whenyoung with Live4ever @ SXSW 2019 (Paul Bachmann / Live4ever)
whenyoung are making waves, and it’s easy to see why. Their music is a powerful combination of melodic, majestic pop with an empathetic eye on the world around them. That they originate partially from Dublin should be no surprise; the Irish capital has constantly provided the western world with a succession of acts who have offered an external insight that both the UK and the US is unable to demonstrate by virtue of geography.
Where was the band formed?
Aoife: We formed the band in London. The guys started playing music together and then I moved over and they asked me to join.
You became friends in Limerick but moved to Dublin, but wasn’t there another band?
Andrew: I was in another band in Dublin for a little bit. That’s why he (Niall) moved to London with that band, but they split up after three weeks.
Niall: We moved to make it…and split up after three weeks, so I was just stuck there with no plan but I wanted to play music so much. Then Andrew came over and we started playing together just for fun, and Aoife came soon after. That’s where whenyoung was born, in Muswell Hill, North London.
Andrew: We’d always been interested in music and wanted to play music together. Always aimed to be a band together. But for some reason the timing was never right until we all moved to London. We were in a position where we were in a new place, we didn’t know anyone and we weren’t distracted by other things.
After you moved to London Aoife, was it a conscious thing to join?
Aoife: I’d just finished studying and they asked if I wanted to play bass as they needed a bassist. I knew how to play guitar but I didn’t know what was going on, basically. I’d been roped into this band!
And why are you together in this form?
Niall: I have thought about this from time to time. But why I have personally kept going at it, with no plan B whatsoever, is I always loved the songs we were writing and really believed in them. I still do. It’s not like a desire to be big or make money, it’s just this is what I do. I don’t know what else I’d do.
Does that lack of plan B give you motivation?
Niall I’ve just never thought to do anything else. I just want to play music with Andrew and Aoife as it is now. That’s all I want to do, I haven’t thought about doing anything else.
Andrew: I guess it’s because we all think the same way. When people were saying we should maybe do something else, we’ve always maintained that same ambition.
What do you think marks the present, past and future?
Andrew: We were never side-tracked. We always rehearsed, wrote and used that time effectively to shape what we wanted it to be and what we wanted our songs to be like. That’s probably the most integral part of our past.
Aoife: We all went to school in Limerick, and I think that background has really affected all of our songs. The way we feel in London being ex-pats or immigrants or whatever. And being underdogs in Limerick. When we were growing up Limerick had a bad reputation. All of these things you take on board. I think we try and have a understanding of people from all walks of life. I think that’s hugely part of the message in our songs. Communication, understanding and breaking down barriers. For the present, we only think of the day. We just try and do our best on the day.
What does the future hold?
Andrew: We have our debut album coming out. With the future we would hope to see more parts of the world, play as many shows as we can and reach as many people as we can. That’s what the ideal future would be.
Niall: That’s what success is to us. Just playing as many places as we can and meeting people after shows who love our songs. That’s such an incredible thing. We were in New York last week and had kids coming up to us who knew our music. That’s success to us.
You took the initiative to reach out to people. We interviewed Felix White a number of years ago, one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Tell us about your relationship with him.
Niall: Our relationship with Felix started before we met him because we were all obsessed with their records! It’s one of the first shows we saw when we moved to London. Aoife met him at a gig.
Aoife: A Yak gig. Then it came through that he would like to put out Pretty Pure. We were over the moon.
He seems to want to just help musicians.
Niall: He just cares about the music. For someone that we respected and loved so much to come back and say I love your music, that gives you such a desire to keep going.
Aoife: That got us more on the radio and more media because people respect him. Then the big guns came in.
It’s incredible to hear a song like The Others and what it seems to be about. Do you agree that it’s important for bands to have something to say, and if so why?
Aoife: It’s important if you are actually moved by it. Sometimes things don’t seem very real, it’s popular at the moment to be ‘out there’. That song was written because I was really upset by it, so that was just a way of talking about it in that way.
Niall: I don’t think it’s an overly political song, it was just a very human reaction to something that Aoife saw. We didn’t say ‘let’s write a political song’. It was something that happened in the city we live in. We write songs to react to the world around us.
Andrew: It is important, if you feel strongly and passionately about something, musicians should use that platform.
Aoife: It’s about being honest. If that’s political then whatever. If it’s true to you then do it. It’s very easy to see through it if it’s not. All our songs are affirmations to us and then hopefully other people can connect to them. A song we’ve just written, Never Let Go, is about maintaining good mental health and not giving up or letting go. Another song we’ve just written is about a friend who committed suicide, and trying to make sense of it. It’s a huge problem in the UK. It’s good to talk about those type of things. Writing it was like healing.
There’s a scene at the moment where bands are speaking their truths. Are you conscious of that and being within it?
Aoife: That’s very much a scene that we like. But those bands are more like punk and spoken word, whereas our music is more pop.
Niall: People always use music to express how they feel and to speak out. Most artists and musicians start writing songs in their bedroom as a release and to help themselves. I think everyone comes from the same place. It’s always existed, maybe it’s just prominent now.
What about the new album?
Niall: It’s all new tunes apart from one, which has already been released which we’ve spruced up and made sound like the way we wanted it to.
Aoife: We had so many songs and we just didn’t want to repeat what we’ve already released. It’s a difficult decision but we wanted it to be mainly new stuff.
Andrew: We made a decision just for ourselves. It definitely wasn’t tactical. If you’re following a band and they release an album, you want it to be new stuff so you can go as far into their world as you can.
