PARADE‘s strange sonic world explores the unsteady relationship between the real and imaginary

With their disorienting debut mixtape Lightning Hit the Trees, London-based collective PARADE harness the freewheeling energy of their longstanding friendships and eclectic tastes, gliding between free jazz, noise-rap, trip-hop, and more.

In 2015, Brighton musician Jago Sagar began inviting friends to make music in the attic of his family home. Filled with old synths, samplers and records, “It was how we socialised,” says Owen Nicholson, a friend of Sagar’s since pre-school. “Someone would be making a track, and people would go in and record – it was this in-and-out creative space.” As the circle gradually relocated to London for university, the HQ shifted to the living room of a shared flat in Forest Hill. “I set up a mixing desk and people would come in and out,” says Yottie Zapantis, speaking on Zoom alongside Nicholson. “It created this competitive thing,” Nicholson adds, “where someone would go in and record, and you’d think, ‘I’ve got to raise the  bar somehow.’”

A decade on, those open jams have crystallised into the eight-piece band PARADE – expanded to include Callum Waddington, Fiorella Amicucci Rose, Isaac Robertson, Louie Johnston Ward and Toby Grant. Their debut mixtape, Lightning Hit the Trees, is a restless, disorienting listen, encompassing free jazz, noise rock and trip-hop, with lead vocal duties shared between five people. Working with a broad palette of sounds – from industrial clangs to yearning string arrangements – the group’s levels of formal music education vary: some have none, while Waddington is a Grammy-nominated Abbey Road engineer. This contrast only adds to the intuitive sensibility and off-the-cuff energy that courses through their music, as if they’re always reaching towards some shared idea. As Zapantis says, “It’s like a think tank.”

Lightning Hit the Trees was created in a shipping container – which doubles as a studio for guitarist Nicholson and saxophonist Robertson – in an intense, fortnight-long burst. Despite the compressed recording period – owing to budgetary constraints and the difficulty of balancing eight members’ availability – the mixtape captures the band’s freewheeling spirit: Srar3 begins as a lounge number, around which Johnston Ward’s airy vocal winds, then morphs into a Zapantis-fronted noise-rap track before Waddington’s vocal ushers it into alt-rock territory. As Nicholson explains, the group are used to trading off like this: “Because of how long we’ve known each other, it’s easy to respond lyrically or with a style of performance.”

Yet, for all the stylistic left turns, the tracks on the mixtape all exist in the same world – partly because of the lyrics: set at night, caught in an ambiguous state between sleeping and waking, their characters nameless, their lines broken or loosely assembled. “Easy easy how it keeps me up at night/ Sunk my head into the pillow,” Zapantis slurs repeatedly on Pillow Talk, over a swirl of tinkling piano, chopped vocals, saxophone squeaks and what sounds like ice cubes rolling around a glass. There’s also repeated references to hands and touching, whether they’re “cupped” in Srar3, “thin” in It Moves, or scratching an itch in Reach. Nicholson describes those images of touching as a means of rooting the abstract, dreamlike setting of the record back to tangible reality: “On one side, you’ve got this thing you can understand, but on the other, something unknowable – these things are always tied together.” This unsteady relationship between the real and imaginary extends to the cover: a photo Waddington took of a local shop that had burst into flames early one morning, which nobody seemed to be attending. “Shit isn’t weirder than real life,” Zapantis says.

The band are now faced with the challenge of bringing these complex tracks into the live realm. Nicholson claims this will involve a merry-go-round of members and instruments: “It comes together on the stage in a similar way to how the record was made.” While the members are involved in other creative pursuits – some perform in the punk band CLAY FOOT, Grant creates vivid large-scale paintings under the moniker Cato, and Sagar is a fashion designer – for now their shared focus is PARADE, and the strange sonic world they have begun mapping out with Lightning Hit the Trees. Ultimately, it’s one best described in ambiguities. “Is it a dream? Is it real life?” Zapantis says. “Is it both? Is it neither?” 

Sounds like: Art-rock fever dreams
Soundtrack for: Embracing confusion
File next to: David Lynch, Moin, claire rousay
Our favourite song: Srar3
Where to find them: @parade.parade.parade