sadplanet just dropped their debut EP slowing down and it's everything shoegaze should be

London-based sadplanet released their debut EP, slowing down, yesterday, and they've arrived with the confidence of a band that already knows exactly who they are. This five-piece—guitarists Nick Rainey and Aiden Knowles, drummer Jeff Baker, bassist Dan Lawrence, and frontwoman Kyra Ho—anchor their soaring, pedal-heavy soundscapes to raw, confessional storytelling and a bleeding-heart sincerity. There is undeniable sexiness to their sound, too. Kyra's vulnerable lyrics cut straight through the noise to become the beating heart of the track. "I feel like a song should be about something," she insists. "And the lyrics should say something."

Ironically, for a project that feels so deeply human, the formation of the band in late 2023 was a little algorithmic. When Nick and Jeff realised that they had the riffs but not the rhythm section, they turned to Vampr — a platonic Tinder for musicians, where you swipe right on a decent bass player instead of a terrible date. After navigating the app's algorithms and a few local Facebook groups, they finally matched with Dan, Aiden and Kyra, who completed the lineup.

That sonic confidence isn't an accident. Between jazz degrees, psych-rock stints, and Kyra’s childhood background in musical theater and opera, they have the chops to experiment without fear. The independent scene has quickly taken notice, including me, who has been obsessively spinning their first two singles, "do you?" and "please." With their debut EP, slowing down, freshly out in the world, I sat down with the band to talk about what drives their creative pulse, the stories behind their intimate lyrics, the journey of recording this EP, and why Kyra finds so much inspiration in the work of Adrianne Lenker.

We’ve sort of struggled with labeling our sound—"shoegaze" has always seemed appropriate, because you could call us indie rock or just generally alternative, but we use so many effects and pedals that what else could we call it?

How did sadplanet first come together, and how did each of you find your way into the band?

Nick and Jeff were friends and started writing together in a room. They quickly wanted to form a band but didn’t know anyone who was up for it. So, they started reaching out on Vampr (a sort of platonic Tinder for musicians) and Facebook groups, and that’s how Dan, Kyra, and Aiden got on board. Kyra joined last, initially just putting vocals onto songs the rest of us had already written, and over time, the creative process has become something we all do. It’s pretty crazy that we mostly all met online; maybe the apps do work after all.

There’s a tendency right now for bands to shy away from the "shoegaze" label, even when their music clearly fits the bill. You do the exact opposite and proudly claim the shoegaze/dream-pop tag. What is it about this specific sound that makes you want to create within it?

It’s a genre with a lot of exploration left in it because it’s still fairly new. Yes, it’s 30 years old, but it’s still a baby, really. A lot of guitar music is quite limiting, and we want to make sure our stuff grows and doesn’t become stale. Shoegaze is such an expansive and encouraging space for that. We’ve sort of struggled with labeling our sound—"shoegaze" has always seemed appropriate, because you could call us indie rock or just generally alternative, but we use so many effects and pedals that what else could we call it?

What drives you to make music? I’m curious to hear about both your musical influences and the non-musical inspirations—whether that’s films, books, or everyday experiences—that bleed into your sound.

When Jeff and Nick started writing together, they were influenced more by '90s alternative music. Artists like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive got them interested in soundscapes and combining heavy and ambient guitars. These were definitely a starting-off point, but when the rest of us joined, it started to widen, and we moved a bit away from classic shoegaze. Aiden and Kyra didn’t listen to shoegaze that much before joining, though they liked artists that had similar elements, like Yuck and Narrow Head. We sort of bonded over the early emo revival of the 2010s (the best revival).

Books and films don’t make it into our sound that much, but Nick’s got a soft spot for Lost in Translation (for obvious reasons). We originally went down the route of making more cinematic music, and we’ve kind of added structure in over the past year. Kyra’s a big reader and tries to get some literary references in once in a while—"La Maga’s" lyrics are a reference to a Cortázar novel—but it’s not a big part of our creative process.

The main answer is probably that there isn’t anything else that we care about as much as making music that we like. You get to a certain point in life where you realize, "This is the main thing I want to do."

The bio on your Bandcamp page simply reads "shower music." Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

Honestly, it was a bit of a joke, and we’ll probably change it to something else in a month because we don’t know what to write in bios. There’s a reason we’re not pursuing comedy.

For a project that only started recently and has just a handful of songs out, your sound feels incredibly accomplished and fully realized. Where does that sonic confidence come from so early on?

Thank you so much for saying that.

Without trying to sound too arrogant, everyone has been doing music for a long time. Jeff, Nick, and Aiden have all been in bands of different genres and really love their instruments, so they can afford to try out new stuff because they feel confident and at ease playing. Dan has also been in loads of projects spanning different genres, from jazz to psych rock, and studied music at university (we often go to him for anything theory-based). If you play him a song, he’ll have an innovative bassline down immediately. Kyra’s been singing for ages and took classes all throughout her childhood, so she is pretty comfortable too.

We’re also nice to each other. No one is ever judgmental if someone messes up once in a while, and we’re all so confident in each other's musical abilities that we push each other to try new things and experiment.

The lyrics in your songs are strikingly intimate and personal, which is refreshing in a genre that often hides behind abstraction and buried vocals. Who handles the lyric writing, and what does that process look like?

Kyra—vocals—writes the lyrics, with feedback from the rest of us. I (Kyra) tend to have trouble writing lyrics that aren’t based on something I actually think or feel. It’s probably because I came to music through musical theater and folk, so if there isn’t a story or something confessional, I really struggle. It’s probably why our lyrics have a bit more of a tangible thread of meaning than some music in the genre. I feel like a song should be about something, and the lyrics should say something. I can’t just make stuff up on the spot or use vocals purely as an instrument—though I think it’s cool and do listen to stuff like Cocteau Twins or artists that don’t put so much emphasis on them. I have to hear the music, take it away, think about the feel of it, and then write something to it that feels appropriate and still is about something; or the lyrics have to come first.

You don’t appear to be tied to a label right now. Are you navigating the industry and releasing everything completely DIY? How has that experience been for you?

Yeah, we’re currently doing everything DIY. Recording, booking shows, marketing, planning—we’re learning these skills as we go. The great thing about doing everything DIY is that we’re not tied to a particular sound or style yet. We’re still finding our feet sonically. Every new song we write seems to be a slightly different genre at the moment, and it’s nice that we can still do that. We’ve made some good friends with other bands across the UK, which has opened up a lot of opportunities to play. We’re always open to working with like-minded people and creatives, but we also believe that if you make music that you have faith in, and you build good relationships with fellow artists, the more structured, industry-like elements of being a musician will come when they come, when it’s right.

Every band eventually builds up its own early lore. What are some of the funniest or most chaotic moments you’ve shared since starting this project?

It’s a bit clichéd, but one of us—not naming names—had a bit of a romantic to-do on our tour a couple of years ago. We were all sharing a house for the night, and one of us thought they’d fallen in love with someone in the crowd, and it all got a little too close for comfort.

We also once had a fan come all the way from a different city to hear us, and he asked us to sign a Pokémon card. That wasn’t particularly chaotic, but it was very sweet.

One kind of awkward one is when an ex of the band came to a gig and named one of our songs as their favorite, even though it was written about how terribly they’d acted in the relationship.

You’re are releasing your debut EP this September. What can you tell us about the recording process and the overarching themes you’re exploring on this record?

To be honest, it wasn’t a simple ride. It took us a while to get the tracks mixed: over a year. There were originally five songs for the EP, and they changed a lot in the studio. We ended up completely axing one of them, and "Please" and "Do You" sound completely different now to how we wrote them in the room. We ended up taking a lot of elements out, especially vocals, because we realized that they didn’t have quite enough space and room to breathe on them as the EP wanted, since it was all about "slowing down" and processing.

In terms of themes, the main ones are love, toxic friendships, and just getting through relationships.

Being a DIY band often means you have to build your own community. What does your local scene look like right now, and are there other emerging bands you feel a strong kinship with?

Shoegaze is welcoming, and as mentioned before, we’ve made some good friends. We recorded our first singles with Ben from deary, and then they invited us on tour with them, and Nick recently played with them. So, we’d say there’s a strong kinship there. We have also played a lot with bands like Toothpaste, Thistle., Velveteen, Garden Slug, Silt (formerly Oliver Beardmore), and so many others, and it’s always a joy to see them at shows or get to play with them again.

If you could put a time capsule in the ground today, right before your debut EP, slowing down, goes out into the world, what message would you want to send to your future selves to read in five years?

The title kind of says it all; it’s a project about reflecting on relationships. It’s supposed to be a confession that we’re all human, so going through the world navigating relationships with other humans is going to take its toll sometimes. In order to move on from any kind of impactful interaction, you have to slow down and think about what it meant to you. It feels sometimes like we’re in a disposable, "be cool" culture, where we have to process anything negative or "toxic" with a level head and simply "move on" and not let it get to you. But everything gets to you, and it’s okay to sit with that for a while.

Kyra, when you were first discovering your love for heavy guitar music, were there specific female artists who made you look at the stage and think, "I can do this too"? How does it feel to now be stepping into that role for the next wave of listeners?

Oh man, I mean I love women doing heavy shit, though I’ll admit I like it when they intersperse heavy with soft too; I like heavy stuff to have a reason in a song. When I was a kid, I thought Hayley Williams was a god (I still do), but it was listening to people like PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Courtney Barnett, and Adrianne Lenker (I believe the best guitarist of our time) that I found the most inspiring. They don’t do traditional heavy guitar music at all, obviously, but they use guitars to get really weird with it sometimes. Big Thief is my favorite band of all time, and they’re obviously not shoegaze—they’re like alt-country or whatever—but some of their songs get really crunchy and nasty and messy.

I think when I saw them play for the first time, I had this moment where I realized that it was Adrianne Lenker, not Buck Meek (the other guitarist in the band), doing all the sick lead lines and the absolute wailing for most of the songs, all while singing the most beautiful lyrics and belting with the most control. I was like, "Oh no, girls’ roles in music and bands are not just to be the one singing nicely; they can be filling out the whole soundscape; they can be absolutely shredding." And that seems so obvious now, but at the time, when I was just playing a lot of folk music with my acoustic, I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on.

As this issue of Tape Wounds focuses on women artists in shoegaze, what advice would you give to younger girls who want to start making heavy guitar music but might feel intimidated by the scene?

I get it, it’s a male-dominated space. This year was the first year that a woman headlined Download (not shoegaze, but still), which is crazy. Upbringings are still gendered, and girls (and boys) are pushed towards certain instruments, genres, and technologies. I might be wrong, but I feel like, still, when music comes into children’s consciousness, electric guitars, effects, and pedals still seem to be pushed towards boys—not because of an overtly sexist agenda, but because there’s this latent idea among too many that boys like computers and girls like pretty sounds.

I’ve been making music since secondary school, but I was doing opera, musical theater, and a cappella, and then I found a classical guitar during a year abroad in Spain. Even then, all my teachers were guys (we don’t have time to get into sexism in Spain). I didn’t know anything about guitars. I once came home after a weekend away and my guitar wasn’t tuned, and I genuinely thought someone had broken in because I didn’t know that strings don’t stay in tune. So I had no idea about pedals or electric guitars or how different amps can have effects, etc. I was playing guitar as a support for singing; it wasn’t the focus of my music at all.

I was daunted coming into the band. I’d just moved to London and was desperate to start playing in a group. I liked shoegaze pop like Alvvays and The Marías, but I didn’t know how to emulate that sound. So, I just came to a rehearsal singing, not playing guitar at all initially, because I only knew my way around an acoustic. Three years on, I’ve learned so much being in this band. My playing has improved, and I think about the guitar as a tool—sometimes like a synth—now. And it’s because I’ve only come across guys in this genre who are simply obsessed with it and the different things you can do with sound.

I have to be honest and say that without one of our guitarists, Nick, there is no way I’d be playing guitar in this band now. He loaned me a guitar and a bunch of pedals, and spent countless hours jamming with me and showing me pedals, but never in an annoying or condescending way—he was just excited to share. The band, in general, has been so open and inviting, to the point where we even turned one of my folk songs, "Heroine," into a shoegaze song, which never would’ve happened in a band that was singularly focused on a specific sound. No one since joining the band, whether bandmates, other artists, or folks in the crowd, has ever been condescending or given the impression that I couldn’t try anything I wanted. I think this is one of the most experimental genres you can work in right now, and that means that everyone here wants to make music with people from all kinds of backgrounds and see where we can go in it.

This is a long answer, and I could talk forever about sexism in the music industry and the world at large, so here is my actual advice if I were talking to someone who wasn’t a cis guy and felt intimidated to enter the scene: You are so talented, and there is nothing you can’t do. Everyone here is so excited to meet you and can’t wait to hear from you.