Announced: caroline – caroline 2 (deluxe) + ’Two riders down’ live

caroline are excited to announce caroline 2 (deluxe), featuring seven new tracks and out now digitally. Additionally, their 2025 album caroline 2 has been named one of Rough Trade shops’ Albums of the Year. To celebrate they have announced a new 12” exclusive available at Rough Trade shops with 5 tracks from the band titled Not everything needs to even out, which includes some from the deluxe release of the album.

The band also share a live video of caroline 2 track ‘Two riders down’ filmed at Rewire festival at The Hague in April 2025.

The band share, “These tracks are mostly early iterations of the songs released on ‘caroline 2’. Minimal acoustic versions of ‘Total euphoria’, ‘Coldplay cover’ and ‘U R UR ONLY ACHING’; an impromptu version of ‘When I get home’ recorded in Peckham Rye park in 2022); and a recording of the first time we ever played the core of ‘Song two’.

We have always loved the quality of phone and portable mic recordings: both how casual and informal they feel, but also because they tend to capture freer and more explorative playing in that precious writing stage, before a song congeals into something solid. It feels like there is almost something mysterious at work in these recordings that can never be replicated or mimicked. As well as the ‘When I get home’ and ‘Song two’ demos, the final track on the release – ‘greek2go’ – is also a phone recording. It was recorded in what was then the empty shell of a former Greek dark kitchen, but has since become our studio – and is an improvisation with three guitars and singing in an empty, reverberant room. It never made it onto the album but it is a piece of music we are really proud of.

We have also included a recording of the club track from the first half of ‘When I get home’. This was recorded from the front bathroom of Avalon Cafe and is a track produced by our friends Daniel S Evans and Jennifer Walton.”

caroline’s founding members Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn and Mike O’Malley began playing together in 2017. As the band’s sound kept expanding, so too did their line-up, eventually becoming an eight piece completed by Freddy Wordsworth, Magdalena McLean, Oliver Hamilton, Hugh Aynsley and Alex McKenzie. By the time the cast settled towards the end of 2019, the songs too were expansive and emotive pieces. Their debut self-titled album caroline (2022), mixed by John ‘Spud’ Murphy, featured in The Quietus and Loud & Quiet magazine’s Top 5 Albums Of The Year in 2022, and they were also cited as one of the Top 10 New Artists in Rolling Stone magazine.

In one way, caroline’s second album picks up where its predecessor left off – 2022’s sublime self-titled debut concluded with ‘Natural death’, where they also explored the possibilities of interlocking off-kilter guitar patterns – but in many, many others, it finds them breaking new ground. Those two worlds on the opener are only the beginning. “One of the fundamental themes is the idea of different things happening at once, things that are very different from each other but also simultaneous,” says Llewellyn, who along with Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes forms the songwriting core of the larger eight-piece band. It makes for a record of extraordinary scope – where the organic and the artificial, the harsh and the beautiful, the pristine and the hazy all clash and combine.

“The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,” says Llewellyn. “It’s more intentional,” adds O’Malley. Fleshed out over several songwriting trips, with the central three upping sticks to rural Scotland, with vocalist and viola player McLean then joining them in southern France, followed by writing sessions as a full eight-piece in Margate and Essex then recording in Ramsgate, bonds have become strengthened. “We were just about an eight-person band on the last one, but now we’re a proper eight- person band,” says Llewellyn.

Listen / pre-order caroline 2 (deluxe) here.
Watch the live performance of ‘Two riders down’ at Rewire festival here.