In this interview feature, we get to know the most radicalist up and coming stars on the planet.

This time we’re chatting to Lindsay Munroe, a singer-songwriter with a unique sound and an equally unique backstory.

Fresh from the release of her impressive three-track EP Our Heaviness, Lindsay Munroe has cemented herself firmly as one to watch in the alt-indie scene at the moment. Musically, she is able to combine her distinctive voice with a confident assault of guitars and interesting synth sounds, but it is her lyrical style that really catches the ear. Uncommonly honest and drawing from experiences that most wouldn’t want to commit to record, her tracks are an unflinching window into her life.

We caught up with Munroe to talk about everything from her influences, to her time amongst a restrictive evangelical group. 

TMR: What is your songwriting process like?

Songs come easiest when I start with lyrics, so I try to keep those building up in notebooks and revisit them to see what’s salvageable. I try to create demos to a level I’m happy with and then leave them for a couple of months so I can come back to them with a bit of critical distance. That’s what’s working for me at the moment, but I think it’s only ever going to be a bad thing to put creativity into too rigorous a discipline. Sometimes songs just fall out, sometimes I’m working on a lyrical phrase for a year, sometimes it’s just not coming. I think the biggest misstep is to put too much pressure on yourself because that’s a guaranteed way to create a ‘writing block’.

TMR: Has lockdown changed the way you approach music?

I don’t think so. It’s confirmed for me just how much I love music and how much joy and playfulness it gives to me. Releasing my EP ‘Our Heaviness’ during lockdown meant I was on somewhat of a schedule and had a lot of work around the release still to do. Obviously, it’s forced everyone to re-evaluate future plans, but at the moment it’s given me a bit more time to write and learn and cook up ideas. I’ve been watching a lot of music documentaries too, trying to fill in my total lack of knowledge of musical history.

TMR: Where did the dramatic grandeur at the end of ‘Split’ come from?

It just sort of happened in the studio, we didn’t really talk about it. I’d been playing it live for a little while, so we knew where the drums kicked in and that the song needed a big release. We recorded some distorted guitar, added some synth noise and then kept layering on top of that. The song is ultimately about having made a difficult decision, so it needed that kind of resolution, moving from tired resignation to energy and catharsis.

TMR: How did you achieve the ethereal quality of ‘River’? 

The first demo of River is basically an alt-country song, but throughout demoing the song I stripped it back to single strummed chords drenched in as much reverb as possible. So the foundation was this washy soundscape that we added a lot of synth textures to. The lead guitar parts add some more structure to the sound but it’s ultimately lead by the vocals, which is what my producer Chris Hamilton (LUMP, Torres) wanted to make space for.

TMR: ‘Mirror’ feels more bouncy than the other tracks on the EP. Why did you decide to place this change of tone at the end of the release? 

The EP tracklisting is fairly chronological in terms of writing. ‘Easier On You’ and ‘Mirror’ are the two tracks that are slightly heavier or more clearly indie tunes. Overall the songs are a window into a 6 month period of my life where I was deconstructing and reconstructing a lot of my beliefs about the world and myself, which sounds dramatic but was ultimately a really positive thing. The EP ends on a more energetic and upbeat note because that’s where I ended up too. Plus I didn’t want to leave people with a totally bleak listen, I’m a much more upbeat person than this EP might suggest.

TMR: You’re open about your time amongst a restrictive evangelical group. How does this experience in particular work its way into your music? 

On ‘Our Heaviness’ I’ve written about it fairly directly and extensively. It’s now two years since I left that environment so I’m not sure that it will keep appearing in my music going forwards. The themes that it raised, of shame, belonging and acceptance, are fairly universal experiences. It was those things that I was grappling with in the writing of the EP, but I think that conservative religious environments take those things and put them in a pressure cooker in a way. One positive is that religious and biblical language is incredibly poetic, so being fluent in that kind of dialogue gives you a lot of material as a songwriter.

TMR: Our Heaviness is strongly linked to a variety of other personal experiences. How do your transfer memories to lyrics?

I’ve always written from personal experience, so I’d struggle to express how I do that. I try and write with one foot in a memory and one foot out of it, I think. If something is overly specific it can take away the relatability of it, but if you detach too far from the experience then it can become disingenuous. It goes back to writing and then critiquing later- I’ll write lyrics with unfiltered emotion and references to experiences, but when it comes to putting the song together I try to be a bit more critical about what I’m comfortable expressing and what I think is relatable.

TMR: If you had to narrow it down, who would you say influences your music the most? 

Well I would say that I learnt to play guitar off of Laura Marling’s albums as a teenager, so she had a huge influence on me starting to play music. I’m still a big fan, although it’s less of a direct influence on my writing now. I still try and learn each of her new albums on guitar when they come out as a good challenge for my playing.

TMR: Do you have tracks in the work for another release after the recent EP? 

Absolutely! I’ve been writing a lot recently and revisiting demos. I don’t usually have a lot of free time to write so I’m trying to pack it in now before life gets wildly busy again.

TMR: How do you envision the music industry in a post-COVID world? 

Oof what a question. I have hopes for the industry, as we’re all going to have to rebuild in new ways. It can feel pretty disempowering as the people who have the biggest say over how the industry is rebuilt seem to be big corporations, big labels and the government. And none of those guys have a strong history of caring about independent music. One of the positives of the interruption that quarantine has created is that people are criticising the structural issues within the music industry. Campaigns such as Broken Record and Let The Music Play give real hope of people coming together to change the industry, which is heartening.

By Dan Peeke