An essay on trespassing: the return of the Carolinas

The Carolines were born in London in the late 1910s, when three university students - Jasper Llewellyn, Mike O'Malley and Casper Hughes - began playing together with the idea of mixing post-rock, folk and minimalism. From those early experiments, a collective of eight musicians took shape; an open project, where each member has a say in the creative process and where improvisation plays a predominant role. Their 2022 debut, intimate and melancholic, immediately distinguished them in the London scene by a less swaggering approach than the dominant postpunk revival scene. With 'Caroline 2', the band made a significant turn. Where the first record was a slow exploration, rooted in folk and 'slowcore' aesthetics, here the band chooses to play with more pop structures in a controlled, layered metamorphosis that makes the album accessible and complex at the same time.

The birth of 'Caroline 2' is a story of places, voices and intentions. Unlike the first album, which collected songs born in different periods, this second work stems from a more circumstantial and shared process. Each song is the result of a communal and artisanal writing process, where mistakes become an integral part of the result. The track that symbolises this approach is 'Coldplay Cover', recorded in two separate rooms, with half the group playing one track while another was played by the remaining members: the microphone shifts from one room to the other, but the result, though initially alienating, is eerily consistent. Other episodes were recorded in unusual locations, such as London cemeteries, where voices intertwine with wind and background noise. All this makes 'Caroline 2' an archive of shared experiences, a sonic testimony to what it means to make music without setting boundaries.

Opening with 'Total Euphoria' is an anomalous anthem, where each instrument seems to play in a different tempo, creating a hypnotic effect that culminates in an emotional climax as subtle as it is devastating. "Tell Me I Never Knew That", featuring Caroline Polachek, blends folk-pop and autotune in a ballad over which a shimmering melancholy is reflected. "Song Twoì" alternates between razor-sharp strings and moments of unexpected warmth, while "U R Ur Only Aching" is an ever-changing sequence, shifting from an acoustic duet to a sing-songy explosion. The most intense point comes with 'Two Riders Down', in which despair, honour chaos and broken vocals are engulfed by the power of the finale. The album closes with 'Beautiful Ending', an epilogue that seems to float in a space out of time, in a suspension of surprising stillness.

Caroline exalt contrasts, find fragments of consonance in cacophony. If, as they themselves put it, this second album 'is a statement', in these three years the British ensemble has shown that there is a lot of music out there, far from clichés and seasonal phenomena. We just have to go and find it.