Interview: Soup Review contain dazzling stars in their eyes

Anyone with mental health issues will tell you: you can’t mask the pain and pretend everything is OK. It takes deep work (perhaps therapy, medication, or whatever works for the individual) on self, reassessing what could be toxic patterns, and regaining a sense of true purpose. It’s about the building blocks that lead to a great, more fulfilled whole. U.K. folk-pop duo Soup Review ⏤ of musicians Mario D’Agostino and Chris Delamere ⏤ construct an encouraging rallying anthem called “Stars in Their Eyes on SSRIs,” paired with a totally goofy and charming music video.

“Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be OK / I’m going to approach it a different way,” sings Delamere, turning his gaze inward to provoke himself forward out of the rabbit hole. “I filled out my diary and meditated today.”

Glistening production erupts around his voice, and it’s within such shiny layers that he cozies up to the hope beaming in the darkest crevices. In the visual, produced by Lauren Paige Dowling, in association with Pittswood Studio, the duo perform overlooking the cityscape and don various cardboard cutout costumes, embracing their cheeky side to the full extent.

Known for wielding humor in their songwriting, D’Agostino and Delamere certainly realize that “if you’re in the throes of a serious mental health episode you can [not] just throw on a Freddie Mercury costume and everything will be fine,” Delamere offers B-Sides & Badlands over email. “In fact, it’s distracting to think of this as a Mental Illness Song. It’s much more to do with the small building blocks of well-being, and self-care and cultivating yourself.”

“Part of cultivating yourself is trying on the guises of other people: wearing their clothes, singing their songs. I definitely feel like I’ve been through that to help me work out who I am,” he continues. “The other, sadder aspect to the pretending thing is that people with a lot of heavy stuff going, internally, may feel like they have to present an optimistic, entertaining version of themselves for the sake of others. I think that’s in the song, too.”

D’Agostino has endured his fair share of depression and finds baking to be especially soothing when he’s going through the toughest times. “I’m confident I can do it, and it makes me feel capable and like I have a skill that I’ve developed over time,” he reflects.

He then turns attention to the role of songwriting in his mental health journey: “I think songwriting can be like that in a way. It’s a skill you develop, and it’s very gratifying to note how you’ve improved. I really find the feeling of having put time into something and developed as a result of it very soothing. But then also you can make a real pig’s ear of a cake, and it can leave you feeling more despondent than when you started baking it. Also it’s so based in communicating experiences and digesting them, and that’s good and healthy!”

Below, the indie duo further discuss mental health, songwriting, finding humor in the darkest times, and their album’s overarching storyline.

Pretending to be someone else doesn’t obviously work, but the sentiment of the song, almost rallying yourself that things will be OK, can be helpful. Do you agree?

Delamere: i feel like I’m constantly having to say ‘It will be ok’ to myself and to others. And it’s hard because it’s not always ok, but what else can you do? Hope is important.

What’s your journey been like together through this?

D’Agostino: We’ve always talked a lot about our mental health and the ways we get through bad patches, in a way that I would say is curious and active, and also very caring. I think feeling loved and supported and also having a repertoire of ways to navigate rough patches are the most important things, and I think I’ve definitely learned that from our friendship.

From where do you draw for your uniquely quirky songwriting?

Delamere: The two main lyrical inspirations at the moment are stories from our lives and wordplay. Puns are such a fun shortcut to an idea, fusing two things together and going, ‘Hey, could that be a song?’ That’s how we got to “Stars In Their Eyes on SSRIs” ⏤ not technically a pun but a bit of wordplay ⏤ we came up with that phrase when we were writing the press release for our first album. Always good to start with a title and see where it takes us. Musically, I think we happily and honestly point to and lean on our influences. Mario and I have spoken in the past about wanting to make “a folk music out of pop music,” and this album does include some pretty obvious nods and winks to Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.

How do you find humor allows you to explore the darkest parts of life in a different way?

D’Agostino: Thats a tough one, ’cause there are so many ways to answer. There’s definitely an element of “deflation without dismissal,” to quote Maggie Nelson, like making light of something in a way that makes it manageable but doesn’t deny that it’s difficult. Also I think it’s a good go-to strategy for owning experiences; it’s very cathartic to joke about difficult things, and it’s a good way of putting a finger on common experiences. But we have a few songs about difficult things that aren’t (intentionally) funny. I guess it’s not always a joke that makes things manageable to think about.

How has your songwriting itself changed the most so far?

Delamere: I think it’s becoming more honest. Certainly compared with the first album, we’ve tried to be more honest while retaining at least an element of the daft stuff. The style of the newer songs feel like they have crystallized around a handful of songs from the first album: “New Skins For The Old Ceremony,” “Half-Astronaut,” “Telegraph Hill,” and “Thoughts While Talking To Euston” ⏤ the more intimate, real songs. The dafter, more fictional material from the first album has fallen by the wayside on this one.

“Hello World” unexpectedly, and delightfully, erupts into a cosmic piece of music. How did this one musically evolve for you?

D’Agostino: We’re both massive Bowie fans, and we wrote this one not long after he died I think. It was maybe the second song we wrote together? It kind of came back into our orbit, alongside other songs with images of stars and space and navigation, so we incorporated it into the album. Our close pal Francis Brady is a big synth guy, so we wanted to get him into the studio to have some fun making it spacey, and he absolutely smashed it, I think.

Speaking of cosmic, what led to “Orion’s Elasticated Waistband”?

Delamere: In my youthful drinking days, the 3 am journey home from a night out always had its own particular energy. We’d get a kebab and walk home from town and talk and talk and talk. “Orion’s Elasticated Waistband” is a little study of those dreamy moments in time, when it’s just you, your friends, and the night sky. You bring a bit of lairy city centre energy back to the suburbs, and maybe you give away a little bit more of yourself to your friend in these moments than you would in more sober moments.

How did this album concept, of being beneath the big white moon, come to pass?

D’Agostino: It’s a line from the end of the album’s closing song, “Jellyfish Population” ⏤ “I am hopeful that one day we will swim into the silver sea / To sit on a raft beneath the big white moon.” It’s a song about suicidal ideation and fear of jellyfish, so I wanted to end it with an image of hope and serenity. I kind of searched the time and place that song relates to for something appropriate and came up with watching the moon shine down on Weymouth Bay. I like how, as a title, it ties in with the images of space and stars and navigation, and how it sounds both panoramic and like it could be the title of a children’s book? I like to think of that as “Big Soup Review Energy.”

What did you learn most through writing and recording?

Delamere: Remains to be seen. I think you only realise what you’ve learnt when you circle back round and start the next project.

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