Out now: caroline – caroline 2

caroline release their new album caroline 2. The group spent 18 months working across various writing sessions in the UK, with recording primarily taking place at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate. The album was produced by the band’s own Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes and Mike O’Malley, engineered by Syd Kemp, mixed by Jason Agel and mastered by Heba Kadry.

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.

‘Coldplay cover’, final preview into the full record, was released earlier in the week. The tender, sweeping video was directed by caroline members Jasper Llewellyn, Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes. Jasper says: “This song is about the many seemingly incongruent, dissonant things that make up our experience; how we hold these multiple, contrasting things in our awareness and somehow make them into a reality that is coherent, that works together. In this case, there are two different songs, played at the same time, one in the kitchen, one in the living room of the same house in south east London. The microphone moves between the two rooms.”

Listen / purchase caroline 2 here.