Ambient rock trio Eyre Llew are an evocative mix of shoegaze, post-rock and dream pop. Including Jack Clark (piano, drums), Jack Bennett (guitar), Sam Heaton (vocals, guitar), the ethereal three-piece conjures a densely atmospheric sound that stirs the soul and rises to truly epic emotive heights.
The Nottingham-based band were met with widespread critical acclaim with the release of debut album Atelo in 2017, receiving plaudits from Louder Than War, Kerrang! and Fred Perry Subculture. It reached No. 24 in Drowned In Sound’s poll of albums of the year.
Eyre Llew have since completed several international tours playing in over 20 countries across Europe and Asia. They have also made appearances at such major festivals as Glastonbury, The Great Escape, Focus Wales, Dot To Dot Festival, and Rockaway Beach.
Currently working on their second album, we caught up with the boys ahead of their album fundraiser show which takes place at Saltbox in Nottingham on Saturday 30th March 2024. They told us about their influences, their best tour memories and what we can expect from their upcoming new record.
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First of all, the name – where did you get the moniker Eyre Llew and what does it mean?
Understandably, we get asked this a lot. It is unusual. Most creatives will know it can be a difficult thing to name a band or project as most ideas you start to love have already been used before in some variety which adds limitations.
In the very early days of us getting together and writing, we were on a coach down to London for a show at The Barbican with A Winged Victory of a Sullen (amazing band). To pass the time on that journey we were picking out names of things and pairing them with each other to see how it would sound as a band name. There was a street somewhere en route which said Eyre Avenue or something like that. Jack Clark and I (Sam) said that it sounded like a lovely word.
We later saw a billboard for an upcoming movie called “Inside Llewlen Davies” and I was playing with the words Eyre and Llewyn phonetically landing on “Eyre Llew” (pronounced Eh-Loo) which we loved the sound of. We then presented it to Jack Bennett who immediately asked what it meant.
When researching that we found that Old French eire, was from Latin for ‘journey, wandering or travelling’ and Llew was our abbreviation for the name Llewelyn which in Welsh meant ‘lion or brave one’. Instantly we loved the idea that our band name translates to ‘wandering lion’ or ‘travelling brave one’. With us being part Welsh and English with the full intentions of being a professional, touring band we decided to keep Eyre Llew. Absolute bonus that it wasn't even taken by anyone in the world either!
How did the three of you get started as a band?
Jack Bennett used to run a rehearsal room and recording studio in the heart of Nottingham. Sam was hiring one of the rooms independently to experiment with sounds using guitar pedals and different tunings with the intention to expand ideas creatively. It was after the third or fourth visit that Jack popped his head in one day to the room expressing his interest in what he heard through the walls. We all organised a jam after that with Sam calling in Jack Clark from having worked with him in other projects before. A couple of sessions later we had all decided we were onto something good and called ourselves a band.
There are definite nods to Sigur Rós in your ambient post-rock sound; who else would you consider were big influences on your music?
Since day dot we just gave ourselves the pursuit of writing music to sound emotive or beautiful. Over time that has elaborated for us, and we’ve tried a lot of things. There are loads of different influences that we draw from musically though.
Tuning and chord shapes from: The Strokes, Novo Amor, Frightened Rabbit and stuff with rock/post-hardcore influences in our background like Biffy Clyro, Title Fight, Alexisonfire and so on. In this new album: there’s hints of Olafur Arnold’s in the piano; Caspian and Hans Zimmer with the layered-up drums; Explosions in the Sky with the post rock drops; Bon Iver and Slaughter Beach, Dog and Noah Gunderson with the acoustic elements; plus, A Winged Victory and Hammock with the minimalism, ambient, drone work. Heaps of bands really!
The new album has a variety of genres that reminded Jack B of Radioheads’s Ok Computer, not necessarily in terms of the sound but in how the album doesn’t settle in one genre. We all love Sigur Ros and get pigeonholed around that band a bit rightly or wrongly. We’re pretty chuffed to be compared to them though because, ultimately, we think so highly of them!
Behind what we do though there is a bigger pool of artists and genres seeding ideas which ends up sounding a certain way due to our pedalboard reverbs and delays.
It’s been a while since the release of the debut album Atelo. What have you guys been up to in the meantime?
Since releasing Atelo we toured 23 countries around the UK, Europe and Asia, played the John Peel stage at Glastonbury and started writing/recording our second album. Then the world shut down with the pandemic and we lost all momentum which we found difficult to get started again as it stunted our progression, financials and day-job security like most bands.
It took extra time to come out of that for us as we took such a hit in our personal lives with work and lived in different parts of England and Wales. Getting together proved much harder than we would have liked so we wrote a large part of this album remotely from each other and brought all the parts into a series of demo recording sessions in Lincolnshire over 2021. We had the large chunk of the album written acoustically which we layered up in the live room and then added more to in our demoing phase.
The difference between Atelo and this album was that our first was all written in a live room and those layers were tracked down almost verbatim, whereas this time we have developed the songs to take them to a number of layers and instrumentation we felt warranted. We’ve never been so excited about our music before.
In mid-2022 we had a pivotal moment in moving out of an old and into a new band studio space in our hometown Nottingham. This gave us an HQ again and importantly introduced us to Russ Clark who, shortly after moving in there, started co-producing and recording our new album in March 2023.
We went up to a barn in the Yorkshire Moors for a week to record the bulk of the instrumentation with Russ before chipping away at vocals and extra ambient layers over the remainder of 2023 around our day jobs. We even held a group vocal recording day at Rough Trade Nottingham with an open invite to our fans, friends and family to come and contribute with group vocals on the album. It sounds amazing and we’re so grateful people got involved. We can’t wait for everyone to hear that especially and are so proud of how it's all come together.
Sonically and production wise, we believe it’s a progression on our first album whilst still rooted in being an Eyre Llew sound. Now we’re learning the songs live for the first time to play our first show back with new material in March, which is a whole learning curve in itself!
What have been some of your best memories whilst touring around the world?
It may seem a bit of a cliche, but the best part of touring internationally was meeting so many new and amazing people from different cultures who all had such passion for music and a positive impact on us. Everyone was so welcoming, kind and enthusiastic that it really made the long tours and weekends away that more enjoyable. It really hit us hard not keeping in touch with them all in the same way when lockdown hit, as seeing them all for recurring tours each year felt like so many friendship groups and extended family were muted.
We worked hard to tour so far and wide. We strove to get out to anywhere there was enough of an interested because, to us, if we could afford to get there, we would make it happen. We’re very proud and fortunate to see some incredible countries, many multiple times around! Some include China, Japan, multiple tours of South Korea, The Baltic States and Scotland, festivals in Singapore, Taiwan, France, Sweden and Poland to name just a few.
Incredible places and touring overseas taught us a lot about ourselves, the UK music scene vs the world, international travel, band dynamics, and how the music industry works in different cultures.
And now you’re working on a new record. What can you tell us about the upcoming material? Does it have a title yet and what are the themes?
We are so chuffed with how the record is sounding. There is no album title just yet and most of the songs are still working titles admittedly but it’s on the way!
With us writing this record remotely in Cardiff, Nottingham, and Lincolnshire through lockdown it meant that a lot of the songs began as Sam’s acoustic songs.
We’ve experimented with a number of new techniques on this album such as piano and drum layering, using less effects on some things and more on others, and different song structures. There has also been some granular effects, drone work and composition with various synths and organs. Group vocals are a theme on some songs too! All with our reverberated pedalboards and such, of course!
Have there been any major shifts in mood or style?
The mood and style have evolved a bit since Atelo, it’s still an Eyre Llew record but some aspects have been concentrated a bit and others have been expanded. We’ve played with the dynamics in taking you from big drops to ambient sections and intimate acoustic parts with locked in, layered up tribal drums and pianos on others. It’s quite a stacked recording process really but we love the idea of having a huge sound and trying to replicate it live. We’ve been laughing in the studio that if you think of the Time Team theme tune having a baby with a Frightened Rabbit song, you’re in the ballpark of it!
The recording process has seen you conduct sessions in Lincolnshire, Cardiff, your hometown Nottingham and even on the Yorkshire Moors. Was it disruptive having to decamp to so many various locations or did it add to the experience?
Interesting question. I think the writing and recording in so many different locations really helped bring out different layers and aspects in the music that might not have come out otherwise. As it was stretched over a longer period of time doing in that way it helped us budget and afford the making of it whilst giving us time to put the work we felt deserved into each track. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’ve rushed a recording to reach a deadline and time was the only thing we had on our side this time around as we had lost our momentum a bit from lockdown and all the money around it.
So, the only thing we could do was put the time in to make it right. Usually when you write, record and mix in the same place it can increase productivity but if you’re not feeling it when you get there it can just stunt the process too. Moving around as much as we did helped keep things fresh and exciting and it was really a necessity for us too.
You have announced a fundraiser show at Saltbox in Nottingham. Why is this such an important gig for Eyre Llew and what can attendees expect on the night?
This is our first headline show for about five years, which is crazy to think about. Time really flew which Sam has written lyrics of in the album. We’re so, so excited to play our hometown again and there has been a lovely bit of buzz about it so far. We’ll be playing new material and experimenting with new instruments live from now on and this show kicks all that off.
There’s also going to be an afterparty with DJ sets from our friends Dom Gourley and Jimi Arundell which always get things going! We’re aiming to have a collection of new merch exclusively available on the day and will be announcing some more bands for the night in the new year. Our plan is to make it a party and celebrate a comeback.
The main objective of this is fundraising in a fair way to get our album onto vinyl, CD and distributed. We’re hoping to raise some money to help finish the album and get it out there basically. By doing a live show bigger than we’ve done before we felt we were giving something back to fans for supporting us through the purchase of a gig ticket.
The recording is basically finished but we have the long job of mixing and mastering and working out how to afford to release it. We’ve funded everything ourselves so far but this next stage we need help with.
Oh, and we’ll be playing as a five-piece for the first time ever! We’re excited for people to see and hear what we’ve been up to…
And for all the guitar geeks and pedal nerds out there, what gear do you use and what would you love to get your hands on?
Well Sam is a diagnosed fx pedal junkie so there is an array of stuff on this record. The album is still guitar and piano-focused, but we’ve layered these up with delays and reverbs in old Eyre Llew fashion in some areas.
We really matured over the recording of this record and held back on some sections where we kept the raw instrument sound in and didn't swamp everything with reverb like Atelo was - as much as we love that! There’s a fair bit of acoustic all over this record as that is how a lot of the songs were written initially, cooped up in our homes during lockdown with the rest of the country. It’s been a different kind of writing process for us developing those ideas and converting stuff to electric guitars, synths, organs, bowed guitar, and piano.
Jack B is a big fan of experimenting with granular synths and running our recording snippets through a modular rig he’s been building over the last few years. It came out with some really, really unique stuff and it’s a whole new aspect that we’ve never explored before.
Sam has really enjoyed using the Hologram Microcosm, his Strymon Deco, some pitched delays, and big reverbs throughout a lot of the album too. It sounds beautiful. Like you’re in the clouds and en route to another!
In 2018 Sam bought an old Hammond organ from a car boot for £3 and wrote a song on it the same day once he got home. That song has been developed over the last year and we’re pleased to say it made the cut on this record. It’s a big sound!
We’ve already got to the point where all the new ideas and equipment have been seeding new songs for album three. We can’t wait to get cooking already!
Thanks for speaking to us! Any special messages for the fans?
We just want to thank everyone who has supported us in the past, it really is the reason why we’ve achieved so much independently and toured across the world. It’s kind of generic to say but it really does mean the world to us. We can’t wait to get back out there seeing you all again soon.
📆 Tour Dates:
- 30 March 2024: Eyre Llew – Saltbox, Nottingham
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Twitter: @EyreLlew
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