Daisy Brain have been causing quite the fever. It’s palpable, an innate part of their artistry – that overwrought energy with which they perform, the pent-up frustration of their lyrics, the deeply intense relationship with fans. It’s all distinctly pyretic. Something about that quality they possess is catching: it is perhaps that which is to blame for catapulting a band from releasing their very first single to accompanying Yungblud on tour in a matter of months.
Scarcely a year on from ‘Boring’, Will Tse and co are gearing up for the release of their second EP, ‘Disconnected Happy’. The EP is the perfect taster of their sound, calling back to a different era – that twisted nostalgia places them at the forefront of a grungey revival. Distorted guitars, dogged percussion and chanting, smirking vocals are all hallmarks of their music. In their tendency to make instinctual, inquisitive tracks, they allow a natural playfulness to come through: as though in thrashing their guitars and putting their everything into each one, they throw a little bit of themselves in as well.
Things are often left untouched with Daisy Brain – raw snippets of conversation, reactions to the things they say, they all make the cut. Latest taster from the EP, ‘Down’, scratches and sighs into a contagious chorus as they steer through their own warring emotions. Following a period of attempting to fit in and make music that wasn’t necessarily him, Will Tse has found an anchoring force in the Daisy Brain world. It’s the music he was meant to make, and that revitalised passion pulses in every twang and drawl.
Fresh from having just tied up on their first headline tour, and with ‘Disconnected Happy’ announced today, Clash had the opportunity to chat with Daisy Brain about how they ended up here, and where they’ll end up next.
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‘Digital Atlas’ and ‘What Would You Do?’ have been out for a little while. How have you found the response to those so far?
Really good! The fans seem to like them. I’ve got loads of nice messages from then. When we did our headline tour post-releasing those songs, people had already learnt the lyrics. People were screaming it in London so it was really nice to hear back lyrics to a song that only came out like two weeks before.
One of them actually came out two days before and people already knew the lyrics. I’m really lucky I’ve got really committed fans – they’re intense. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the meme pages – there’s so many group chats that they’ve made that are all Daisy Brain related. I can always tell what they’re talking about on the chats by the memes they post. It’s nice that they’re very supportive.
‘Digital Atlas’ does a really good job of summing up this frustration in your headspace and having it come through on the sonic side of things. How do you channel those feelings into creating the music?
I actually did the music first! That happens to a lot of our tunes, we do the music and the lyrics come last minute and we’re scrambling. If we have an EP, out of five tracks, three of them won’t have vocals until the last month. My motivation to write lyrics is quite low. I love making music, I love waking up every day and just making tunes.
When it comes to making songs, it’s quite a lot. It’s a big task and I don’t ever want to cop out or write lyrics that are just not what I feel. If I don’t feel them and I don’t like the lyrics I just stop and try again the next day. I get quite frustrated myself. This one was a little more frustrated but also a bit ironically lonely in a sense, having that little voice in the verses going back and forth with your own head.
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Does it often end up being quite stream-of-consciousness style in that case?
I feel like I just vomit out lyrics most of the time. I’m reading Junky by William Burroughs at the moment, which I feel like is just word vomit. It’s literally just him rambling on for two hundred pages. I feel like that’s where I probably where I get most of it from – it really is just a stream of consciousness. All the lyrics are written out in our descriptions on YouTube like that. It’s not written like a poem or anything it just comes out.
I think if we were ever to do lyric posts it’d be written out constant. It’s very much a stream of consciousness. It’s just me ranting. It can be very therapeutic when you get it done quickly. I spend an entire evening sometimes frustrated with one thing and then feel so much better and think I should do it more often.
‘What Would You Do?’ has been called ‘an anthem for Gen Z anxieties’. A big part of this generation stem from finding validation for how you feel. Are you keen to touch on those big, generational experiences?
Well, if you’re not relating to the people you’re trying to talk to, then what’s the point? I’m not trying to relate too hard to everybody, but I feel like most of the time I’m not trying to be so unique in the subject matter.
I talk about things that have been talked about before but I’m trying to say it in a way that no one’s said it before. I think that’s the whole ethos for lyrics in Daisy Brain. It’s not like we’re creating a whole new world of ideologies or political stances, we’re just talking about what everyone else is talking about in a fresh voice. In a way that no one’s ever heard before, or questions no one’s asked that people feel like they’ve heard before – that’s how I write.
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It's taken a while to get to this specific stage and sound, and you pull on a range of influences. How did you land on it?
I grew up loving Green Day and My Chemical Romance and Nirvana and Foo Fighters. When I was 15 to 20, I was exclusively making pop music. I thought that’s what you needed to do to get into the industry, I thought no one would accept the music I actually liked playing. I actually studied music, but no one wanted to play the music I wanted to play. Daisy Brain comes from a history of pop production and making music with pop artists, because I used to write for other people.
When I moved to London, I was getting on a tube which was really loud. I needed loud music to compensate because I just couldn’t hear what I was listening to. I also worked at a pizza joint and the fan was really loud so we needed to have loud music playing all day. We had like Smashing Pumpkins and all that. I sort of got frustrated and decided I’m just going to make music I want to make now – this is all I listen to, why am I making pop music? Then lockdown happened, so I was attempting to make grungy punk rock music in a bedroom.
You went to uni in Leeds, and it seems that it was only upon moving away from there that you were able to get this vision. Do you often find your location and environment impacts your creativity?
I soak up everything around me. Moving to London, the movement, the pace, how loud it is just walking through the street. I try to listen to music as much as I can just because I want to bathe myself in new ideas and things I’ve not thought of. If I’m walking down the street and I’m listening to something really pretty, I can’t hear it and it’s just frustrating because it’s not enjoyable.
The environment does change how I think and when it comes to Leeds, for example, it’s not like I’m following a trend, but I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to be accepted. In Leeds I was trying to be accepted by the funk and soul people, and pop artists so I tried to be that. When I moved to London, everyone doesn’t give a fuck around here, so I stopped giving a fuck. Subsequently, I’m doing what I want to do now which I’m really grateful for.
I don’t think I’d have done that if I stayed in Leeds to be honest. I feel like I need people around me to change the way I feel. Even when I was making pop music, I would put on a distorted guitar and I’d have to stop myself from making it heavier. It’s really frustrating because I think there’s probably loads of songs I missed out on writing because I was stopping myself from writing the stuff I wanted to. It just goes to show that this is what I was meant to be doing.
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Do you find yourself holding back at all now or do you think it’s allowed you to get past that block?
I’m not stopping myself; I think I’m pushing myself. When it comes to making music, I can go as heavy as I want now. I’ve been doing this type of music now for a little bit so my brain has gone into ‘how did I make it interesting?’ mode. How do I keep making new music that doesn’t sound like something I’ve done before? I’m trying to push myself rather than limiting myself and trying new things, staying in the same lane but we have a few tunes coming out at some point which doesn’t sound like Daisy Brain but what I want it to be.
I want people to listen to it and it still relate to the Daisy Brain world. I’m trying to figure out at the moment how to incorporate other genres or other aspects of music into Daisy Brain without it feeling too much like ‘why have they done that?’.
What’s a direction you might like to push the sound in as part of that?
I’ve always wanted to do music for film, Russian Dan who I write with is big into music for film. He’s always sending me new albums or playlists on Spotify that are from a film.
We’re constantly trying to make music for film but in a Daisy Brain fashion – I would love to make some ambient, scary piece where it’s just five minutes of feedback, but it’s pitched and warped weirdly. Something they can just put to a dark film and it makes it feel grungy and scary.
I think making music for film but making it heavy and eerie and quite emo is the goal.
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Words: Neive McCarthy
Photography: Rachel Lipsitz
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