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The work of London-based artist Lazy Day—aka Tilly Scantlebury—is refreshing and surprising. From their two early dazzling EPs “Ribbons” and “Letters”, they’ve grown their artistry into a more cohesive and exploratory form on a multi-coloured and carefully curated debut album.
The record, Open the Door, is fuelled by guitar-driven goodness and potent songwriting. Co-produced by Gethin Pearson (Kele Orekeke, Charli XCX), the work delves into their queerness and identity in a vivid and thoughtful manner, and revels in its glistening sonics. Questioning and quizzical, the album is a highly impressive and fleshed out debut from one of the English capital’s very finest songsmiths.
Listen to Open the Door…
Scantlebury shares their album thoughts, track-by-track…
“Killer”
“Killer” is about the way that love fuels your appetite. I wrote it after watching Hannibal, specifically witnessing the love/hate relationship between the two main characters: Hannibal Lecter (the forensic psychiatrist, and famous cannibal) and Will Graham (a special investigator).
Writing of “Killer” began when I found a 70s drum video on YouTube. Obsessed with the deadness of the drums, I chopped it up and put them in a different bpm. Next came the bassline, first on a real life bass and then moving to the keyboard, trying to recreate a beefy Moog synth. I could hear the melody straight away, and then had so much fun finding lots of synth sounds and working on the lyrics to tell the story of these two main men. Sexy and menacing was the goal.
When thinking through the tracklisting for the album, Killer felt like an exciting one to start with. Not only does it introduce queer themes from the very beginning, but also shows how important rhythm and storytelling is for the record.
“Getting Good”
One day I tuned my guitar to DADF#AD and very quickly recorded a demo for the first verse. I took it to practise and asked the band to learn it so I could hear it live. I often do this — as a way of experiencing the song outside of myself, to see if it has legs. I went straight home and wrote the rest of the song.
“Getting Good” is about how I was becoming really good at behaviours that weren’t helpful for me, habits that stopped me from doing what I knew I needed to. I don’t think many people would recognise this trait in me — so I stared that secret tendency of mine head on.
I became extremely attached to the demo I’d made at home, but knew there was something more to be captured by re-recording it in a studio. My co-producer Gethin got the best vocal performance out of me, making me sing/shout “way too good” over and over again, pushing the emotion where it needed to go. I also got the main rhythm guitar sound from an amp called a Kemper Profiler on a setting called ‘Gentle King’. That’s me!
“Squirm”
“Squirm” was the track that began to really flesh out what kind of record I was making. Although fundamentally a song centred around the guitar, I’d never written a drum part that had such swing to it before. And the continual riff in the verse made me feel like a cowboy. “Squirm” linked the old Lazy Day to a sense of newness I was excited by.
Lyrically “Squirm” helped me reflect on how much worry I keep in my head “How can I show you I’m stuck when I know it’s just a feeling / And I keep dragging it out.” I came up with the initial idea in my childhood bedroom. My wife was trying to get ready for bed, but I couldn’t stop noodling on the guitar. The verse melody fell out of me, along with the image of a worm, wriggling around in the dirt.
I love how by the end of the song it’s Sunday morning and I’m kissing in bed. What a turnaround. A good reminder that things can change, actually quite seismically. There’s a sense that the door is open and I’m finally ready to step through it.
“Strangest Relief”
I wrote “Strangest Relief” on my uncle’s Spanish guitar from the 80s, tuned down a step to help with the range. I wanted it to sit on the edge of where I was comfortable, so at some points I could be soft and measured, but when the bridge comes in you can hear a sense of pleading in my voice. “Strangest Relief” is about my big brother. One day we met in a park and walked and talked for hours, and then I came home and wrote the line “I wanted to feel the world lighten its load on you.”
I recorded the song on the same guitar, and wanted the studio version of it to feel as close to the listener as possible. No production tricks, just things as they are. Some special textural bits in this song are the piano in the second verse and the glock later on. I hope they help to give it a tactile quality, like you’re in the room with me.
“Bright Yellow”
This song began in a very conceptual way, I knew that I wanted to bring in my academic research more explicitly than I had in anything I’d previously made for Lazy Day. A large part of my PhD was focussed on the queer photographer Catherine Opie’s photographic portrait series, Being and Having from 1991. It’s made up of the faces of 13 queer people, captured like comical mugshots against a bright yellow flat background. Opie gave representation to a marginalised community, and in doing so, allowed others to be part of it too: “Kings like them had never been seen.”
“Bright Yellow” started off very slow and minimal, a bit like an early Mitski song. But then I let myself get carried away, imagining the people in the portraits dancing or singing along. So I upped the tempo and introduced elements that gave the song more momentum, like Robyn-inspired synths and dancey drums. I remember so well being out with my wife on a big coastal 12km hilly walk, and talking about the lyrics, trying to figure out the words. In the end, I wanted to describe them as a group of people that I so admired: “I must have stared at them for hours / Hours on end / You with your friends / I wanna be like them / Regal and bold / Luminous gold.”
There is so much hatred still directed towards the queer community, and I feel it even more strongly since I came out as non-binary 2 years ago. Opie was motivated to show togetherness, boldness, unity, subversion, and “Bright Yellow” is my attempt to do the same.
“Concrete”
I can really remember my musical influences for “Concrete”: Rostam’s Kinney and the entirety of Life Without Buildings’ album Any Other City. This song was written later on in the album making process, and is a big shift from what I’d made before. I’d started to gain confidence, realising that the record could be whatever I wanted it to be. And at the same time, expectations I’d had of myself for so long were falling away or being expanded. It was a good feeling, especially when the song is about the breakdown of trust, and facing it head on.
Recording the outro for this song was a new experience too: we let the drums loop and I forced myself to feel free (is that possible?!). I made loads of guitar parts up, just landing wherever. Sifting through my many many takes and piecing the music back together felt really creative, like making a massive mess before doing the most concise tidy up ever.
“Falling Behind”
The voice memos on my phone paint a very vivid picture of how I wrote this song, both their titles and time stamps:
3rd Dec 2019: me and my guitar in my bedroom, first verse done ‘New idea’
4th Dec 2019: first verse with chorus ‘New idea MORE’
4th Dec 2019: Left my bedroom, went to practice, showed the band. Voice memo humbly titled ‘Banger Practice Room’
Over the next couple of weeks I built the demo, until exactly a month after showing the band the first idea, I had the whole song. “New song practice improved.” The band gave it more life, playing it faster than I had been doing alone in my room. You can hear in my voice I’m incredibly excited.
I knew that the final recording needed to be pushed towards its bratty 90s logical conclusion. In an ideal world it’s Chrissie Hynde meets Alanis Morissette. I knew I wanted the chorus harmonies to sound like one voice, one wall of angst — so that the multiple perspectives from the verses come together as one.
“Alright”
To ask to make it ‘alright’ feels like such a minimum requirement, a really low bar, but when you’re feeling really bad you’d give anything just to feel alright. Despite ‘alright’ being quite a vague word, the song is specifically about one of my best friends, a bit like a letter when talking was too difficult. I wanted to express the tension of the lengths you’d go to help someone you love, even when it hurts you too: “I’m feeling out of it / I’d rather go anywhere then back again / I wanna hold my friend.”
“Joke”
This is the only old song on the record. Written in 2013 about a past relationship, it felt necessary to come back to it and update the lyrics, as a way of consolidating how much things had changed. For me, “Joke” feels like a conclusion, and it’s good knowing that there’s no more songs to write about that time in my life: “Or I won’t feel anything at all / No I won’t feel anything anymore.” I wanted to bookend the song with the same phrase: “When you laugh at me, even for a joke / It breaks my heart.” There’s something so pathetic to me about this lyric, but in a way the repetition and actually saying it out loud reclaims some sort of strength.
“Not Now”
There are lots of questions in “Not Now”, but this time I’m definitely asking and answering myself — so that the ‘you’ of the song is also the ‘I’. It’s a weird thing to ask yourself a question, it’s not just introspective, but it’s also indicative of feeling quite split and at odds with yourself.
“I find that there’s a point where I can’t try / Eating makes me feel sad / Do what I need just to get by.” This is a particularly specific and intense lyric, one where it was important to face something head on. This acts as quite a stark contrast to the way this song is so much about displacing a feeling so that you don’t have to deal with it “not here, not now, now way”. I found power in naming something in the midst of all that shrugging-off. This song is a hard one to write about, because even though it’s sad, I think I only really understood what it’s truly about after I finished making it. “Not here, not now, someday” — I feel happy that ‘someday’ has now come and passed, and I’m all the happier for it. It was important to have “Not Now” come just before “All The Things That I Love”. A sense of rock bottom before I get some clarity.
“All The Things That I Love”
This was the final song I wrote for the record. There’s a string of voice notes minutes apart where I test out the melody, muttering different words, working out syllables. I can hear a wobble in my voice. Maybe because I knew the whole process was coming to an end, but also because I was beginning to see the record more clearly: what the songs had been about, their motivations, how I’d changed over the big span of time that it took to make the album. This song has a level of clarity that I wouldn’t have been able to write at any other stage of the process.
The title Open the Door comes from this song: “We got tired of waiting / You opened the door / I did all the things that I said I’d do before”. Although the shortest song of the 11, it felt like an important one to end with, but also to give the album its title. Doors – ways of coming in and out, the domestic and everyday, but also the big questions and hope for the future. “All The Things That I Love” seems to encapsulate these concerns whilst also in many ways consolidating them. It’s okay to dream big and still be wanting more, even when you’ve got all the things that you love right here.
The song was recorded with a studio mic and my iPhone voice notes app at the same time, and the final song is a blend of both. At the end you can hear my finger come down on my phone to stop the recording. I wanted to keep that in, as a way to close the record, as a way to say goodbye.
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The work of London-based artist Lazy Day—aka Tilly Scantlebury—is refreshing and surprising. From their two early dazzling EPs “Ribbons” and “Letters”, they’ve grown their artistry into a more cohesive and exploratory form on a multi-coloured and carefully curated debut album.
The record, Open the Door, is fuelled by guitar-driven goodness and potent songwriting. Co-produced by Gethin Pearson (Kele Orekeke, Charli XCX), the work delves into their queerness and identity in a vivid and thoughtful manner, and revels in its glistening sonics. Questioning and quizzical, the album is a highly impressive and fleshed out debut from one of the English capital’s very finest songsmiths.
Listen to Open the Door…
Scantlebury shares their album thoughts, track-by-track…
“Killer”
“Killer” is about the way that love fuels your appetite. I wrote it after watching Hannibal, specifically witnessing the love/hate relationship between the two main characters: Hannibal Lecter (the forensic psychiatrist, and famous cannibal) and Will Graham (a special investigator).
Writing of “Killer” began when I found a 70s drum video on YouTube. Obsessed with the deadness of the drums, I chopped it up and put them in a different bpm. Next came the bassline, first on a real life bass and then moving to the keyboard, trying to recreate a beefy Moog synth. I could hear the melody straight away, and then had so much fun finding lots of synth sounds and working on the lyrics to tell the story of these two main men. Sexy and menacing was the goal.
When thinking through the tracklisting for the album, Killer felt like an exciting one to start with. Not only does it introduce queer themes from the very beginning, but also shows how important rhythm and storytelling is for the record.
“Getting Good”
One day I tuned my guitar to DADF#AD and very quickly recorded a demo for the first verse. I took it to practise and asked the band to learn it so I could hear it live. I often do this — as a way of experiencing the song outside of myself, to see if it has legs. I went straight home and wrote the rest of the song.
“Getting Good” is about how I was becoming really good at behaviours that weren’t helpful for me, habits that stopped me from doing what I knew I needed to. I don’t think many people would recognise this trait in me — so I stared that secret tendency of mine head on.
I became extremely attached to the demo I’d made at home, but knew there was something more to be captured by re-recording it in a studio. My co-producer Gethin got the best vocal performance out of me, making me sing/shout “way too good” over and over again, pushing the emotion where it needed to go. I also got the main rhythm guitar sound from an amp called a Kemper Profiler on a setting called ‘Gentle King’. That’s me!
“Squirm”
“Squirm” was the track that began to really flesh out what kind of record I was making. Although fundamentally a song centred around the guitar, I’d never written a drum part that had such swing to it before. And the continual riff in the verse made me feel like a cowboy. “Squirm” linked the old Lazy Day to a sense of newness I was excited by.
Lyrically “Squirm” helped me reflect on how much worry I keep in my head “How can I show you I’m stuck when I know it’s just a feeling / And I keep dragging it out.” I came up with the initial idea in my childhood bedroom. My wife was trying to get ready for bed, but I couldn’t stop noodling on the guitar. The verse melody fell out of me, along with the image of a worm, wriggling around in the dirt.
I love how by the end of the song it’s Sunday morning and I’m kissing in bed. What a turnaround. A good reminder that things can change, actually quite seismically. There’s a sense that the door is open and I’m finally ready to step through it.
“Strangest Relief”
I wrote “Strangest Relief” on my uncle’s Spanish guitar from the 80s, tuned down a step to help with the range. I wanted it to sit on the edge of where I was comfortable, so at some points I could be soft and measured, but when the bridge comes in you can hear a sense of pleading in my voice. “Strangest Relief” is about my big brother. One day we met in a park and walked and talked for hours, and then I came home and wrote the line “I wanted to feel the world lighten its load on you.”
I recorded the song on the same guitar, and wanted the studio version of it to feel as close to the listener as possible. No production tricks, just things as they are. Some special textural bits in this song are the piano in the second verse and the glock later on. I hope they help to give it a tactile quality, like you’re in the room with me.
“Bright Yellow”
This song began in a very conceptual way, I knew that I wanted to bring in my academic research more explicitly than I had in anything I’d previously made for Lazy Day. A large part of my PhD was focussed on the queer photographer Catherine Opie’s photographic portrait series, Being and Having from 1991. It’s made up of the faces of 13 queer people, captured like comical mugshots against a bright yellow flat background. Opie gave representation to a marginalised community, and in doing so, allowed others to be part of it too: “Kings like them had never been seen.”
“Bright Yellow” started off very slow and minimal, a bit like an early Mitski song. But then I let myself get carried away, imagining the people in the portraits dancing or singing along. So I upped the tempo and introduced elements that gave the song more momentum, like Robyn-inspired synths and dancey drums. I remember so well being out with my wife on a big coastal 12km hilly walk, and talking about the lyrics, trying to figure out the words. In the end, I wanted to describe them as a group of people that I so admired: “I must have stared at them for hours / Hours on end / You with your friends / I wanna be like them / Regal and bold / Luminous gold.”
There is so much hatred still directed towards the queer community, and I feel it even more strongly since I came out as non-binary 2 years ago. Opie was motivated to show togetherness, boldness, unity, subversion, and “Bright Yellow” is my attempt to do the same.
“Concrete”
I can really remember my musical influences for “Concrete”: Rostam’s Kinney and the entirety of Life Without Buildings’ album Any Other City. This song was written later on in the album making process, and is a big shift from what I’d made before. I’d started to gain confidence, realising that the record could be whatever I wanted it to be. And at the same time, expectations I’d had of myself for so long were falling away or being expanded. It was a good feeling, especially when the song is about the breakdown of trust, and facing it head on.
Recording the outro for this song was a new experience too: we let the drums loop and I forced myself to feel free (is that possible?!). I made loads of guitar parts up, just landing wherever. Sifting through my many many takes and piecing the music back together felt really creative, like making a massive mess before doing the most concise tidy up ever.
“Falling Behind”
The voice memos on my phone paint a very vivid picture of how I wrote this song, both their titles and time stamps:
3rd Dec 2019: me and my guitar in my bedroom, first verse done ‘New idea’
4th Dec 2019: first verse with chorus ‘New idea MORE’
4th Dec 2019: Left my bedroom, went to practice, showed the band. Voice memo humbly titled ‘Banger Practice Room’
Over the next couple of weeks I built the demo, until exactly a month after showing the band the first idea, I had the whole song. “New song practice improved.” The band gave it more life, playing it faster than I had been doing alone in my room. You can hear in my voice I’m incredibly excited.
I knew that the final recording needed to be pushed towards its bratty 90s logical conclusion. In an ideal world it’s Chrissie Hynde meets Alanis Morissette. I knew I wanted the chorus harmonies to sound like one voice, one wall of angst — so that the multiple perspectives from the verses come together as one.
“Alright”
To ask to make it ‘alright’ feels like such a minimum requirement, a really low bar, but when you’re feeling really bad you’d give anything just to feel alright. Despite ‘alright’ being quite a vague word, the song is specifically about one of my best friends, a bit like a letter when talking was too difficult. I wanted to express the tension of the lengths you’d go to help someone you love, even when it hurts you too: “I’m feeling out of it / I’d rather go anywhere then back again / I wanna hold my friend.”
“Joke”
This is the only old song on the record. Written in 2013 about a past relationship, it felt necessary to come back to it and update the lyrics, as a way of consolidating how much things had changed. For me, “Joke” feels like a conclusion, and it’s good knowing that there’s no more songs to write about that time in my life: “Or I won’t feel anything at all / No I won’t feel anything anymore.” I wanted to bookend the song with the same phrase: “When you laugh at me, even for a joke / It breaks my heart.” There’s something so pathetic to me about this lyric, but in a way the repetition and actually saying it out loud reclaims some sort of strength.
“Not Now”
There are lots of questions in “Not Now”, but this time I’m definitely asking and answering myself — so that the ‘you’ of the song is also the ‘I’. It’s a weird thing to ask yourself a question, it’s not just introspective, but it’s also indicative of feeling quite split and at odds with yourself.
“I find that there’s a point where I can’t try / Eating makes me feel sad / Do what I need just to get by.” This is a particularly specific and intense lyric, one where it was important to face something head on. This acts as quite a stark contrast to the way this song is so much about displacing a feeling so that you don’t have to deal with it “not here, not now, now way”. I found power in naming something in the midst of all that shrugging-off. This song is a hard one to write about, because even though it’s sad, I think I only really understood what it’s truly about after I finished making it. “Not here, not now, someday” — I feel happy that ‘someday’ has now come and passed, and I’m all the happier for it. It was important to have “Not Now” come just before “All The Things That I Love”. A sense of rock bottom before I get some clarity.
“All The Things That I Love”
This was the final song I wrote for the record. There’s a string of voice notes minutes apart where I test out the melody, muttering different words, working out syllables. I can hear a wobble in my voice. Maybe because I knew the whole process was coming to an end, but also because I was beginning to see the record more clearly: what the songs had been about, their motivations, how I’d changed over the big span of time that it took to make the album. This song has a level of clarity that I wouldn’t have been able to write at any other stage of the process.
The title Open the Door comes from this song: “We got tired of waiting / You opened the door / I did all the things that I said I’d do before”. Although the shortest song of the 11, it felt like an important one to end with, but also to give the album its title. Doors – ways of coming in and out, the domestic and everyday, but also the big questions and hope for the future. “All The Things That I Love” seems to encapsulate these concerns whilst also in many ways consolidating them. It’s okay to dream big and still be wanting more, even when you’ve got all the things that you love right here.
The song was recorded with a studio mic and my iPhone voice notes app at the same time, and the final song is a blend of both. At the end you can hear my finger come down on my phone to stop the recording. I wanted to keep that in, as a way to close the record, as a way to say goodbye.
and integrate them seamlessly into the new content without adding new tags. Ensure the new content is fashion-related, written entirely in Japanese, and approximately 1500 words. Conclude with a “結論” section and a well-formatted “よくある質問” section. Avoid including an introduction or a note explaining the process.
