Tone Glow 198: caroline

An interview with the British post-rock band about embracing sound bleed at music festivals, avoiding guitar supremacy in their music, and the inspirations behind 'caroline 2' (2025)

caroline

Photo by Henry Redcliffe

caroline is a British post-rock collective whose founding members—Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn, and Mike O’Malley—began playing together in 2017. Over the years, the three expanded their sound and added members before solidifying their lineup as an octet. They’ve since released two albums, caroline (2022) and caroline 2 (2025), and the latter stands as one of the year’s most thrilling rock LPs. Over the past few years, the group has embraced the sound bleed that occurs at their festival performances, and utilized this idea of colliding sonic worlds—specifically those with different intentions—as a compositional strategy. Recently, caroline announced US tour dates for 2026, and have released a deluxe edition of caroline 2 that features demos, snippets, and a 19-minute improvisation titled “greek2go.”

Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with four members of caroline—Hughes, Llewellyn, O’Malley, and Magdalena McLean—over Zoom on June 10th, 2025 to discuss how the band members listen to each other during live shows, being inspired by Claire Rousay, and the making of their sophomore album.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: When I listen to caroline 2 (2025), I’m reminded of different communal experiences I’ve had with music, especially those I’ve experienced in church. It’s the only record that’s reminded me of that specific atmosphere aside from the debut Dijon album, Absolutely (2021). As a result, I’m wondering if you could share about your earliest memories of experiencing music in a communal setting, be it with family or friends or at school.

Mike O’Malley: That’s a good question. If you hadn’t mentioned church, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it. Weirdly, we talked a lot about church on this tour. I grew up going to a Catholic church—my dad is an Irish Catholic—and singing was obviously a big part of that. Singing in a really bouncy space is a very nostalgic and referenceable experience. That’s probably my first memory of that. I feel like you two [Jasper and Magdalena] have the same experiences—like singing hymns—but in different contexts.

Jasper Llewellyn: I didn’t for quite a long time—not until I was older. I think I did youth orchestra from the age of 6. From the age of 9 I went to a Christian school, which had a small church attached to it, so I suppose I did sing hymns in church. It was a very painful experience from what I remember, and I remember really not wanting to go. It was very badly run, and the woman who ran it was really stressed out. She was the only person who taught cello in the whole of my town—it was quite a small town—and she didn’t enjoy doing it much, as a lot of the students couldn’t play their instruments well because we were 5 or 6. I recently saw photos of me wearing this sparkly waistcoat during a concert. It wasn’t necessarily very positive because I could tell that the sounds we were performing were really nasty (laughter). That’s probably the first communal musical event I was involved in.

Magdalena McLean: I also went to Catholic church. My mom’s side of the family is quite Catholic, and we’d also sing at Christmas. In big holidays, we make music with the family. But yeah, church… (laughs). I remember really getting into singing because it was the least boring part of service; I was just waiting for the hymns to happen. I also played in orchestra in my childhood and teenage years. Playing violin in an orchestra is kind of a streamlined communal experience—it’s super-charged—because you’re in a group of 20 violins and if you’re sat in the first seat, which I never was, you have to play the same thing as everyone around you. The bow needs to move the exact same way. You’re really locked into this group around you.

Did you like that?

Magdalena McLean: No, I was always in the last row. But I guess it was formative. I’m good at doing my thing and paying attention to something that’s right here, to the person right next to me, or following along to something precisely.

I’m thinking now of the importance of listening in any sort of large group. When did all of you really value the act of listening as a practice, as a way to better understand how to play music?

Jasper Llewellyn: Within caroline specifically, intense awareness and attention to one another—in order to play the parts successfully—is part of the composition. They’re inextricable from the things we’re playing, and the sounds are inflected by that attention, too. When we realized that this was an aesthetic, that it was an interesting artistic thing to do, the compositional choices we made had to do with that. We’re building precarity into the compositions—we’re building dependence on one another into the compositions from the ground up. The songs are rooted in that, and there’s a fundamental tension and intimacy that the songs can then grow out of.

Mike O’Malley: There is a shift that happens for a lot of people in their late teens or early 20s where, when you’re really into music, you start talking about what the music actually sounds like. If you’re really into Nick Drake, for example, you might talk about how warm the guitar sounds. You describe things more in those terms instead of just saying you like the music. I think that leads to listening in a way where it’s about production concepts. There was a shift in my listening as a teen where I was listening to things critically, to all the micro-parts that were happening.

Jasper Llewellyn: At the show before yesterday in Leeds, someone said it feels like we compose music as a group from a feeling first, and then it gets expressed as notes. It’s like we’re doing everything out of the vibe and the atmosphere between us, and the music grows out of that. Listening has to do with how we interact with each other as people, and I think in caroline, the music and sounds are always coming out of something bigger—you know what I mean? caroline could also exist as something other than a band; it’s an art project, and it could be expressed in other ways. It’s really about how we relate to one another and the process of how we interact. There are a lot of non-musical dimensions to how the band is, and they inflect how the music is.

Magdalena McLean: In thinking about my own approach to the world, I feel like I’m an insecure person—and this isn’t sad, or anything. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the advantages are of that. One avenue I keep getting back to is how you uncenter yourself and give more attention to others. I just filled in for Oli[ver Hamilton] at a show seven years ago—I didn’t know anyone in the band. I was really hesitant to go because I had just moved to London not long before. Am I really just gonna play this random gig with a huge group of people I’ve never met? But I really liked the recordings and I said I’d go. I played the first gig, and there was this stance of listening to each other, of openness and cautiousness being a part of this project, and that really resonated.

Casper Hughes: When performing, you can hide because you’re not going to be the sole focus of anyone’s attention—it’s gonna be split between the eight of you. But sonically, there really is no place to hide in caroline. The way we write the music is so that there’s no guitar supremacy. Everything is sitting at a level where it can be heard—the individual parts are transparent.

Have there been situations where you’ve written or performed a song and recognized your positionality, and then had to recede to avoid any sort of instrument supremacy?

Jasper Llewellyn: I don’t think it’s something we avoid. It’s not a totally horizontally-organized band—Casper, Mike, and myself make more final creative decisions on things—but we’re all writers and contributing to the project. When we play live, it does feel like we’re collectively working towards something. I think we’re also interested in foregrounding certain elements at times. There’s not this egalitarian attitude, that it’s a necessary ethical decision.

Casper Hughes: Right, it’s a sonic choice.

Jasper Llewellyn: It’s not political.

Mike O’Malley: There’s a foregrounding of things, but it’s not like foregrounding an instrument implies a leading role.

Jasper Llewellyn: In the early days, I was writing the drum parts and playing them. I remember the early conversations involved saying that the drums don’t have to be at the bottom of the pile, that they don’t have to be the foundation. In “Dark blue,” from our first album [caroline (2022)], I was playing drums and Casper was playing guitar, and I felt that they were on an equal footing.

Casper Hughes: It’s also easy when you have electronic instruments, like the electric guitar, and acoustic instruments, like violins, for one to swamp the other. There was a bit of a tussle where mine and Mike’s amps were a bit loud and we had to turn them down, like, (dejected sigh). It was the right decision though. People need to hear themselves, so even if you have this big fuckin’ amp, you can’t just blast everyone. Everyone needs to be heard.

Mike O’Malley: You talking to me now? (laughter).

Casper Hughes: I’m talking to myself as well! But you do have the bigger amp, so you are the bigger rocker, let’s be honest (laughter).

Mike O’Malley: Of all the things we endlessly talk about when writing music, we don’t really talk about that—it just falls into place naturally. It’s very easy, actually. When we were first doing it, we were talking about how it’s okay for certain instruments to have a certain role, but now it’s such an established language that those decisions get made but probably subliminally—they’re not verbalized. That’s one of the pleasurable things about working together.

What sort of non-musical things are y’all interested in that shaped how you play in caroline?

Jasper Llewellyn: My background is in performance art and theater—throughout making the first record and into starting the second, I was working on a PhD on something in that world. There were constant reference points when we devised our stage show; I was thinking about performance, but not necessarily of a musical sort. I was in academic institutions for 10 years doing that work and was thinking about it all the time. I was thinking a lot about how there are many materials involved in a performance and sounds are just one of them. There was also a fundamental performativity to the music, though maybe not in the beginning, when it was just the three of us and there was a fourth person playing bass. We were doing small shows and playing songs like “Dark blue.” When we took shape as an eight-piece, things started to change.

We had an early version of “Skydiving onto the library roof” at the first gig that Magda was involved with. That was the first song that had non-musical aspects actively inflecting the music. We had this precarity, we had these rules: we agreed to see each other before playing a chord. The song didn’t employ rhythms that you could internally keep track of; you had to use your eyes and see how other people were doing things in this space. As time’s gone on, it’s just become a part of what the band is. When we think about what we wanna do in the future, we’re interested in making performances as much as making albums. That awareness and listening isn’t only attached to sounds—that’s just people negotiating things in a space.

Another example would be how all the compositions on this second record [caroline 2 (2025)] collapse into one another. We work with atmospheres in juxtaposition with one another. There’s a lot in there that isn’t just about notes and who’s playing what part. It’s about thinking broadly about how a sound happens, where it happens, and its whole context and world.

Casper Hughes: The project definitely isn’t just confined to music. I’m not even sure what medium the next thing can take on. Laurie Anderson headlined Rewire on a Sunday, and it was such an amazing show. It was just many things—you couldn’t pinpoint what it was. It was a big, blossoming performance that included dance and political oratory and video art and stunning bits of solo music composition. It had no bounds, which to me was like… this is it. That ethos was very inspiring, to put on a show where anything goes. Like, that’s what we can do—we can do anything. With us, music would underpin things because that’s what connects us, but there’s so much else we can do with our creative relationships.

Mike O’Malley: The only thing I’m interested in outside of music is sound more generally. I started making a living as a sound engineer a few years ago, kind of by accident. I filled in for Hugh [Aynsley], who is the drummer in caroline, when he was working at a venue. I started doing that and I really underestimated how enlightening an experience it was. That job for me still involves a series of mini epiphanies about sound, and it’s also massively informed how I think about music, writing music, making music. I underestimated how much of a toolkit that would give me. I’m just very interested in sound physically.

Are there specific things on the new album that were a direct result of what you learned from this engineering gig?

Mike O’Malley: I was much clearer on what was and wasn’t possible and how to achieve those things. One thing that we started using for the first time in an intentional way was sub-frequencies—everything under 100 Hz. It’s this elusive thing. Most people don’t have access to a subwoofer to see what happens when you play 40 Hz through a speaker. And even if people have access to one, it’s usually not a big one that can make your body vibrate. So it’s these unknown facets of sound that you can’t play with day to day.

How has performing live contributed to the differences you see between the first album and the second?

Jasper Llewellyn: There are pretty obvious things in terms of compositional ideas. They existed only because of experiences we had live, like [sound] bleed. We played music with lots of silences and gaps in it on small festival stages. There’d be big bands on other stages, which meant that the piece we were presenting was polluted—in a positive way—by sounds from elsewhere. Like, we recorded this and there was silence between these chords, and now there’s these different sets of rhythms and harmonies.

Inevitably, the sounds you’re hearing between each chord… you’re working with them before you play the next one. I’m thinking of “Skydiving onto the library roof” specifically, again. You’re working with two songs at once—your own song, and this other band’s song, and they don’t even know you’re working with theirs. You’re having to interact with it, and the audience is experiencing both at the same time too. You also know the audience is hearing both, so you have to work with it. So that was something we began to explore a lot on the record.

There are a lot of instances in which we delved into this thing of two worlds with different intentions co-existing, of them being aware of one another but not really. I think there’s something really interesting about one world not being aware of the other one, and trying to continue on regardless. We have that with the club in “When I get home.” The club is totally oblivious to the fact that in the next room, people are trying to play this song.

Casper Hughes: We have those experiences all the time in our lives, where sounds butt up against each other. Especially living in a city, if you’ve just got headphones on and go in the tube or somewhere busy, you have these completely different intentioned sounds happening at the same time. Most of the time we tune the other thing out and foreground the thing we want to hear, but the combination of the two can be incredible. We chose to recognize that this happens in life and saw it as something to explore. I suppose the prime example of that is playing at festivals with some main stage headliner playing over us.

Jasper Llewellyn: It extends to everything! Sometimes it’s the things that we all witness in London, and of course these can be very shocking and sad and horrific. There could be someone half-naked, passed out on the floor and people are stepping over them while something else is going on. You form a reality out of these things that can work—you find a way to accept things and make them coherent. And the same applies to music.

Mike O’Malley: The first time this happened to us while performing we were quite flustered by it, but if you keep having that experience and manage to do it with conviction, what is interesting and workable presents itself to you. That kind of pollution was perceived negatively the first time, but you can turn it into something. But this is also specific to our music.

When did this first happen? And who was playing?

Casper Hughes: It was at Green Man [Festival]. It was the Swedish sisters, First Aid Kit.

Mike O’Malley: Was it really? I remember it being like (pumps fist in the air along to an imaginary beat).

Jasper Llewellyn: Oh, it happened at Razzmatazz in Barcelona with that electropop thing that was more like that.

Mike O’Malley: Oh, Yungblud!

Jasper Llewellyn: It was the room next to Yungblud.

Casper Hughes: Oh I wish it were Yungblud, that’d make for a better story (laughter).

Jasper Llewellyn: Yungblud would’ve worked really well, the other thing didn’t actually work that well.

Casper Hughes: It wasn’t a great show, actually.

Mike O’Malley: And that was one of those shows where it went wrong because we were probably exhausted. We’d been touring for three or more weeks, and there was a sense that the audience was uncomfortable about it, and it became a feedback loop. You can really steer it the other way though if you have it in you.

When did you decide to be active participants in this larger soundscape and feel successful about it?

Casper Hughes: I don’t remember it being like, “Alright, it’s happening.” It was more just being accepting of it and not being like, “This is ruining our show! Our peaceful silences are being peppered with noise from another stage!” We were trying to be one with the swirl of noise. We had to be okay with it, and accepted that there’d be some clashes that’d be beautiful.

Jasper Llewellyn: I think you’re right that there wasn’t an exact first show where we did this. It’s interesting that when we came to write the second record, we were very quickly into the “two songs at once” thing. We didn’t call it that, but we were interested in pushing the atmospheres of two worlds and having them happen simultaneously, with the only thing changing being your position of perception.

Another route to this thing of upholding difference—of not enforcing harmony through the conventional ways of rhythmic synchronicity—is free-improvised music. We really went in on actually playing free-improvised music toward the end of the first record. And when we came to the second one, we didn’t want to do anything that sounded like free-improvised music—there’s a lot less scratching around on this record—but the one thing we did keep is this ethos of upholding difference. You can have two or more things that are being themselves, that are on their own trajectory, but are placed in parallel with one another. Relationships then emerge.

That’s what I love about seeing a duo show at Cafe OTO, for example. Like, the Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt album. A lot of that was recorded without them hearing one another. It’s this mysterious thing of just placing one thing next to the other and letting them hang in the right way. It’s about how you hear them and the position you hear them that creates the relationship. With “Coldplay cover,” the two songs exist, but the only change is with the person’s position in the house. We did a bit of, like, “this thing should come in at one point,” but these two songs could really just go on forever. Syd [Kemp] just went around with his microphone, and that’s what created the structure of the composition.

Casper Hughes: When you improvise with others, you’re constantly testing the different kinds of relationships you can have musically, or ones you wouldn’t have if you were just writing a song together. A new relationship between your playing emerges, and we’re always looking for that.

I know that after the first album, you covered Claire Rousay’s “Peak Chroma,” and then there’s the AutoTune singing on this new album and how you’re positioning them in these more emotional sounds. It makes me think of both her and More Eaze’s work. Mari told me that the album with Seth Graham, The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid (2021), had some sort of influence caroline. Can you speak more on all that?

Mike O’Malley: In terms of what we were influenced by, I weirdly don’t think about the vocals when I think about them—I think about the meshing together of worlds and environments. Obviously there are AutoTuned vocals in a lot of their songs, but if I imagine Claire Rousay’s music, I’m hearing field recordings. That record, The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid, is incredible. There are so many consecutive environment switches as opposed to layering things, and that feels quite radical.

Jasper Llewellyn: When I was really inspired by her music, it was more the earlier things. In particular, it was 17 roles (all mapped out) (2021).

Oh yeah, I love that one. I wrote the press copy for that album.

Jasper Llewellyn: Oh whoa, cool. I really listened to that album a lot. Having listened to a lot of post-rock music where people were employing field recordings as this aesthetic layer on top, or playing voicemail over guitars… I mean I do love the OG people who did that, but it’s been done to death. Listening to that Claire Rousay record and hearing these field recordings just exist as tracks, and not as like this cherry on the cake of the “real song,” where you hear it and it stops and then something with pitched notes begins… it really pushed what non-musical sounds could be in our world of music.

Mike O’Malley: This goes back to the question about listening, but I was reminded of how I really didn’t like university. Still, one of my lectures introduced me to musique concrète, which I had never heard of. It was extremely lane-shifting for me. That’s basically what any artist using field recording is doing—they’re referencing that movement ideologically.

Magdalena McLean: The thing about AutoTune is that we don’t put it on the recording in the production process. I’m essentially singing into the AutoTune and the really nice thing is that it really foregrounds the materiality of the voice. It makes edges to your voice, it makes it way more object-like. It moves it away from this idea of the voice as a direct window into your soul, that reveals something inside of you. Singing into this box puts it more in the realm of the other instruments, which I like.

Casper Hughes: Our love of AutoTune was probably just from liking bog-standard hyperpop. Like, wow, the vocals sound really good when they’re sung like that. The melodies you can create, the runs you can do with your voice—they sound very sweet and beautiful. I suppose what More Eaze and Claire Rousay and even Alex G did was doing it alongside acoustic instruments. They made us know that we could do it to high standards and have amazing results, too; it didn’t feel like a huge gamble.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that any of you wanted to mention?

Mike O’Malley: I love reading Tone Glow. Magda actually got me into it. This has been a really thought-provoking conversation.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you all. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Mike O’Malley: I like to think that I’m good at considering other people’s perspectives, and factoring that into how I think about something. Or at least I try my best (chuckles).

Casper Hughes: I think you’re good at that, Mike.

Magdalena McLean: Yeah. Did you wanna go Casper?

Casper Hughes: No, I have no fucking idea. I’m a fucking piece of shit (laughter).

Magdalena McLean: I was gonna go back to what I said at the beginning of the interview, where I’m good at turning things around and looking at things from a different perspective, especially if it’s negative or something I feel strongly about. I like that I can pull it off often.

Mike O’Malley: Can I add something to mine?

Casper Hughes: Alright, fuckin’ hell (laughter).

Mike O’Malley: And I’m honestly not just saying this because of who I’m around right now, but I strongly know—not just feel—that being part of this group is what has allowed me to have that quality. The people in this group have shown me how to be more like that. It’s not something I’ve arrived at independently; it’s been afforded to me by looking at how everyone in this band behaves.

Jasper Llewellyn: This is something that has emerged in the past few years of my life. I’m proud that I am transforming myself around what I think to be good values. I made an imperative—not totally, because I’m not there yet—that I act more generously, that I’m less self-centered. I put more time into other people than I did in the past. Before, I was like, oh I don’t need to change who I am, but now it’s become a priority.

Casper Hughes: God, this is a really hard question for me. It’s probably a willingness to change. I have a willingness to let go of the sides of myself that cause others pain. I often have to be dragged in the street, kicking and screaming, but I do eventually get there. And through those experiences, I have a willingness to constantly evolve. I want to be kinder and more loving, to take others’ perspectives and interests to heart.

The deluxe edition of caroline 2 is out now via Rough Trade at their website and Bandcamp.

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Thank you for reading the 198th issue of Tone Glow. carolin3 and c4roline when.

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