It’s been almost exactly 10 years since Alt-J released its wildly successful debut album, An Awesome Wave, which went platinum at home in the United Kingdom.

Since then, the Leeds-born band has won the Mercury Prize, toured the world and had their songs featured in Netflix series and Marvel movies, to become arguably one of the most successful UK bands since Radiohead – a group it has often been compared to thanks to its adventurous mix of rock, pop, electronic and even orchestral elements. Add esoteric lyrics full of historical, film and literary references as well as tightly produced records, and the band's got a winning formula.

But the slew of singles off the band’s upcoming album The Dream, slated for release on Feb. 11, 2022, seems to indicate that Alt-J’s is not just relying on the old formula this time around. The first single “U&ME”, released in September 2021, is a laid-back, feel-good summer track with “simple” sounds by the band’s standards, while November’s “Get Better” is an Elliott Smith-inspired, gut-wrenching folk number atypical for the band.

Speaking exclusively to The Jakarta Post on Jan. 13 via Zoom, Alt-J’s keyboardist and vocalist Gus Unger-Hamilton acknowledged The Dream’s stripped-back production, saying the band might have been influenced by The Beatles: Get Back, a Disney+ documentary series by Peter Jackson of LOTR fame that premiered last November.

“I don’t know if it was deliberate, but we kind of enjoyed the slightly vintage feeling the album has,” said Unger-Hamilton.

“We’ve all been watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary and it’s amazing how they literally recorded those songs live with just four, five people playing in the studio,” he added.

“We didn’t go that far, but in the past we’ve gone down the route of making all the songs big, big, big, layer up, layer up, strings, vocals, everything. This time, we did pull back a little bit and perhaps let the songs speak for themselves rather than making the production such a loud voice.”

Lyrically though, the band is still as random as ever. “U&ME” written by frontman Joe Newman, is about the fun he had while attending a music festival in Australia with his girlfriend on the first day of 2020, just weeks before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic and changed life as we knew it.

“Get Better,” meanwhile, is a fictional account of someone losing their partner to an illness and their grieving process. It is also Alt-J’s first song that refers to current events.

“It was written during the pandemic and makes references to frontline workers and staff, so yeah, I suppose it’s very much a product of the pandemic while not lyrically making direct references to coronavirus,” Unger-Hamilton explained.

“We’ve all lost people during the pandemic, haven’t we? So I suppose it’s kind of a shared international experience rather than a personal one.”

Alt-J also shows its fun and silly side in its third single “Hard Drive Gold”, released Jan. 5, 2022, which pokes fun at the current popularity of the crypto market: “Gimme that gold / straight into my hard drive, baby / Don’t be afraid to make, to make money, boy”.

“It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek and ironic. We’re not actually advocating capitalism, we’re just pointing out the ridiculousness of cryptocurrency, NFTs,” said Unger-Hamilton, referring to non-fungible tokens, which saw a sudden boom amid the pandemic. “It seems kind of like a bit of a gold rush, a bit of a bubble, it’s just a bit silly really, I suppose.”

Strangely enough, Unger-Hamilton admitted that the three singles weren’t representative of the album as a whole, lyrically speaking. He also said that during the pandemic, Newman became absorbed by true crime podcasts and themes like death and the human mind, which inspired his writing on The Dream.

“In general, we’ve always written songs that dealt with death and tragic love. There is this fascination for us humans with mortality and as a band, we’re getting older and you become more aware of your own mortality,” Unger-Hamilton added.

Considering the five years since Alt-J’s last studio offering, 2017’s Relaxer, the band had some anxiety over the public reception of The Dream, but Unger-Hamilton said creating it eventually worked out for the best.

“It was good to have extra time to work on things without a strict deadline. We feel we came up with a better album than, perhaps, had we been more rushed,” he said.

After the album’s release, Alt-J plans to tour, but things won’t be the same because of all the different restrictions around the world.

“Look at what’s been happening in Australia with [tennis player] Novak Djokovic, it’s crazy. Obviously we’re all vaccinated, but it shows you how difficult it is,” Unger-Hamilton said.

“Before coronavirus we could get in touch with a promoter in Jakarta and say, ‘OK, let’s do a gig there in 9 months’ time,’ and barring some crazy act of God or accident, we would be there. Now, we have no idea what the situation will be like in 9 months. We have no idea what the Indonesian government’s policy will be in the future, you know?”

The band last played in Indonesia in 2018 and according to Unger-Hamilton, playing Asian venues were “fun gigs”.

“Getting to travel to places like where you [interviewer] are is a real treat for us, because it’s certainly better than playing Manchester or somewhere like that where we go all the time. No disrespect to Manchester, I love Manchester, but you know what I mean?” he said, laughing.

“It's pretty special when we get to travel all around the world to beautiful places and play music there. That is really the best part of our job.”

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