be a feature of what comes next from Boston Manor.

But before looking ahead, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate the complete double feature of 'Datura' and 'Sundiver'. "We're standing on our own two feet a little bit more now," Mike states, and it's evident in the ambition and level of execution in this pair of records. While not explicitly "concept" records, both albums exist in the "faux Blackpool world" they've been building over the last few years. It's reality, but not quite. It is slightly untethered. Inspired by the Donald Glover series Atlanta and The Animatrix and Akira, they've revelled in the moments in which the rules of reality have been a bit more liquid, and they've carried that more literally into the videos they've been making recently. In looking even further back, Henry credits his old PlayStation games as the inspiration behind wanting to make music that can capture an entire backdrop and tell its own story without any lyrics.

'Datura' followed them down the dangerous backstreets while 'Sundiver' looks skyward towards limitless possibilities. Together, they represent a duality of positivity and negativity and a fork in the road of wholly embracing just one mindset.

It's clear that this album has always been in Boston Manor. Both 'Sundiver' and its predecessor draw a lot on inspirations, whether they be musical, film, or even video games stemming back from their collective childhoods, and, combined, they've made something truly special. It's not only a product of their youth and a reaction to the world around them now, but an invitation to escape it - if only for a little while. ■