WATCH: Mumble Tide - 'Hotel Life'

Mumble Tide are back - everybody cheer / clap / rejoice! Or all of the above. The best news. Hotel Life is their first new track of the year, releasing on Nothing Fancy Records. They were one of my fave new artists of 2021 (I think?) who have spent the past couple of years recording and touring with a bunch of brill artists (Divorce, Liz Lawrence, Personal Trainer... ooft). 

Working with co-producer Ellie Mason (of Voka Gentle) this latest batch of songs saw the duo living a nomad lifestyle, uprooting their lives (and their recording set-up) every couple of months as they moved between boats, Airbnbs, spare rooms and warehouses. If the results are all as good as this first taster, I'm excited for more. 

On the new track, vocalist Gina Leonard shares: "'Hotel Life' is a song about relinquishing control. We wrote it after Ryan's dad had a 'funny turn' whilst on a work trip in Reading and we rushed to pick him up from hospital and ended up staying the night in a weird corporate business hotel on the outskirts of the city. I think hotels can be quite confusing spaces... I like running away in my head to a kind of 'hotel life' where I can escape everyone and be completely in control of who I am. Ultimately though, that's not healthy or possible. The song is overall positive and uplifting (I hope) - it's about not giving up." 

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WATCH: Mumble Tide - 'Love Thing'

Let me introduce you to Mumble Tide. They're a Bristol duo comprised of Gina Leonard and Ryan Rogers. Following recent single Bad Match, they've just shared Love Thing, the title track of their forthcoming debut EP, which is due out on 13th November via Nothing Fancy. 

On the track, one of first written for the project, Gina explains that "we had tried a bunch of different versions of it in the studio when we were still figuring out our sound but nothing was really sticking. In the end we took it back to my folks' in Cambridge and spent a week working on it and everything clicked into place."

Having both worked on other projects, Mumble Tide came from a desire for some more creative freedom. Gina explains that it was born "during a tricky time where I was feeling quite restricted in other projects. Lots of what I was writing was getting rejected for being say... too sweet, or too silly, or too simple. It became increasingly frustrating binning songs and to find that Ryan was up for embracing a no rules, no questions approach turned out to be just the ticket. Creating Mumble Tide allowed me the chance to tip everything upside down and shake it. I was reminded of why I love writing songs." 

Working from a home studio (in Bristol originally, and in Cambridge during lockdown) Gina starts the process by bringing a song to the room, while Ryan focuses on the production side. On some creative insecurities, he shares that "at first when Gina and I decided to do some tracks together, I was very focused on just capturing her songs without over-complicating them. But the more we experimented and collaborated, the more we wanted to embrace the DIY production world we were creating together. We stopped trying to be technical or serious and stopped worrying about not knowing the right way to do things. We both played everything how we wanted, recorded it how we wanted and mixed it how we wanted. Just fun and easy and messy." 

It sounds as if the past few months have been a creative and lucrative time for the duo, so I'd expect that lots of new music is on the way - for now, the Love Thing EP is due 13th November and you can pre-order it here.

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