DJ Paul Richards

caroline’s founding members Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn and Mike O’Malley first started playing together in 2017. Llewellyn and Hughes met at university in Manchester, and on moving to London invited Llewellyn’s old friend Mike O’Malley to form a group, rehearsing in the upstairs room of a South London pub. Yet as they kept on playing what was to become the hypnotic riff of album opener ‘Dark blue’, it became clear that something altogether deeper was emerging. “As soon as ‘Dark blue’ became more structured, we thought some swoony violin would be good,” says O’Malley. To provide it, they recruited Oliver Hamilton, who had also had a stint on bass in their early days.

As the band’s sound kept expanding, so too did their line-up, eventually becoming an eight-piece completed by trumpeter and bassist Freddy Wordsworth, another violinist Magdalena McLean, percussionist Hugh Aynsley and flute, clarinet and saxophone player Alex McKenzie. By the time the cast settled towards the end of 2019, the songs too were expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and O’Malley and Llewellyn’s roots in Appalachian folk.