Dublin’s Pillow Queens signed to Royal Mountain Records after self-releasing their debut 2020 album In Waiting. Their second album Leave the Light On followed in spring 2022 and the quartet have now released their third album Name Your Sorrow. We took the opportunity to learn more about how life experience has shaped their creative process and music.
Can you share a liitle on the themes of Pillow Queens’ new album Name Your Sorrow.
Name Your Sorrow delves into themes of loss, grief, love, and exploration. It’s also very much a record about love. Similarly to our first two records, this album is deeply personal and reflective of our experiences and emotions. Drawing inspiration from our lives and the world around us, we wanted to create music that would resonate with listeners on a profound level.
Has your song creation process evolved with experience?
With each album, we’ve grown more confident in our abilities and more attuned to our artistic vision. Our song creation process has become more refined, but is still deeply collaborative. We’ve learned to trust our instincts and embrace experimentation, and mainly to just allow our music to evolve organically with each new record.
Learning that the album title is a line in the poem “Atlantis” by Irish poet Eavan Boland, how is this poem connected with the themes of Name Your Sorrow?
We came to find “Atlantis” after we’d finished recording the record and we found that it beautifully encapsulated the essence of loss and longing, which were themes that ran through the record. There’s a sense of melancholy and introspection in both the record and the poem: they explore similar emotional landscapes, bringing you along on a journey of self-discovery and catharsis.
The soaring soundscapes on tracks such as ‘February 8th‘ and ‘One Night’ are utterly thrilling. You worked with a new producer, Collin Pastore from Nashville (boygenius, Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties) on Name Your Sorrow and spent three weeks at Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry. How did the change in producer and recording location impact the album? Collaborating with Collin Pastore definitely brought a fresh perspective to our sound. Collin’s a genius and his expertise and creative input helped elevate our music to new heights, allowing us to explore different sonic textures and experiment with our sound. The recording environment itself also played a crucial role, the gorgeous landscape of Newry helped foster creativity and collaboration. Otherwise we’d have gone a bit weird. Overall, the experience was just lovely.
Is Name Your Sorrow your most personal record to date? And the creative process of making music cathartic, helping to unravel some of the challenges of life?
Name Your Sorrow is a super personal one for us. I think any creative process has a way of helping you unravel your experiences and see things in a new light. It also helps that there’s four of us in the band and each of us has a new perspective on the tone and meaning of a song, so it can cause a beneficial shift in mindset having their opinions weigh in on fraught emotions!
It was intriguing to learn that even though previously you have road-tested new tracks live and tweaked them on the basis of the crowd’s reaction, you haven’t done this for this album. Do you think that’s partly due to being more comfortable in your own skin as Pillow Queens, or was it more to do with how you recorded this album?
The decision not to road-test tracks live for this album was a bit of a departure from our usual process. It was driven by a combination of factors, including our evolving confidence as artists and the unique recording approach we took for this album. By immersing ourselves fully in the studio environment and focusing on capturing the songs in a raw, authentic way, we were able to channel our creative energy in new and exciting ways, which resulted in a more cohesive experience for us as a band. I think it’s easy to get bogged down by an audience’s response to hearing a new song live for the first time, but realistically songs take time to marinade to have their full effect so it’s a lot of pressure to put on an audience!
What does playing live mean to Pillow Queens, and how do you think you will be feeling before stepping onto the stage in Iveagh Gardens?
We love playing live, and a hometown show definitely brings about something extra special. Iveagh Gardens is a huge one for us because we’ve seen some of our favourite bands there over the years (Pixies, Idles, Villagers, Fontaines D.C., Bell X1) so it’s a huge deal to us. We’ve been planning the show since the moment it was booked so just before we step on stage we’ll most likely be vibrating with nerves, and asking each other for reassurance, but the main feelings will be buzz and elation.
Pillow Queens third album Name Your Sorrow is out now on Royal Mountain Records.
