London Grammar: "We found ourselves wondering if there was something else to finish"

Having first formed as teenagers at uni, London Grammar’s double-platinum debut album, 2013’s If You Wait, nicely set the scene for what has been a glittering career. In addition to shifting three million albums worldwide, the indie-pop crew have also garnered a truckload of award nominations.

Comprised of vocalist Hannah Reid, guitarist Dan Rothman and keyboardist Dominic ‘Dot’ Major, their fourth album, The Greatest Love – the first to be created in their own studio – boasts a newfound sense of freedom.

“It started as fragments, bits of writing and stuff,” explains Dot. “Then at some point in the process, we got our own studio space, basically for the first time ever. It’s been a defining factor for this album, because weirdly enough, we’ve never had our own space before. That allowed us to make a record that was a bit more introspective. It’s probably the quickest turnaround we’ve had making an album. At the same time, it felt like an expansive process – for the first time, we were left to our own devices.

“I don’t think it’s a particularly conceptual album, it’s more like a collection of moments in time. But overall, it feels really special to us, because there was change during the period we made it.”

There was a slow-build towards The Greatest Love over the past few years, with two band members starting families.

Previously, London Grammar have had their share of challenges – they nearly called it quits in 2018, when Reid had to deal with chronic fibromyalgia, brought on by the exhaustion of touring. At the same time, the group feel they’ve grown enormously in recent times.

“It’s quite strange, things have change a lot since the first album,” says Rothman. “It almost felt like we were children when we first started. We were just so young and our lives revolved around the band. Most of that album was written in the garage at my parents’ house. That was the environment, which was why it was so special. But now, Hannah and I have children. We all have our own separate lives and creative work we do outside the band.

“As Dot was saying, that made for more of a transitional process this time around. It’s quite an interesting album for us, personally speaking, and it feels very much like the end of a chapter. It actually feels like the death of the younger side of our band, and now we’ll move into a new phase, in terms of how the group operates. That’s why the record feels like a transition.”
The Greatest Love also has more of an electro influence, no more so than on the aptly named opener, the thumping ‘House’. Rothman’s occasional DJ appearances were key to the shift.

“When you’ve been in a band for so long, you can start to take each other’s musicality for granted,” he offers. “For me personally, after being together for a long time, stepping away enabled me to look again at what all of us do – it brought back a lot of excitement. At the time, I was doing a lot more DJing. That’s definitely had on influence on what I’m doing in terms of the production, particularly with the electronic stuff.”

Nonetheless, there’s still an eclectic feel to the record, with the soft acoustics of ‘Fakest Bitch’ echoing the sparseness of Taylor Swift’s Folklore. Although not a concept album, The Greatest Love does have some unifying themes.
“I think the defining factor on is that it’s a little more outward looking,” says Dot. “Maybe we have a little more of the naïveté of the first album. In a weird way, it was like another rebirth, where we discovered ourselves again because we had our own space.”

In the days of If You Wait, the band were “just discovering laptops” and navigating new techniques in production and mastering. The Greatest Love treads a similar line of discovery via fresh technology. Still, when finishing the LP, London Grammar felt it needed something extra and searched relentlessly for the missing ingredient. Thus it was that they turned to AI.

“Hannah and I wrote ‘Into Gold’ about six or seven years ago,” recalls Dan. “Towards the end of making this album, we naturally found ourselves wondering if there was something else to finish it. You’re always searching for that other thing, you know?”

“Dan was playing through some demos on his laptop speakers, and I remember hearing the song and asking what it was,” adds Dot. “It’s sort of like a remix in a way. Dan couldn’t find the original stems, so I actually AI-ed the vocals out of the original track. It was very useful. You can actually hear it if you listen closely and I just love that sound.

“I found it quite exciting, really, because there’s an element of liberation that comes with the process. That’s where we’re at in our lives. There’s this freedom at the moment, and hopefully we can maintain that on the next album.”

• The Greatest Love is out now.