PostLast just recently announced the release the single ” Mizen” and announced the release of their debut EP ”Pull Me Into The Open Sea” for 24th of October 2024.
Alan has managed just recently to grab a chat with band members Julie and Stephen, please read below.
Alan: Can you tell us if there is any meaning or significance behind the name “Postlast”?
Julie: We needed a band name! Ha
Stephen: Well to be honest there was some significance behind the name. A few years ago, I just hit a wall with music thinking “I don’t want to do this anymore, I think I’m done”. I started working on other things, thinking I’m going to start moving away from this and to stop being involved in music because I just wasn’t enjoying it at all. Then after awhile there was a little desire that popped back into my head like “maybe if I started writing music and maybe if i give Julie a shout, maybe if I give her a song and see what she thinks” and it just eventually turned to “ oh maybe I do actually want to do this”. Once I started I found myself obsessively loving it again. So the idea with the name was it was post the last thing I said I’d do because I did say “no way, I’m done, never again”. So it’s like life after the last project I said I’d work on.
Alan: I’ve been listening to your music recently and I feel you have a really distinctive sound. How would you describe your musical style to someone who’s never heard your music before?
Stephen: We’ve been going with alt-pop as the quick explanation of what it is, which I guess sort of covers it.
Julie: I’d say it’s quite lush! Lush and plushy. For me, the most distinctive sound that goes through the music is the texture of the guitar and I think Stephen has so much patience with how he lets those cords ring out and how they come through in the production.
Stephen: I would say the same thing about the backing vocals, they’re a huge part of it. There’s quite a lot of guitars and they’re layered and spacey but then we also do the same thing with the backing vocals, Julie has these lines that are quite sweet and soft and there’s a few layers and harmonies. I think it’s probably a combination of the two that creates this lush, tranquil sound.
Alan: Were there any key influences you had that helped to shape your sound musically?
Julie: We had a great playlist that we made, in terms of our references. A band that we kept coming back to was “Men I Trust”, they played in Dublin over the last year.
Stephen: I actually didn’t know that, I found them by accident. We were actually well into our music production when I found them. They had released an album and I listened to one of their songs and said “wow, what’s that?”. I went back and listened to them and I thought (laughing) “oh my God, they’ve stolen our sound years before we even tried to make it!”.
Julie: I went back to a lot of early influences from when I started writing, like more acoustic folk influences. I’d say there’s some peaceful Radiohead influences there for sure.
Alan: How has your past experiences in bands like HAVVK and BARQ influenced your approach with Postlast?
Julie: For me it was a chance to adopt a different persona. When you front a band for a really long time like I have in HAVVK, I feel you tend to adopt a bit of an inner demon to get through those songs. So with Postlast it was really nice to put on a different persona, tell different stories and use different lyrics than I usually would. I think in Postlast I feel much more like a storyteller and Dreamweaver whereas in HAVVK I’m doing a lot of screaming. Both bands are personal but in HAVVK it’s in a very emotional way whereas in Postlast I find I can adopt these surreal characters and tell these more surreal versions of what I’m feeling. It’s become this sort of rebellion even though it’s not very rebellious music.
Stephen: I think outside of the music stuff, I’ve definitely learned a lot from other projects I’ve done. I’ve learned a lot about demo’s and production and writing and the business side of things. I’ve learned how important it is to get all the visuals together and all the stuff ready for PR and talking to radio stations and working with the social media side of things. Julie is brilliant at all those things so we were ready to go early on, we both knew “we need to this, then this, then this” and that made the process pretty easy because we both knew what we had to do and there wasn’t so much of a learning curve. For me, I probably went through that learning curve earlier on in my career.
Julie: I think for most artists who have been involved in a small music scene like Ireland, if you’ve been in it long enough, there’s a period where you’re willing to try anything. When you’ve been in it long enough you start to understand what works for you and what doesn’t. It was nice to go into this project knowing what our boundaries were, what we wanted and it was very much quality first and then think about the industry side of it second.
Alan: As you just mentioned there Stephen, there is an importance on visuals and artwork these days with social media. The video for your new song “Mizen” has some very cool visuals as well as your social media. You seem to be working with some very talented artists. How important do you think the social media side of promoting music is these days?
Julie: Stephen actually made the “Mizen” video so I want to put that out there! He is the very talented artist!
Stephen: For the “Mizen” video, it was all shot on my phone. The shots of Julie singing to the camera were done in my kitchen. A cinematographer friend of mine, Eileen, who has a company called “Bear Print Media” works in film and TV came and lit the scene for us and brought in the backdrop. So that’s why it looks great, Eileen did the hard work there! I drove around Mizen Head and got shots of anything I thought was interesting and I edited it with my friend Bjorn, who also works in Bear Print Media. We then realised all the landmark stuff, it just didn’t work, it didn’t feel right and we ended up just using all the tight shots of the water along with Julie singing. We were very happy with how it turned out especially for doing it on a phone with an extremely tight non-existent budget.
Stephen: (laughing) And I will say, just to share the praise, the video for “Scavenge”, Julie did that in her sitting room with a wine glass and her phone!
Julie: Going back to the question about how important all this stuff is, I think you’ve done a great job in illustrating that we’ve been quite relaxed and trusting in our gut feeling when making these things. There is quite a bit of work but it’s not laboured. We don’t want to compromise and just make stuff that doesn’t go with the art but at the same time we know that the time and budget you put into a music video is not going to give the same reward it would’ve 10 years ago. I love making music videos, full production music videos, or at the very least very well thought out music videos but I know that YouTube is not the mecca it was before. On one hand it makes me sad because it’s an art form that I miss but on the other hand its given Stephen and I these really small boxes to work in where we have to think of these 10 and 20 second moments and think “what’s going to connect?” with the bonus being if someone wants to click through and watch the full thing. We know we’re dealing with a different universe of social media and I don’t think there’s too much sense in just saying “social media is ruining everything”, we have to find the middle ground that works for us and I think we have found that.
Alan: Looking at your debut single “Connect 4”, can you explain the inspiration behind it and the reasoning behind why you choose that track in particular to be the debut single?
Julie: We actually shared the tracks around and got some opinions from friends. We were flip-flopping constantly. We almost put out the slowest, most miserable song as the first single.
Julie: (laughing) That was “Mizen” which is out now.
Stephen: (laughing) That was my idea!
Julie: I was onboard as well. We kept changing our minds.
Stephen: I think it was Matt, Julie’s partner in HAVVK that we were talking to and we were talking about singles and which to release first. He said “obviously Connect 4 or maybe Scavenge” and I was like “is that obvious?”. So then I asked the same question to Scott who mixed the tracks for us. I said “first single, what do you think?” and he replied “well obviously Connect 4” so I thought “okay, these are two people that I trust and they’re both saying it should be Connect 4” so that played a big part for me in deciding the first single.
Julie: I also have this ethos that if you’re doing any work that’s weird, make sure people know it’s weird on purpose. So I think leading with the weird single is good because you can also climb down and then put out slightly more normal music. But if you start out normal, people might not get it.
Stephen: We also had a lot of material to work with visually. It’s such a strong theme like anything to do with Connect 4, the colour schemes, the game itself. We filmed ourselves having a game of Connect 4 for the music video.
Julie: It was devastating!
Stephen: (laughing) We played four or five games that day and Julie won all but one game but the one we filmed was the one I won so the record states I am the champion!
Alan: How has the reaction been to “Connect 4”, “Mizen” and the other singles?
Stephen: We’re very happy with the reaction. There’s so much music coming out every week, the quality of it, there’s so many brilliant tracks just from Ireland that whenever anyone takes the time to play, listen to, write about or feature one of our tracks it makes you feel like “oh my God, thank you so much! There were 50 other songs this week you could have listened to and you put the time in to our one, we are so grateful”. We’ve got tons of support from loads of people and it’s surprising and lovely and I’m thrilled with how it’s gone.
Alan: You’ve been around the Irish music scene for quite awhile now, could you give something positive about the scene?
Julie: I’m done with framing my answers around covid but I definitely think people have banded together in terms of there is a wave of live music, younger promoters and more diverse promoters supporting each other now. Especially when you see the way venues are struggling, I think that banding together has been a huge positive. I think there was maybe a bit of disconnect in the scene before (covid) where people were just out to promote their own music and not really supporting others. Now I see these pockets of scenes and communities of different bands, where you even see band members playing each other’s groups and things like that. I think that’s really positive and we really need that because the industry is really struggling and I have always felt really strongly that if you try to do this fully on your own that no single musician is good at absolutely everything in terms of managing the project, doing your own visuals, getting people along to a gig, getting a band together and puting them in a practice space. So I think the more people start to embrace the Dublin/Ireland music scene as a community rather than an industry, I think we’ll have a lot more happier musicians.
Alan: Are there any Irish artists you’re currently listening to right now?
Julie: Loads!
Stephen: Annie-Dog!
Julie: I knew you were going to say that.
Stephen: Big time, straight away when I heard the first couple of songs she put out I was thinking “wow, that’s really amazing!”. I think she produces and plays all the instruments herself. Hearing those songs I was so impressed, I thought “that’s incredible”. She is brilliant.
Julie: A brand new band for me is “Cable Boy”. I went to see them at Ireland Music Week. They are right up my street. They are this sort of shoegazey band but they’re also joyful and having a lot of fun and their songs are really interesting. Yeah, I really like them.
Alan: Are there any other songs on the EP that you’re particularly excited for fans to hear?
Julie: Yeah! So this is my favourite time of year because it’s coming up to Halloween and we have a bit of a Halloween themed track on the EP that’s going to be coming out very soon. I’m looking forward to that because anything pumpkin adjacent I get very excited for. Most of the EP is already out and I get that it’s not really the same as an album but I’m really looking forward to people hearing it from start to finish.
Stephen: We did another super simple DIY video shoot the other day so we’re looking forward to getting that out.
Alan: As we’ve talked about, you have the EP “Pull me into the open sea” releasing on October 24th and you’ve had success with the multiple singles you’ve released, where do you see the band going in the next year and are there any goals you have?
Julie: For sure! We’re writing and demoing away on what we hope will be an album which I think we’ll talk more about next year when we get the songs down. We’ve also been working with a few people on remixes of the tracks which has been really interesting so that’s something that we’re going to come back to in the new year as well.
Words – Alan Robinson @alan_robinson_photography
PostLast photo credit – Eileen Timmons