Ahead of the release of alt-J’s 2022 record "The Dream," Gus Unger-Hamilton caught up with The Current's Mac Wilson about writing in a pandemic, which football teams the band is rooting for, and the themes they explore on the record. Watch the full interview above, and find a full transcription of the conversation below.

Interview Transcript

Edited for clarity and length.

MAC WILSON: Hello, I'm Mac Wilson from The Current and I'm joined by Gus from Alt-J. Hello, Gus, I would say good afternoon, but it's it appears to be good evening there.

Yes, it's six o'clock where I'm at here in London. But yes, hi, Mac. Thank you for having me.

So this is the point of the interview usually where I'll say, "Hey, how are you doing today?" But I gotta say at the outset, like, I'm kind of anxious today. It's one of those things it kind of feels like as a species, and as a society, we're kind of living on the edge of a knife right now. It's like I was going through my head, everything that's going on on the planet right now. And it's like, well, I'm gonna go to my work and interview alt J today. So I'm curious Gus, if from the outset, like, are you in a similar headspace? How are you feeling today?

I'm feeling all right. I've actually had Coronavirus this week. So I'm actually out here in my current garden shed office, isolating from the rest of my family. Feeling fine. Didn't have any symptoms. But yeah, stuff in London right now is pretty spicy. It's nice to be here talking about music and forgetting about world events for for a little while.

Well, I would love to forget about world events momentarily, too. But I'm sorry to hear that that's the case with you. And I hope that your recovery is is going well. And at the same time, it feels like we're at that point where all of a sudden, there's tons of folks in the UK and tons of folks in New York and all over who are just suddenly rapidly accelerating at this point of illness. So it's a very strange point in history to be sitting and having a chat about music, you have to admit.

I do admit that. Yeah, it is weird. But I'm hoping that, you know, it'll be kind of like a brief spike and hopefully we can get back to business as usual pretty early in 2022. So let's give our fingers crossed for that.

One more COVID question. I'm curious what the testing capability is like there--what was the process that you had to go through? I mean, you seem to be feeling fine. But what is the apparatus that is offered there for you?

Yeah, it's strange. Basically, on Friday evening, like, a week ago, I was going to my five-a-side football, or soccer, if you will, awards dinner, an annual fixture of mine for a team I play with, and we were like, all of us will do a test. So like a lateral flow test, you know, like a little home swab, put the drops on the thing, came up positive. So yeah, I've been for a couple of PCR tests, to confirm that I did have it, which basically involves either going to a drive thru thing or going to do a test in a kind of big tent in a car park somewhere. Somewhere in London, which I did again today. Yeah, that's more or less how the testing works here. Yeah, it's either the home, you can get home tests, or you can drive or walk to kind of like government test center.

So you mentioned football. Let's segue into that. So Alt- J, you're from Leeds. Is Leeds United your team or who is your personal support behind?

My personal team is Liverpool. They've been my team since I was a kid. Leeds United, yeah, you know, obviously, we all stayed at Leeds, but none of us are from Leeds. So don't think any of us are Leeds fans, but I do like to see Leeds doing well. They're a team that--I'm not really a huge, huge football fan. I prefer playing football to watching football, but Leeds are a team that--they're back in the Premiership now, which is very good. And I hope they stay there for a long time.

Yeah, I'm hoping they stay up too. I started following a couple of years back and Wolves are the team that I've adopted. And maybe you're hearing that you're like, "Wow, that's a random team. But I feel like there's a lot with with my own personality that fits in with them. So that's who I'm following, and I definitely hope that they and Leeds can both stay up. I mean, amidst all these cancellations that they're having, as well.

Well, yeah, the cancellations are quite worrying. I mean, Wolves have been pretty good for the last few seasons, I think. And, yeah, our guitar tech Jack, support Wolves and my ex-girlfriend is from Wolverhampton, so I feel a certain affinity with Wolves.

Gus as you're looking ahead, we're in the holiday season right now, do you have any holiday traditions that you are looking forward to and/or will be able to participate in the days to come?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm a big celebrator of Christmas myself, mainly, from a point of view of just like good food and being with family and exchanging presents and stuff, but I love Christmas music. I love everything from cheesy pop tunes to kind of like, you know, I was listening to the Bach, Christmas Oratorio earlier this evening. I love Christmas music across the whole spectrum. So, normally we have a big kind of Christmas party, me and my wife. We invite our friends around and sing lots of Carols and Christmas pop songs and I play the piano and we have like a projector with the lyrics and stuff. That was supposed to be tomorrow, but we've cancelled it now. Yeah, so you know I guess this Christmas is turning out--or this holiday, I should say is turning out to be a little bit, you know, disappointing as it was last year, but you know, fingers crossed next year things will be a bit more normal. As it stands, we're going down to my parents next week for Christmas down in the southwest of England. We'll be doing lots of cooking and maybe going to church to sing some carols and that kind of thing, quite traditional English Christmas, I guess.

We're talking with Gus from Alt-J, you have a new album on the way called The Dream, will be out in 2022 and then hitting the road as well. So the first song that we heard from the upcoming record was "You and Me" and it sort of occupies a unique place because there's plenty of instances in the history of music where you've got a happy sounding song with sad lyrics. And "You and Me" is sort of different. It's a very ominous sounding song about what seems like one of the best days of your entire life. So compositionally did that start from a place of brightness or more like bleak tone that musically you think it has?

It started compositionally more or less as a jam during a soundcheck when we were on tour in America somewhere. It was just like something that just came about really fast. You know, Joe kind of just like came up with this guitar hook. And we all just kind of like, you know, we're just locked into it. And luckily, somebody, one of our techs recorded it, and that was something we were able to work from back in the studio in London when we started working on this album. YI's definitely one of the more up tempo and upbeat songs on the album, I would say it's more or less about being at a festival, having a good time. But you know, possibly that that moment where you've been indulging--over indulging and you know, you start to sort of like, worry that perhaps you're tipping over into a little bit more of a sort of freakout. But, yeah, on the whole, it's a happy song, I would say.

There's a lyrical reference in the tune to Stellan Skarsgard and if people are not super in the know of his personal habits, can you give a little bit of background of what that particular allusion is to what he does?

Yeah, so the lyric is, "struck like Stellan Skarsgard to and from the bar". I think that, you know, Joe is a huge fan of films and Stellan Skarsgard has a particular kind of walk as an actor, possibly he does this walk all the time, but you know, he has a sort of like very confident kind of strut. And I don't know if Joe was thinking about that when he was at this festival that he was writing about in the lyrics, but certainly I think it's a nice, you know, I think people who are aware of Stellan Skarsgard and his work as an actor will immediately know what Joe's talking about there.

The other song that you've recently released is "Get Better", which is on the flip side of that--that's a beautiful sounding song that's about really, really gut wrenching loss. It really does a great job of capturing the small little details that go into knowing a person and then missing that person as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, lyrically, it's a very, very moving song. I think that, you know, Joe really nails it there with kind of, like, certain things like hearing the toilet flush at night, meaning that the person you live with has come home or, you know, sort of like putting their jar of Nutella in the basement as you can't throw it away. You don't want to eat it because you don't like it. But you can't throw it away, stuff like that. I mean it's very sad song, very moving song, but I think it's song with a lot of hope in it too. It was written during the height of the pandemic, it's about a man losing his partner to an illness. It's not specifically about Coronavirus, but certainly influenced by that. It's the closest we've come to writing a song that's directly referencing sort of current world events.

As we've just sort of dived into other records that are being released at this point, we're getting to instances where artists have had the time to write and record the entire record during the pandemic. So a lot of the press around a lot of these albums is like, well, this is dark times and this record is is a show of resilience. And Alt-J, you've sort of been upfront, like, "Well, this is a record that kind of reflects this darkness that's around us." So is this sort of a means of grappling with not just the pandemic, but just the general malaise in life?

I think that the last two years have been obviously bad in very obvious ways, you know, the loss of life and the struggles people have gone through mentally as well. But you know, I think they've also offered quite a nice reset for some people mentally. Giving people space to reevaluate what's important in life and space to take a bit of a breather and not live such a sort of hectic existences as we always generally live. I mean, speaking from experience, you know, my life in London here, up until March 2020 was really crazy. I was going out almost every night sort of like trying to catch up with friends all the time, like, just really kind of like overstretched, I would say. I think that actually lock downs and stuff, although it was, you know, set against a background of extreme difficulty for the world did at least give me an opportunity to kind of like, just take a bit of a breather. And I think that the album we wrote tries to reflect the fact that there have been positives and negatives to the time we've been living through for the last two years. I mean, I don't for a second want to downplay the negative sides of any of it. But you know, I think that, for us, having more time to make this album was a really positive thing, and I think that the pandemic did give us that.

So you've got the new record on the way, The Dream, and you'll be hitting the road in 2022, as well including a stop in Minneapolis at The Armory in March. We're looking forward to seeing you back around here. If you could visit any spot off the top of your head in Minnesota? Do you have any affinity for any places here? Or is it all kind of a blur?

I do remember going for Juicy Lucy, when we were on our first big tour of the States, I can't remember which spot we went to. It's probably written in my diary, but I can't remember off the top of my head. I mean, I want to say, is Pat's--is that a place? No, I probably made that up. It was obviously some--

Matt's, I had to think about it. There's two, the two spots are Matt's and the 5-8. Those are the two competing ones.

I think we went to Matt's. If I said Pat's, let's assume it was Matt's.

Well, there's also a restaurant called Pat's Tap. So it could very well have been that. I mean, those are the two primary Juicy Lucy spots. But then I mean, everybody serves it because it's sort of a regional dish. So I mean, it could easily--I'm looking forward to you checking your diary and figuring it out.

We definitely went--made sure we went to like one of the good places, we didn't just go for like any old Juicy Lucy, I'm sure it's like coming to London, you can have fish and chips here in some truly awful places. And if you're not careful, you will, but there are good places to go too. So yeah, Juicy Lucy really stands out in my memory a lot. And we've made some good friends, you know, touring in, in the Twin Cities actually, like I remember after our one of our first gigs here, we met some people after the gig and they invited us back to their house, and we've stayed in touch with them. So shout out to Erin and her pals. They've become good friends. We've always found it to be a very welcoming area, and we're looking forward coming back very much.

Yeah, we are looking forward to having you back very much. It's funny. A couple of months ago, The Rolling Stones were here, and Mick Jagger gave a speech on stage where he went out to get a Juicy Lucy and what beers he drank. And then nobody had any photographic record of him going out. So it was basically all like, "Hey, put it on the teleprompter, and he's gonna say that he ate a Juicy Lucy." So we're taking your word for it, Gus, that you really were there and ate the sandwich.

I promise you, I promise you. I mean, I was big fan of Man vs Food and stuff before I ever came on towards the states. So you know, places like Matt's, or as I call it, Pat's were very much on my hit list.

Well, Gus, thank you for for taking the time to chat with us about what Alt-J have been up to and looking forward to having you back on the road. And it's just great to touch base as well.

Thank you very much, Mac. Thank you for having us. Can't wait to see you in the Twin Cities late winter, early spring. And yeah, thanks for all the support and all the best.