Interview: lotusbliss navigate wrecked hearts for their art

The final 14 seconds of lotusbliss‘ “Beautiful Monotone” pulls skin from the bone. It’s only three voices, wrapped like twisty vines around a trellis, the sun baking them in place, but it’s enough to shake you to the core. The evocative, air-puncturing ending, bookmarking the song as the torchy opener to their debut EP, A Good Death is a Beautiful Thing, feels as monumental as it does intimately carved. The last moments stand in stark contrast to the rest of the song, cut with more arena-laced fabrics, vibrant and pushing the boundaries over the edge. Yet the trio ⏤ comprised of Seth, Josh, and Adam Gauton, musicians out of Kent, UK ⏤ never miss the landing.

“We actually found ending the song one of the hardest parts of the process,” Seth writes to B-Sides & Badlands. “It felt important that the end was powerful in its representation of the song, thematically. The final part of the song is significant to the message in a couple of ways really. Firstly, there’s this vulnerability that comes with the stripping back of all other instrumentation, and you’re left with a visceral feeling of fragility that the lyrics are exploring throughout the song (i.e ‘you and I both know I wouldn’t cope with a sudden overflow’). Secondly, there’s also a sense of freedom as the voices break away in a form that’s symbolic of escape, a mirror to lines like ‘I cannot stay somewhere that isn’t real.'”

The song’s levitation quality, zipping across a cosmos of indie, Coldplay-style pop, and heavyweight singer/songwriter, worms its way into your head. You can’t help but become lost in between its soft layers. In the recording studio, containing a wider smorgasbord of tools, perhaps more than they were used to, a level of unexpected creative freedom opened before them. “The actual size of the bigger sound later on in the song changed a little throughout the recording process,” notes Adam. “The explosion and outburst that we created is key to the idea of wrestling with escapism that forms the foundation of  [this song].”

Echoing throughout the very last number, “a good death is a beautiful thing” is the kind of disturbingly poetic line that leaves you breathless. It’s the exchange of real-life trauma for artistic, and emotional, catharsis, the crux of the song as much as their life’s journey so far ⏤ a soul-cleansing way to bookend the debut. “This is quite an emotional [song] for us, cutting very close to the bone, so much so that we debated whether we should include it in the EP or not,” offers Josh. “2018 was a very heavy year for our family: the death of two grandparents, multiple miscarriages and an in-law losing a battle with cancer being the headline tragedies. It was really hard.”

Their grandfather’s death toward the end of that very long year fed directly into the phrase which would carry profound implications, personally and professionally. “One of us was chatting with our dad, and he said in an almost throw-away comment, ‘A good death is a beautiful thing.’ That line really stuck with us, and when we felt ready, we started translating that idea into song.”

“Beautiful Monotone” and “A Good Death” only scrape the surface. A Good Death is a Beautiful Thing (the EP) flies out of the body, absorbing the world along its space-bound trip, and harvests such a breadth of musical influences, you’d be hard-pressed to define exactly what and who they are. But that’s the charm. Below, the band dissects other EP standouts, like the trippy “Carpet,” growing up together, and songwriting.

Later, in “A Good Death,” there’s a sweltering guitar solo. When adding pieces like this into a song, how do you decipher what’s necessary and what’s not? What does this solo do for the story?

Adam: For us, we’ve found it’s usually a case of just trying out new elements. Generally, it will be pretty clear whether they’re adding to the song or taking away from it. This has helped us to keep trying to be creative with our sounds, too, the idea of ‘no wrong answer.’ Ultimately, if there’s a disagreement, we have three band members so a vote always comes out with a majority view. The solo in ‘A Good Death,’ though, is a very intentional and significant element of the song. The part is really an expression of the songs’ underlying pain and mental battle with loss. The wailing and note bending of the guitar is indicative of crying out, as distraught blends into defiance with the mantra-like lyrics reaffirming that ‘a good death is a beautiful thing.’

Why did you form this particular collective in 2018?

Josh: Previous to this, we’d never thought of it. When you grow up together, it’s easy to take one another for granted, and to look for people to partner and create with outside of that context. It could also make it feel less awkward looking outside of family, as very often those are the people that see you for how you really are instead of the facade you’d like to present. They’ve seen the good and the bad.

But there can also be a huge advantage, principally in that the bond a band would build over many years of being together was already there, and we all really want the best for each other through this project and are willing to sacrifice things for ourselves to make that happen. So, when the idea came, we tested it out and found there was something cool there and have just kept pushing into it since then.

Having grown up together, did you find your musical synergy lining up pretty well?

Seth: For sure! [It] is actually pretty weird when we all took very different musical routes. Growing up, Josh was all about high-energy guitar stuff, and [I] did lots of singing and even played Joseph in a school musical. Adam focused heavily on the sax, playing lots of jazz and big band. We never actually made much music together, even when we all started getting into indie rock stuff at uni. But then we realized we should, and we did, and it felt so natural. We’re all bringing something different to the table from our different journeys with music, and we’ve got a brotherly bond that makes things way easier. It’s kind of odd how much we tend to agree on musical decisions, but there’s a lot of patience going around when we don’t.

Fusing big pop hooks with darker shades of rock and alternative music, did honing a singular aesthetic come organically?

Adam: Yes and no. Naturally, it felt like there was a couple of directions we wanted to head as a band when we started writing, but I think patience and trial and error in the writing process helped us to explore different avenues and find our sound. That was important to us. We didn’t want to drop the first thing that came (and everyone will be glad we didn’t!) but wanted to be able to present something that we really loved and that felt like us.

With “Carpet,” you’re imagining a what-if scenario coming out of a very real life experience of needing a break in a relationship, but from where does the darkness come?

Seth: A few people have commented on the darkness of the track and video and to be honest we’re not sure we’d really noticed it all that much until people started saying it! We all tend to lean toward more moody and melancholic music, finding that highly upbeat stuff tends to not sit so well , even at points feeling more depressing if that’s not where your head is. So ,with the narrative, rather than any of us having a dark past or disturbing secret life, picking the anti-story simply felt like it sat better with us. For Josh, though, looking back at that conversational moment where he and his then-girlfriend discussed going on a break does feel panic-inducing considering that they’re still together (and are now actually married), and it really could have gone either way.

Given the abduction angle of the video, and its general cinematic feel, were you drawing upon any particular thriller or horror movies to flesh out the concept?

Josh: Liam Neeson in ‘Taken’ (not really). There wasn’t a particular film we had in mind but [mu] favorite film is ‘Donnie Darko’ and looking back some of the shots, particularly the scenes of the sky and running through the forest, bare resemblance to scenes in that film, with that uneasy feeling being quite present throughout both.

Have you found your musical endeavor together has taught you different things about each other or music itself?

Adam: For sure. We’re always learning both our own niche skill set and each other’s niches within the creative process, and those skills and pretenses feel like a window into each of our own personalities. In terms of music, there’s endless things to learn and always new avenues to explore, and whilst we’re getting more confident in what we’re doing, we also feel like we’re just getting started.

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