The Naked Truth

Polica’s Channy Leaneagh speaks in sad, cautious tones and is not, you suspect, given to hot flashes of emotion. Still, she found herself deeply discommoded when, several months ago, her record label submitted the band’s second album Shulimath to iTunes for distribution.

Word came back that the cover – a tasteful painting of a naked couple – would have to go.
“There was nudity,” she says. “It was a man and a woman, just standing next to each other. So yeah, iTunes… hmm. They control a lot. That’s why the image wasn’t released. I was looking for artwork that was striking, which would visually encapsulate the sound of the LP. We had to go with something else.”
Leaneagh describes herself as a bit of an Eeyore (the character from Winnie The Pooh): maudlin no matter the circumstances. There was certainly a great deal of heartache on her band’s 2012 debut, Give You The Ghost. The inspiration was her divorce at the age of 30, and the subsequent implosion of Roma Di Luna, the group she’d fronted with her now ex-husband. Melancholy was etched into the grooves.
Two years later, Channy is over the break-up and fronts a successful avant-pop band, whose cheerleaders include Jay Z, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Prince (ol’ Purple pants has caught several of the group’s shows back home in Minneapolis). And, cover woes notwithstanding, she has the strange and gorgeous Shulimath to plug. But, talking exclusively to Hot Press, Channy seems as downcast as when we spoke 18-months ago. She is, it is clear, one of those people for whom clouds never quite seem to part.
“I’m in a different place compared to when the first record came out,” says the former primary school teacher. “I don’t know if I’m in a happier place. I’m not very happy in general.”
As the mother of a two-year-old daughter, the success of Polica has been double-edged. On the one hand she gets to travel the world for months on end. On the other, she’s away from her daughter.
“I definitely feel a lot of conflict,” she explains, “as to what is good for my daughter and what is good for the music. Usually, they’re not the same thing. I try to tell myself that it’s important for my daughter that she has a mom who can put food on the table.”
Tensions came to a head last March as Polica were finishing their umpteenth European tour promoting Give You The Ghost. Just two dates remained – at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire and at Whelan’s in Dublin. The night of the London show, Channy felt something amiss deep down. She sat in a slump backstage. She wanted to be home, wanted to be with her little girl.
“Sometimes you just don’t ‘feel’ it,” she rues. “It doesn’t happen every night and it has nothing to do with London specifically. I simply wished I was with my daughter.”
With head and heart in the wrong place, Polica turned in a brittle performance in the UK – and were promptly beaten-up on by the media. The story had a happy ending, of sorts, as the next day Polica dashed across the Irish Sea, made it to Whelan’s and delivered one of the stand-out gigs of their career.
“That was one of the best crowds and we had such a fun time,” she half-smiles. “It was a pretty rough crossing though. Drew our drummer got pretty sea sick!”
Building on the spooktown atmospherics of Give You The Ghost, Shulamith is a deeply moving updating of Polica’s patented ‘sad pop’. Once again, Leaneagh’s vocals are distorted, through AutoTune and other technologies, so that it sounds at times as if her voice is coming from the ocean floor. This time the music is livelier – there’s a driving dance beat on single ‘Chain My Name’, while ‘Warrior Lord’ has a woozy trip-hop sway.
“The first album was a demo, really,” Channy proffers. “This was the first time that we all really worked in the studio together. It wasn’t like we were trying to do anything specifically different. To me it still sounds kind of familiar. It still sounds ‘Polica’.”
For newcomers, the LP’s calling card is Channy’s duet with the aforementioned Justin Vernon on ‘Tiff’. There’s a shared history between the groups, with Polica’s producer and founder Ryan Olson a longtime pal of the Bon Iver leader.
“They come from the same town. When Justin was a teenager he wrote a letter to Ryan telling him he was a fan of his band. They’re close, to this day.”

Shulamith is out now