The Tide Is High

With the band forming back in 2010, it could be argued we’ve waited quite some time to hear the debut album from shoegaze quartet Lowtide – a fact their guitarist Gabriel Lewis readily admits. “For a couple of years we’d been saying, ‘We’ll have something ready by the end of the year,’ but things just kept getting in the way, like people going overseas and things like that, so we decided to stop telling people when it was going to be ready because nothing had really been started. When we eventually got around to recording we did all the live tracking in a weekend, and then we just sort of worked sporadically on bits and pieces with Gareth [Parton, producer] over the next year or two.”  

The final result is a lush and expansive journey through sound, the beauty in which Lewis attributes to spending that bit of extra time in the studio. “It was nice to be able to perfect all these ideas that I’d been trying to play live – I’m always sort of playing everything at once [on stage], you know, playing rhythm guitar and lead, and that sounds okay live because it’s sort of in the moment, but isn’t as great recorded. Our first EP and 7” were both first-take live recordings and I’ve never been overly happy with those because my parts felt a bit choked because I’m just stuck with five fingers,” he laughs, “so I like that I’ve been able to give everything a bit more presence this time.”

While the album is sonically beautiful, the same can be said for its visual aesthetic thanks to its striking cover art, which Lewis explains came about through pure fluke. “We had Darren Sylvester working on the cover design and [the cover photo] was basically just something he’d found and used as a mock-up and we thought, ‘That’s actually really good!’ We rarely agree on anything as a band, but straight away everyone was like, ‘Can we just use that?’ He had to do a bit of research as to where the image actually came from because he just found it on Google, but a guy called Timothy Raines took the photo and it was on the website for the National Park Service in Alaska – it’s an image of a glacial carving, like the side coming off a glacier and falling into the sea and it is just such a dynamic and explosive sort of image.”

Lowtide have been touring the album across the country since the end of July, and Lewis reveals between shows their time has been spent discussing new possibilities for the band. “We’ve been on the road a bit and have been spending a bit more time together than we normally do, so we’ve been talking about different music and sharing what we’ve been listening to a bit more and thinking about what sort of direction we might be taking next. We’ve been listening to a French band from the ‘80s called Asylum Party which I guess is sort of new wave/coldwave – our ideas are a little different to what we’ve done so far but not totally removed, so I think we can manage to make it work.”