Goat Girl discuss their uncanny new single ‘Ride Around’
There’s something ineffable about the new Goat Girl single. Though the band physically recorded ‘Ride Around’ amidst the mountains of Dublin, it was creatively forged somewhere in between 1990s grunge, the cinematography of Roy Andersson, and the relief awarded by barn dances. “We wanted to come back out with a bang,” drummer Rosy Jones tells me of the lead single, but ‘Ride Around’ strikes more subtly than their statement might suggest.
The track is centred around gritty guitars that pay homage to Sonic Youth, but they seem indecisive in their intensity. This allows Lottie Pendlebury’s contemplations about authenticity to float somewhere about the melody. The strums, meanwhile, flit between rigidity and relief, a tension the group were particularly intent on exploring. “We really liked the grunge-y commanding-ness of the first set of chords, and then how it sort of resolves itself,” Rosy explains, “We were always just very interested in the conflict and the resolution of the sound of it.”
It’s only as the song reaches its midpoint that grunge soundscapes and lonely clacks of drumsticks give way to some real resolution, in a segment the band refer to as the “barn dance section”. Grunge soundscapes fade further into folk, and Lottie begins to echo her own words, asking, “Shall we go ride around?” Still, an underlying discomfort remains, a dazzling dissonance.
“We want it to be uncanny, somehow,” Rosy remembers telling co-producer John Spud Murphy when the song was in its early stages, “That was a word that kept popping up.” This effect was always their intention on the track, though it took some trial and error to hone to their liking.
“It took a while to get it to where it is now, a lot of adding and taking things away,” Rosy explains, “When we recorded it in Ireland, we just added so much to everything. Then we had to pare back and let things shine.” One of the things the drummer was keen to spotlight in this process was the mellotron, an instrument the band chose for its ability to recreate orchestral sounds.
With the intent to create a sense of the uncanny in the song’s conclusion, there seemed no better way to do so than to imitate an orchestra with a machine. “That bit always felt quite surreal to me,” Rosy mused, “quite uncanny but joyous as well.” It’s this sense of tentative jubilance that makes the track so sonically captivating, so inexplicably striking from the very first listen.
While the soundscapes thrive on conflict and unnaturality, the narrative of the song speaks decidedly in favour of the opposite. It’s a piece about honesty in relationships, a concept that singer Lottie has often compared to the experience of going on a night out. “Those social etiquettes that we often have to abide by are stripped away,” Rosy explains, “You can just be yourself, be authentic, and have a good time.”
The band also had a hand in conceptualising the accompanying music video for the single, which takes on far bleaker landscapes to chart that same longing for real connection. The bare bones of an idea and a Pinterest board featuring the work of Roy Andersson were presented to directors Luke Kulukundis and Mateo Villanueva Brandt of Foreign Body, who took on the task of bringing ‘Ride Around’ to life.
The visuals they created forwent the loose atmosphere afforded by disco balls and free-flowing alcohol in favour of lonely benches, group therapy sessions and ballet classes. As the song gathers in tension and ghostly ambience, an unbothered Lottie gradually gathers acquaintances in each of these settings, beginning with a man dragging a suitcase behind him and culminating with a whole bus-stop bench-worth of people. They sing karaoke and pile around her up until the self-described barn dance section kicks in.
“We had these ideas of it starting with one person, and then throughout the song, they have all these people gravitating towards them,” Rosy explained, “or they just pick up all these people on the way. A kind of Motley Crue vibe.” As the mellotron and folk influences enter the track, we see Lottie alone in each of the same rooms, while a point-of-view shot shows the now-familiar faces jumping gleefully in a circle, hand in hand.
It’s just as uncannily captivating as the track it accompanies, which provides a first glimpse at Goat Girl’s upcoming third album, Below the Waste. The new record follows from the release of On All Fours in 2021. According to Rosy, the first track represents the expansive nature of the new record, noting that some songs allowed the band to lean further into the “doomy guitar” elements while others rest on that “more folk-y vibe”.
“We chose it ‘cause I feel like it represents the album quite well,” they explained, “It’s got a lot of different sonics, it goes through quite a lot of different sections, it’s quite dynamic… There were other songs that were definitely contenders, but we felt like this was a really good representation and would grab people’s attention.”
‘Ride Around’ might have provided the perfect return for Goat Girl, but it’s not Rosy’s personal favourite from the record. That title goes to the six-minute closer, ‘Wasting’. “It just goes really hard, but it’s really beautiful as well.” It’s difficult to imagine a song that goes harder and contains more beauty than ‘Ride Around’, which almost commands you to hit the repeat button, but it’s a promise that only elicits excitement for the full-length release.
Below the Waste is set for release on Rough Trade on June 7th. Watch the music video for ‘Ride Around’ below.
