Pain, loss and love: Palace discuss their “life force” new album ‘Ultrasound’
Heartbreakingly, during the early stages of writing Palace‘s new album, Ultrasound, frontman Leo Wyndham suffered an unfathomable tragedy when his partner had a late miscarriage. This life-altering catastrophe understandably caused immense grief to Wyndham, who used Palace’s new album as a vessel to channel his grief.
Throughout 14 tracks, Wyndham takes the listener on a powerfully emotional journey written over the 12-month period that ensued after losing his unborn child. While miscarriage sadly occurs in around 20 per cent of all pregnancies, it remains a societal taboo, especially in Britain, where the ‘Keep Calm, Carry On’ mindset remains prevalent. Although it wasn’t his intention, with Ultrasound, Wyndham breaks barriers on the new release.
Ultrasound marks the band’s fourth album, and while Wyndham has always been a songwriter who mines lyrics from personal experience, their latest effort cuts deeper than any of their prior material. More importantly, it was a cathartic mission that allowed the singer to help process the trauma and chronicle his grief in a bid to better understand and process it.
A few days before our conversation, Palace unveiled Ultrasound for the first time by playing the album in full at Earth in London. “It was this weird, full-circle moment. We started working on the songs a year ago, and then playing the whole thing in full was very emotional,” Wyndham reflects over Zoom.
Performing any song live for the first time is daunting, especially when it’s unreleased, but particularly when the tracks are of such a personal nature. “I certainly relived a lot of experiences and memories on stage, but it felt positive to let them into the world. It was very cathartic,” he adds.
Wyndham admits the new set of songs is “more personal” than anything he’s previously attached his name to and likens it to a collection of diary entries penned during a “blurry” year. While journalling is common practice for those dealing with grief, few have to share those thoughts with the world, let alone perform them live in a different city each night, retreading the grounds of painful memories underneath the glow of the spotlight.
Nevertheless, making this record was vital for Wyndham to help “to make sense” of the situation, describing it as a “crutch”. Unexpectedly, since going through the tragedy, he and his partner have been overwhelmed by the number of people they know who have shared their experiences of suffering a miscarriage.
While his intention with Ultrasound wasn’t to open the floodgates on a crucial societal conversation, he believes the taboo around the subject to be a “really odd thing”.
Although Ultrasound is an album born out of heartbreak, Wyndham also crams it to the brim with love, especially for his partner. On ‘Make You Proud’, he painfully sings, “Never thought I’d breathe again”, and shares his devotion for his better half, explaining that he’s discovered how “your love goes deeper and deeper when you go through these experiences.”
The record begins as it means to go on with the ambient ‘When Everything Was Lost’ that sets the scene with Wyndham crying, “Now everything is fucked”, and places the listener in his shoes before the story unravels.
For Wyndham, ‘When Everything Was Lost’ was the only place to start Ultrasound as it “captures and bottles the feeling of pain, loss and love and emotion, all in one song.” It’s a gripping opener. Its arresting not through the notion of Hollywood-driven themes of universal connection but the stark vulnerability and explicit veracity of emotions on display.
Meanwhile, the album’s finale, ‘Goodnight Farewell’, sees Wyndham find a grain of closure and slowly start to come to terms with his loss. He says the track is “probably my favourite” from the record and was also the last song they made for the album, providing a comprehensive conclusive moment.
Palace allows all their emotions to flow out of them and blend them to create a track of epic proportions, with a little help from Mother Nature. Wyndham explains, “It was the last moment of recording vocals, and as I finished singing, suddenly everyone can hear this intense hail dropping outside, like crazy hail that was setting off car alarms.”
“It was this like weird, strange closure to the whole experience like a little gift from the gods. It was like a very spiritual moment,” he emotionally adds.
Wyndham’s pride regarding ‘Goodnight Farewell’ radiates from his facial expressions when the song is mentioned. He also believes it’s an indictment of how far Palace have come as a band since releasing their debut album, So Long Forever, in 2016. “Back then, we weren’t quite ready to try it and probably not confident enough. Through experience, we’re now more confident as musicians. We give less of a shit about what other people think and are not afraid of doing something a bit more ridiculous and experimental. It’s taken time to get to the point to be able to do that song, and I think in our heads, we’ve always wanted to do a song like that.”
Wyndham’s under the firm belief Ultrasound is Palace’s “best record”, but on a personal level, it has been so much more. In a time of inexplicable darkness, having a creative exercise to lighten his world while traversing through the stages of grief is a process that will always make the LP intangibly connected to its creator.
“I really would have struggled,” he says of how he’d have coped without being able to use songwriting as a tool. “It’s an absolute life force for me to understand myself and make sense of situations. I find it hard to put emotional experiences into words, but when I pick up a guitar and write lyrics, it just flows very freely. I feel with each lyric I write, I’m letting go of something, and when you perform it over and over again, you’re releasing all this sort of trapped energy inside of you.”
Although Ultrasound is a highly personal record, told through the lens of Wyndham, grief is a process that we’ll all encounter at some stage, and anyone who has been through it will connect, on some level, with the unflinchingly brutal version of events told. While it will be helpful to many and could break down societal stigmas, it was a necessary form of therapy for Wyndham, who needed to make this set of songs for the sanctity of his mind.
Ultrasound is out on April 5th through Virgin Music.
