Shifting currents with Pozi

“Cut it! Cut it!”

Pozi drummer Toby Burroughs is patiently explaining the band’s approach to writing lean, poetic songs, when violinist Rosa Brook decides to demonstrate it instead: “Cut it!” she chants, relishing the brevity. Burroughs laughs. “We just want openness. Space! I wanted the compositions to feel like a breath of fresh air.”

Listening to art punks Pozi speak about their craft, you could mistake them for minimalists; they don’t use any guitars or chords, just sparse lyrics and plenty of room left for the unexpected. Bassist Tom Jones was a guitarist once, but it didn’t fit the vision: “I said he’d need to swap,” Burroughs grins, as Jones mimes a neck-chopping nope. The south London trio formed around a clear desire to create music that sits slightly to the left of everything else, allowing ample opportunity for happy accidents. “We’d rather have it that the song talks straight to you,” says Burroughs, resolutely.

Pozi songs are philosophical, often political and usually funny, but the band are determined to avoid accumulating any kind of trademark sound. Instead, over five years, two albums and two EPs, they have continued to find unpredictable ways to combine their chosen basic ingredients: violin, drums, bass, and the respective vocals of Brook, Burroughs and Jones.

Despite this directness, latest album Smiling Pools is maximalist in almost every other way. Fidgety single Slightly Shaking Cells verges on baroque pop, but across the other 11 tracks, you’ll find post-punk, new age, krautrock and folk influences, as well as field recordings taken from the inside of tree trunks, audio from a home video of Brook’s fifth birthday party, and the rev-rev-rev of their producer’s motorbike. Lyrical topics include crumbling ecosystems, the protestors who drowned a statue of Bristolian slave trader Edward Colston, a fantasy pub crawl through Edinburgh, and the slow disintegration of old friendships. And yet there’s nothing on a Pozi song that doesn’t need to be there: the group work by trimming the fat, resisting the urge to fill the gaps, and trusting that something unforeseen might spring up in the spaces they leave empty.

It’s the second day of their UK tour and Pozi are assembled on Zoom via three different windows. This splintered approach suits them. Each member brings a strikingly different voice to their music – Jones’ delivery is blunt and punk; Burroughs has a gentle, almost tactile talent for harmonies; Brook can sound springy and light, or gothic and intense. Their vocal interplay makes songs like Through the Door, a clattering post-punk cut structured around call-and-response vocals, feel almost like a radio play; varied characters weighing in at different times with unique points of view. This dynamic remains the same in our conversation: quick and witty, volleying dry jokes around to tease and encourage.

Burroughs and Brook are currently in Glasgow, preparing for an evening show in beloved sweatbox the Hug and Pint, but Jones is still in London, unable to take the time away from his day job. “It’s a bit of a shame,” he says, downplaying his visible disappointment. “Just one of those things.”

Luckily, Frank Lindsay from punk outfit KEG is stepping in on bass duties, but it’s a sign of increasingly tough times for independent musicians in the UK. As the cost of living continues to soar, gig-goers stay home, and venues can’t afford to keep the lights on. The UK’s Music Venue Trust counted 22 closures in the last year alone. For musicians without a major label bailout, it’s becoming near impossible to balance art and basic life needs.

“It’s so stressful!” Brook shouts, theatrically throwing her hands in the air. “As a musician, I’ve been thinking more than ever, ‘Should I just cut it and go for a nine-to-five?’” But Burroughs tries to find a silver lining: “Amid the bad things, and the way music is at the moment, we are seeing more and more of a community building up. A stronger DIY scene. People just putting music out themselves.”

Jones points to artist support schemes in France for a sceptical comparison. “The thought of that happening in this country is just unimaginable.”

Brook agrees, frustrated. “I mean, I’ve never felt like this before, but it does help to have people in the same boat. And we need music and art! We’ve got to just carry on.”

Pozi’s earliest music put their politics front and centre. Debut single KCTMO (2018) is a throbbing, heartbroken punk elegy to the victims of London’s Grenfell Tower fire. “I hope you see them on your way to work,” Burroughs sings, voice wavering as he wishes guilt upon the corporations responsible for the building’s highly flammable cladding. Their 2019 debut album, PZ1, opens with Watching You Suffer, a sub-two-minute track fuelled by a bassline that’s ready to fight, and a verse about how quick people are to wash their hands of those experiencing homelessness.

Smiling Pools continues Pozi’s adventure in simple yet urgent songs, laced with anger, joy and delicious oddities. But it’s also substantially less explicit, opting for questions rather than statements. After tackling the headlines on PZ1, Smiling Pools presents an intimate, almost microscopic approach to similarly enormous issues. Somnambulance, for instance, is a song about sleepwalking through climate collapse, with a woozy atmosphere of creeping bass, plucked violin squawks and French sound artist Mathias Arrignon’s composition of field recordings. The result is a soundscape that feels like you have your face pressed into the undergrowth, ants scurrying down your ear canal.

The band credits producer Shuta Shinoda for many of Smiling Pools’ delightful eccentricities. They describe how the producer discovered some “crazy stuff, the blububububs that sound like volcanic eruptions” on the stomping, existential Slightly Shaking Cells, by constantly running every voice and instrument through an army of pedals. “It felt like [Shinoda] was performing as well as us,” Burroughs remarks. Throughout the album is a sprinkling of hidden earworms, too: the catchy “wowowow” of Jones’s distorted voice on the second verse of Shut Up, hidden in a backdrop of tinny, irritable string sounds, or what sounds like rubbery raindrops on waltzing album opener What You Came For.

The album’s fixation on seemingly minute details – along with its enigmatic title, which sounds both sweet and sinister – can also be tracked back to two strange objects: a piece of crockery found in a charity shop, and a tiny, mysterious sculpture. Brook happened upon the former by chance while browsing for bargains in Edinburgh’s secondhand shops. “I found this aqua-blue plate,” she explains,“and it said, ‘Green Briar Smiling Pool 1982’, with a picture of these little animals in the middle. I just found it ambiguous and beautiful. I’ve been holding on to it.”

Jones, however, had a different idea – which serendipitously chimed in with hers. “He suggested the words ‘Tidal Pool’ for the title, and I said…” Brook pauses for dramatic effect. “Let’s change it.” Her bandmates laugh while Brook protests. “But it makes sense! It’s softer, this album, but still has the intention to play and question.”

Jones’ original suggestion was inspired by the Victorian tidal pool in Margate near to PRAH Studios, a mini-HQ for a growing community of experimental bands and where Pozi often jam, rehearse and record. “We’d been swimming a lot, and I just think pools conjure a calming image in your mind,” he says, placidly. “You can’t be stressed out.”

The second tiny object is the talismanic sculpture on the album’s cover. It could be a fleshy sea creature, some twisted coral or a piece of contorted bone, photographed in an aquamarine void. Burroughs nods, finally demystifying the image: “What is it! That’s what’s intriguing about it. It’s actually a thistle.”

“A thistle with personality,” Brook adds, erupting into laughter.

“It’s only about the size of your little finger,” Burroughs emphasises, explaining that the art piece was made by Tom Dowse, from fellow UK post-punk band Dry Cleaning. “And maybe it’s floating in a whirlpool, or maybe it’s floating in space.”

In typically ambiguous Pozi fashion, the thistle could also be a subtle nod to experimental Scottish musician Tom Prentice. Smiling Pools is dedicated to Prentice, who was best friends with Brook’s father and passed away in 2020. The record’s final track, A Walk in the Park, is a cover of a song of his that Brook would listen to on cassette as a child. The last 90 seconds are taken from a VHS recording of Prentice performing some “crazy drones” at her fifth birthday party. “He played electric viola in a punk band,” Brook says, wistfully. “And it was never really my plan to be playing violin in a punk band, but there’s a weird mirroring thing happening.”

A Walk in the Park is a haunting tune, the type that sounds breezy enough on first listen but quickly reveals a far darker undercurrent. “When I was a kid, I obviously didn’t know it was about suicide,” she says. “I just loved singing it. But that’s life, isn’t it! Pleasant ‘till it’s not, surprises around every corner.” Prentice’s original version isn’t publicly available, but the band describe it as “80s punk with a drum machine, kind of bossa nova, quite groovy”. Pozi’s version is a showstopper.

With bass and drums that encroach like a stranger walking too closely behind you, a shivering violin, and Jones and Brook’s unsettling harmonies, A Walk in the Park is surreal and painfully human. “I used to go for walks on windy days,” Brook sings flippantly, almost with the naivety of a nursery rhyme. “But now I hang about swinging from the trees.”

An endeavour so cinematic couldn’t sit on Pozi’s first album, and for the band, that’s exactly the point. Jones shyly describes feeling a few growing pains in the band’s five years together. “Sometimes I get a bit self-conscious when we play one of the first songs we wrote, Ash Cam. It’s great, punk and straightforward, but now there’s been this whole shift. It’s been amazing to feel it grow.”

Brook affectionately disagrees. “But those songs still work in the set! They feel like full stops at the end of long explorations. It’s like, ‘BAM!’ Always leave ‘em guessing!”

Proving that simplicity can facilitate fresh surprises, and that growth is rarely linear, Pozi’s music will forever be on the move. The only guarantee is more questions and fewer answers. When envisioning the future, Burroughs can only predict more change. “Well, with any idea, you can always make something new,” he mischievously grins. “With us, it’s always, why not?”