Beauty Sleep, the dreamy pop duo from Belfast, are set to release their second studio album, The Whole Damn Cake, on October 17th via Alcopop! Records.
Cheylene Murphy and Ryan McGroarty discussed their upcoming album and its range of inspirations.
I just finished listening to the album for the first time, and it was so great; I loved it! It sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a queer love story.
Ryan McGroarty: That's amazing! I guess, in a sense, it has been. It's so strange. It kind of feels like it's still in our brains, and I forget that people are going to hear it now.
In looking into all of your music, it's been a long time since you guys have released a big project like this. Was that necessary to figure out what you wanted to do next? What was the journey of those in-between years?
Cheylene Murphy: It's six years since our first album, and it makes a lot of sense. I think if you said to us when we released our first album that it would be six years to the next one, I would have punched you in the face. I hate that. But it did feel quite necessary. We released our first album in 2019, so 2020 was the pandemic and in itself, quite an intense year. We were also working with a label and a manager who we loved very dearly, and he passed away in early 2020, so it was quite an intense pull-the-rug-from-under-you of our whole world and all of our connections in the music industry.
We did write an album's worth of material in 2020. We listened to it, and we were like, "this just feels the same," and we didn't want that. We always talk about music like it's our forever project. Us writing the first album was us being really honest for the first time about us struggling mentally, which is something we wouldn't have done in previous musical projects. We wanted to figure out a way to do the next step and not be like "I'm so sad and that's so brave of me to say." How do I move it forward and say I struggle, and I have internal difficult emotions? I wanted it to be this story where we figure it out and live our life anyway.
So, after that first album, we were like, "let's try to write an album about that process. Let's go on that process for ourselves and write songs along the way." In a way, that meant we had to put our songwriting on the back burner, because we've been in the music industry since we were teenagers. We've never taken a break. We had to take a step back and roll with it. It did take a long time, but it was always going to take a long time.
Ryan McGroarty: I appreciate it so much when someone comes to one of our gigs or listens to us, and it means something to someone. To be as honoring and respectful to that conversation, we did need to live our lives to be a bit more authentic and truthful to ourselves, because people deserve the truth. They deserve for you to be as truthfully you–as you are. It wasn't like we were sitting there –"let's just get a catchy hook and a chorus." It was about something a bit deeper.
Our old manager passed in January of 2020; the pandemic happened in March. It also collided with the first time we had our own house, just the two of us together. It was a really safe and present time when we got to figure each other out and go on a journey that was very much about exploring life, queerness, and identity.
Just being very honest, to each other and to ourselves. If you're going to go through all this effort to make music and write things, they should at least represent who you are.
What was the first thing you wrote for this album where you thought, "this is going to go somewhere?"
Cheylene Murphy: One song, "Unfamiliar," did almost make it onto the first album, so that is the oldest song. We didn't put it on the first album because we couldn't figure out the production.
We weren't brave enough to let it be what it wanted to be. But it was a song that haunted us. We were like–"we have to release it because [we] just keep thinking about it."
One of the oldest and the newest tracks is "Up for Air." It was originally a demo called "Still Sad." It didn't really have any of the lyrics, but it had a big riff in it. That was the first thing where we were like–"there's something there." But it took us writing twelve other songs to finish that one, so it's all a bit muddled.
What was the last thing you wrote? When did you know you had said everything you wanted to say for this album?
Ryan McGroarty: There's a song called "Radical Happiness," which was the first single from the record. It had no chorus up until the last month, when the mix had to be finalized and we had to master it. It felt so elusive.
Cheylene Murphy: When we were first figuring out how to live life on our own terms, the first words we had were Radical Happiness, so we always knew we wanted a song called Radical Happiness to be on the record. When we went on this five-year-long journey, how do you sum that up in a song? We went into it feeling a bit like a theme tune and being silly with it. I love that song; I'm really proud of it. We had all of it other than the choruses, which were originally a lot more introspective and sad. When we got towards the end of the album, it just felt really wrong, so we were just messing around with stuff. It was just one of those things where we were like "what about this?" and it was immediately perfect. The last words we wrote were "I'm all that you want/ I'm all that you need."
Is there one that you've been connecting with recently?
Ryan McGroarty: You spend every day chipping away at this piece of art that you have, and then when you finally finish it and send it off, you never want to hear it again. And then it comes back, and you want to obsess over it and listen to it ten thousand times, then not hear it again for four months. You start to forget things. You don't hear it critically anymore. The first track, "Up for Air," is one I connect with. There are two perspectives on a lot of our songs; [it's] always a shared perspective.
That's one that I know took a long time, and it's quite raw and honest to me, so it always kind of catches me by surprise.
I also wanted to talk to you about your album cover. It's very dreamy and otherworldly. Did you have visual inspirations?
Cheylene Murphy: We said this album, when we took a step back and looked at it, was about us embracing being too much. One of the visual references we had was the 50 Foot Woman. It's something I've had posters of my whole life, I just love it so much. So we did all of these photoshoots with us in funny poses and greenscreens with the idea that we would cut out and make weird perspective shifts. In some of the single covers, we have done things like that. But that one image of us both leaning and entwined was a test image for a lot of weirder shots, and it just really stuck with us.
What do you hope people feel and take away from the album?
Cheylene Murphy: I hope they feel really inspired and empowered to live life on their own terms. It's a reminder that life is our own and we can do whatever we want.
Ryan McGroarty: I hope that we've created something that, when people experience it, they see something they recognize. I hope it just really makes sense for someone.
Beauty Sleep's full album, The Whole Damn Cake, will be available to stream everywhere on October 17th.
Listen to the band's latest single here:
