Greetings and welcome back to another LG RECOMMENDS piece, and a very special one at that!

You can see from the title and the snap up above what the order of business details, and not only is Imploded being rightly celebrated right here and right now on its day of release, please continue to read on for part two of the interview that I recently conducted with Kel and Giz of The Empty Page, where all things album related are discussed, plus a range of other related subjects.

There’s plenty to go at, so I recommend that you give yourself a bit of extended time for reading. But I promise you that it will be 100% worth it.

I’ve been anticipating the release of Imploding for a LONG time. Well, how could I feel anything but given the high standard that the band established for themselves from 2016 and debut album Unfolding onwards?

So that strong debut and the standalone singles over the past few years (‘He’s Very Good At Swimming’ amongst them inspiring one of the most important pieces I’ve ever written) continued the anticipatory build, and the opening singles in the Imploding cycle from 2022-2023 sent things into overdrive, quite frankly.

From that position, it would have been harder for the full album to fail in my opinion that it would be to succeed. And my expectations were fully met.

As we move on into the interview part of this piece, it should be clear from my questions and from my listening notes just how much I appreciate this body of work. So continue to read on and my thoughts – in particular to the five songs previously unheard before release – will definitely come through loud and clear.

As mentioned in part one, this interview took place in the aftermath of their headline show at Shakespeares in Sheffield, where they were more than ably joined onstage by John Simm (drums) and Andy Pimblott (synth), and supported by the equally awesome Nervous Twitch and Hopeful Dream Cult.

They’ve been featured in two of my past Top 20s, in 2019 for He’s Very Good At Swimming (linked up above), and in 2022 for Imploding inaugural single Dry Ice (It’s worth reading the last link alone to find out how I met The Empty Page in the first place. And it really is a cool story. Bro.)

They’ve always been generous with their time whenever I’ve asked them for quotes to add to past pieces, and this interview feels like a natural extension of this. Kel fielded the majority of the questions, with Giz having his say towards the end.

I hope you enjoy the read!

LG: Hi, how are you?

Kel: I’m alright Pretty good, thanks!

LG: On to the serious questions. So, first serious question…what did you have for breakfast today, and where does it rank from Monday in the week to date?

Kel: Well, I didn’t really have breakfast today, I skipped breakfast and went straight to lunch. So that, I suppose, becomes breakfast. People that know what I do for a living will be surprised…I had a tin of Heinz tomato soup, and some cheese on toast.

LG: Very cool. Another serious question, a nice contextual one. How many ‘furious nice guys’ have you encountered this week so far?

Kel: I’ve seen a couple online, I don’t know if I’ve had any real-life dealings with any that I know of. I’ve definitely seen a load online because there’s a thing on TikTok – I don’t know if you’ve seen it – where they ask women if they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man. And in this realm of TikTok, everyone is saying ‘bear’.

Make of that what you will, why they’re saying that. But there’s a lot of men that are very irate on TikTok about why women are choosing the bear, and saying, ‘don’t you think it would kill you’. And the women are responding by saying ‘yeah, it probably would’. But at least it’s not a furious nice guy!

LG: I think it’s a situation where, obviously, if you’re with the bear you know what you’re getting don’t you?

Kel: Exactly. There’s a lot of things that bears don’t do.

I checked it out online. Make of it what you will, but there’s definitely a wider conversation to be had about these feelings and sentiments.

LG: On to the main business of the album with a question designed to make you think. Desribe the overall experience of making Imploding in exactly five words.

Kel: (with natural pauses for thought in between) Intense. Emotional. Frustrating. Creative. Surprising.

The impact of and reaction to the first five singles should definitely be noted, and reviews in chronological order coming from the likes of Get In Her Ears, Joyzine, A&R Factory, Buffablog and Louder Than War can certainly help with this. My Imploding questions firmly drew the focus towards the other five tracks contained within.

LG: ‘Medication Nation’ to my ears is definitely the one song on Imploding that definitely would easily have held down a spot on Unfolding. Is that, in your view, a fair assessment ot not?

Kel: Yeah! The riff side of it was probably one of the first, one of the oldest ones that we had. There was that, and a song called ‘Gorge (Oh Well)’, plus ‘Leaf Thin’, but that changed quite a lot [during recording]. They were the ones that we were writing around the time of When The Cloud Explodes and He’s Very Good At Swimming, so it was not too long after the album. So yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment.

LG: And how soon after Unfolding did you start writing Medication Nation?

Kel: It was a couple of years. Albums get written long before they eventually land into the public sphere. Unfolding was a long time ago, but the two year time difference from then still makes it one of the older songs.

I then suggested to Kel that her spoken word part in the middle of Medication Nation with the accompanying silence to my mind had the effect of asking people to get on the floor without explicitly asking them to do so, before rising again in an explosion of energy when the music is reintroduced. Something where she could see the point I was making, but also making it clear that it was an action that she herself wouldn’t call for, preferring instead to see people in crowds react to the music in a way that suits them best.

The discussion then turned to ‘I’m A White Hot Blade (Witches Are Wicked)’.

Kel: I was thinking a lot about witches, and about the history of oppression of women. And how there’s not really a lot of women in positions of power in the world, and that maybe if there were, some things might be different.

Not all women who have been in positions of power have been good as we know, but I just feel like it’s an imbalance. And I started thinking about the imagery of witches being burned, because it’s quite evocative to think about that. And I started thinking about how when people are oppressed, for whatever reason in whatever way, if it doesn’t kill you, you often come out stronger, you often come out fierce and more powerful.

I started thinking about flames, and how you can make a knife in flames. I am seeing women come together in union more than I can ever remember. There is a power that comes from being beaten down. So we can be burned but flames also strengthen. To make a knife or a sword, you heat metal in a forge. I imagined a woman emerging from a fire as a “white-hot blade”.

LG: During my initial analysis of ‘Leaf Thin’, I wrote the following:

“One minute in, and I’m already picturing this as being the silent song in the middle of a set in a big arena or stadium, holding everyone’s attention with their lighters/phone torches simultaneously alight. Slower, but hard hitting. Anthemic vibes.” Is that an association that resonates with you?

Kel: Yeah. I never picture myself in an arena, but I understand what you mean. It’s a stark contrast to the other stuff that we play. It’s definitely one of those that brings the mood down. Hopefully people will like it.

It did have drums on it by the way, it was a ‘proper song’ at one point. And then we just stripped everything out in the studio. We just dismantled it, and I think it’s better for it.

I then brought things back to earlier in the Imploding timeline, and to Big Nasty Palpitations, explaining that it was a song that took quite some time to fully click with me, but if there is something there, you should definitely persevere along with it. The proverbial ‘grower’ track, if you will.

Kel: In a way, that’s a big compliment. I think that growers are my favourite songs, because often something will be instant, and you also get very quickly bored with it when it’s very instant. So when it takes a while, it kind of like grows roots a bit more, and it adds to the longevity. So I’m glad to hear that, I know that some of our songs are a bit like that.

Shifting away from album talk for a moment, I then asked what will most likely be a recurring question in future interviews that I conduct, that concerning bands that others should be more aware of.

Kel: There’s a band called Careering from Manchester who I don’t even think are doing it any more because they were so under-the-radar. They just got disillusioned, but they’re really excellent, and I’m a big fan of them. They just released an album on Bandcamp that nearly didn’t come out. (Note: the news of their disbandment is correct as according to this post on their Facebook page.)

Another band to look out for is swim school. Me and Giz recently saw them at [iconic Manchester venue] Deaf Institute, and they were really good, I enjoyed them.

Other bands who are new and just breaking through include Shelf Lives.

(Pause. I freaking LOVE Shelf Lives, and I fully concur and approve with them being mentioned here! But if you ever meet Sabrina Di Giulio, the band’s charismatic vocalist, don’t tell her that I used the ‘l’ word. We have a friendship based entirely on the foundations of banter. Read more about how all that began here if you like.)

I think Shelf Lives are on a few playlists, and they’re doing quite well in some respects. They’re still under-the-radar to some extent, but if you’ve not heard Shelf Lives, definitely check them out, they’re really good.

There was a girl supporting Shelf Lives…err..

LG: Yingyang.

Kel: Yeah, couldn’t remember her name, she was really good. (Note: I knew of her because I saw them both play earlier on that same tour up in Newcastle. And I agree that she was pretty cool.)

And I’ll tell you who else I liked who I recently saw playing in support of HotWax. DUVET, they’re a band from Manchester. I really liked them, they had a Fall meets Babes In Toyland kind of vibe.

LG: (Shifting talk back to Imploding) We’ll go back to ‘Gorge (Oh Well)’, I stated in my initial listening notes that ‘I’ve a feeling that this one will go down well with a crowd when played live’.

Kel: It went down really well tonight.

LG: I was facing forward (standing front row), so I couldn’t see the crowd reaction.

Kel: Yeah, people were moving to it, and I was impressed, because no-one knows it. It’s a good sign.

LG: What would you like people to know about the song?

Kel: Again, that’s one of the oldest songs in terms of when we wrote it, around the same time of When The Cloud Explodes. And I was really fucking angry about the Tories, and I was really angry about Brexit, and everything just felt as if it was going to shit. I didn’t think it would get any worse (back in 2019), and yet it has got systematically just worse and worse and worse.

And every [passing] year that we didn’t release that song, I thought, oh now’s the time to release it! If we don’t do it now, it won’t be zeitgeisty enough. And then every year goes by, and it’s like, it’s STILL really pertinent.

Basically, it’s just about how there’s no future, as Johnny Rotten said, the world’s just fucked. It’s terrifying. I wrote these lyrics about spinning, twirling and gorging yourselves, and about how the rich and Tories are just gluttonously indulgent while [the likes of] nurses are using food banks. At the time, it was really infuritating when you look at it through the lens of what happened in the pandemic.

I almost knew what was going to happen in the future, because it now seems that Gorge could be relevant to what is happening now. Which basically just goes to show that the Tories just never get better. They get worse and worse and worse, and if we don’t get rid of them, we’re idiots.

(That theme of songs continuing to be relevant long after they were written saw me draw parallels with another song, ‘Poor Man’s Show‘, written in 2017 and released in 2020 by Millie Manders, and performed by her band Millie Manders and The Shutup. Contained within you’ll find the lyrics: “There’s no more money for the nurses, to do the jobs we need. But apparently there’s trilions, for bombing overseas”. As true today in 2024 as it was seven years ago. And even more so right now given the current events in Gaza.)

LG: Of all the songs written for Imploding, how many of them did you write with the live experience in mind, if any?

Kel: We don’t really write like that. I write because I have an itch that needs scratching, as a lyricist, that’s how I write. I get a bee in my bonnet, and then I write about it, whatever it may be. So actually, selfishly, when I write, it’s all about me.

Obviously, there’s two sides to the coin. It doesn’t have to neccesarily resonate with people in the way that I originally wrote it.

LG: So the positive effects that people might experience from the live performance are a happy consequence. Moving on to ‘What Happens Now?’ my exact initial notes read thus: “NEEDS to be added to a future radio playlist. Specialist/daytime. Whatever. I got that from the very beginning, and it would be a worthy addition.” What are your thoughts on this? Is this a viewpoint that you see common ground with?

Kel: Yeah, it’s really interesting, because it’s probably the ‘poppest’ song on the record. It’s got electronic drums on it which is a new one for us. It started out with a drive-down-the-road, Tom Petty kind of vibe, and then we picked it apart and smashed it up.

We put an Underworld style drum loop on it at one point, then took that off, and then messed around with it quite a lot until it came to what it is. And I think the tremolo guitar really makes it very ‘radio’ as well, but in a cool way.

We like a lot of bands like REM and Counting Crows, and I feel that it’s got an element of that. But then it’s also a bit more edgy and cool. (To Giz: What did you say that it reminded you of?)

Giz: A little bit of Pulp.

Kel: People keep telling me that bits of my lyrics and the way in which I deliver certain songs remind them a bit of Jarvis Cocker. Which is a massive compliment, huge compliment.

LG: Final question. And now that Imploding is finally out there (looking ahead eight days to the future given the interview date), have you had any initial thoughts upon what happens next beyond the touring and the promotion? Or should I ask you again a few months down the line?

Kel: I’ll have a long lie down. (laughs)

We are very keen to record again soon, because that album took ages, in case I haven’t said that enough! We’ve got a load of half-written songs, bits of songs, that we really need to knuckle down and finish. And it almost feels like I can’t do that until I’ve ‘birthed’ Imploding properly. Once Imploding is out there, my body will be my own again, and I’ll be able to think about moving on to doing other things.

Giz: Now the record’s out, we’re just gonna play some shows and do that thing for a while. That’s gonna be really cool, but we really do want to record some new stuff really soon as well.

Kel: Live is where it’s at this year, I think we’re gonna spend most of the year doing as many gigs as we possibly can.

Nice one Leo!

LG: Thanks very much for your time, and for agreeing to be partners for my first ever interview.

Kel: We’re honoured. Thank you.

So there you have it. Imploding in the band’s own words, with my own observations sprinkied inbetween. It truly is a piece of work that needs to be heard, and will make a strong case for the need to be added to your individual collections in the immediate aftermath.

Thanks once again for Kel and Giz for being generous with their time and for giving me the opportunity to bring this to you. And if you got this far, thank you very much for giving us your time and your attention.

The Empty Page. Imploding. Out Now. And it comes highly recommended by me.

Now go ahead and give it a listen.