New album, fresh start for Pale Blue Eyes - Brighton date

It’s an album that comes after challenging times and big changes in their lives for Matt and Lucy Board who are joined in the band by bassist Aubrey Simpson.

As Lucy says: “The first album came out in 2022 and then we had one in 2023 so it has been three in three years.”

“We carried on writing between the records,” says Matt, “but we were about to move. We moved from just outside Totnes to Sheffield. Lucy's parents are from Sheffield. And I think the albums are a bit of a triad really. The first two were written during quite a difficult period of personal change and transition. It was quite a complex family journey and then we moved out of the family home to Sheffield which was a big change again.”

As Lucy explains: “We met originally when I was doing my degree and Matt was doing his masters at Dartington College of Arts. I started playing the trumpet in one of his previous bands and we just literally started making music together, quite a long time ago, maybe about 15 years ago. We met Aubrey and we just started playing music together before we had any gigs together. It was just the three of us playing so it happened very naturally.”

Matt adds: “I will generate the ideas, and the workflow is quite natural. We never really get that hung up on the songwriting side of things. If we are all feeling it in the room, then we will develop something further. I come up with the idea for the lyrics and give them a good solid foundation and then Lucy comes in and takes it further almost as a producer and then the three of us develop it together in the studio as a project. I think it works because we are never over analysing what is happening. It's nice to chat about it but it's definitely about not overwriting and not getting hung up on that side of things. The real stuff happens very naturally.”

As Lucy says: “Matt is prolific in his writing but we have found a dynamic that is really quite intuitive and we just trust our instinct.”

And now with the move to Sheffield, they are entering a new chapter: “We have let go of a few things. It was quite a hard time for us in Devon. Both of Matt's parents passed away, and then for us the music was just the opposite of what we were feeling.”

Matt adds: “But now with a new album in Sheffield we really feel that we have been able to get our teeth into it, to give the album our full attention and it does feel like a distraction to what else has been happening. I think that that has made it a deeper album.”

As Lucy says, it has all been a fresh start: “Some of it feels like a weight has been lifted a little bit. A lot of the second album was good poppy fun but that was very much at odds with what was going on, a positive reaction to very difficult circumstances but this third album is different now.”