Mark McGuinness
Pillow Queens are reaching new heights by going to great depths
Ahead of the release of their new album, Name Your Sorrow, Sarah Gill sat down with Pillow Queens to chat about vulnerability, catharsis, and the strength that comes from sitting in your sadness and naming your sorrow.
“Delighted.” “That’s the aim!” “Class.”
That’s how Sarah Corcoran, Cathy McGuinness, and Pamela Connolly respectively respond when I divulged just how much their new album, Name Your Sorrow, made me bawl. In my room, on the bus, walking down the street — tears sprang up and out unexpectedly and with embarrassing velocity. And that, it seems, was precisely the desired reaction.
All good art is evocative and affecting, that’s why we resonate and interact with it. It reaches deep down into our murky depths and pulls at our heartstrings, striking a chord, and leaving us feeling understood, cleansed, different.
The landscape of heartbreak is a well explored territory, but when you’re in the throes of it, loneliness abounds. That’s the thread that Pillow Queens pull loose and unravel with this album. They lay love and loss under the microscope and examine all the messy complexities contained within. Desire, longing, insecurity, self-worth, pettiness, reprieve, anger, fear, and hope. It’s all present and accounted for across the 12 tracks of Name Your Sorrow.
“We’re not obscuring the subject matter of this album,” Pamela tells me over a table of pints (Bulmers for her, Guinness for the rest of us). “Regardless of the type of person who’s listening, where they come from, what stage of life they’re at — they’re going to have experienced those big feelings of heartbreak and vulnerability.”
Stripping away symbolism and metaphor, the lyrics of these songs are explicit in their emotional bluntness. They ricochet around the phases of grief, and yield a wisdom only attained by marinating in the melancholy and madness of that hurt. The four piece do this not just lyrically, but sonically too, getting at what cannot be said, only felt, with erupting guitars, walls of noise, soft melodies, and spine tingling harmonies.
“It’s a subject that we all have a different perspective on, and it feels like it’s all knit together in one communal sad story,” Cathy says. “It was cathartic and turbulent and such an interesting journey for us all to go on together. It’s a privilege to be able to soundtrack your own feelings, and to do it with three of the people that you relate most to in the world is just a bizarre, incredible experience.”
Breaking out of the city for a sojourn in the Burren, the band settled into a tacit rhythm that they say were some of the most communal writing sessions they’ve had so far. “We had to break through the rawness and embarrassment quickly, and just say how we felt,” Sarah says. “When you’re cut off from everything like that, where it feels like you’re the only people for miles around, it makes you think of things in a different way. You can tap into that vulnerability in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling pretentious.”
Following up from their first album, In Waiting, and their sophomore record, Leave the Light On, endeavouring to put out three albums in three years might come with some degree of pressure, but through a self-imposed 9-5 routine and a resolve to only put out music on their terms, they settled into what Cathy describes as the most fluid and honest creative process they’ve shared.
Working with Nashville-based producer Colin Pastor — who has worked with the likes of Lucy Dacus and boygenius — on a three week recording session at female-owned Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry allowed Pillow Queens to take a more experimental approach, plucking at grand pianos and picking up harmonicas to create more layers of sound than ever before. Of working with Colin, Cathy says he “managed to capture exactly what we wanted to capture, and made it bigger and better.”
Record completed, the band began musing on potential titles, which is when the poem ‘Atlantis’ by Eavan Boland came to their attention, and it was like everything just thematically fell into place. “It goes beyond the 12 tracks,” Sarah explains. “It encapsulates the context that the album was written in. The backdrop it was written against. A city that’s losing its vibrancy, the idea of sweeping things under the rug, even if they’re not in the songs themselves, they were in us when we were writing them.”
“The old fable-makers searched hard for a word/to convey that which is gone is gone forever and/never found it,” the poem reads. “And so, in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.”
“It was like Eavan Boland explained our own record to us a little bit,” Cathy admits.
Elsewhere, sonic influences defy genre on the PQ playlist, drawing from the music of ABBA, Barbra Streisand, Fleetwood Mac, TOOL, Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie, Saint Vincent, Mariah Carey, and Lana Del Rey in the making of the album. “The playlist we have has absolutely no throughline,” Pamela says of the mishmash of reference points. “But there’s something about the apathy and sultry sadness of Lana Del Rey’s music that we really wanted to capture and put into our record.”
The first song released off the album was ‘Suffer’, a track that captures the melancholic, dull ache of a relationship unraveling, unpicks the turbulent struggle to let go. Elsewhere, ‘Like A Lesson’ explores a longing for intimacy and the insecurities that are part and parcel of sharing yourself with someone new.
Speaking on ‘Gone’, a song that showcases a vulnerability that allows for no silver linings, Pamela says it’s “not trying to push a narrative of ‘everything is going to get better’. A lot of the album is not trying to make heartbreak look nice, because a lot of sadness and grief and healing is not nice to look at. There are slivers of light, but it can also be bleak, so sit in that, feel it, and express it in some way.”
“The only way to heal from these things is to experience them and sit in the sadness,” Sarah says. “I’m all for getting over things, but sometimes life is hard and sh*t happens and you just have to be sad for a while.”
Cathy boils it down: “The early stages of grief are like angry outbursts. It’s angsty and it can be immature and unreasonable, but that’s also valid.”
‘Notes on Worth’ closes the record out with a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel with the lyrics “I don’t wanna go home alone this weekend/I think I’m worth the time/I’m worth the time.” This empowering endnote speaks to the band’s careful curation of the listening experience. “We wanted this record to be a journey through the stages of a breakup, traveling through those moments of reprieve and turbulence, with that breath of fresh air at the end to be the new day after the storm.,” Cathy says.
“Side A and Side B are like different projects,” Sarah explains. “We wanted people to feel a certain type of way when they get up to flip the record, and feel new once they start listening to the second side.”
With their previous album, the band wanted Leave the Light On to encourage duality, so I wonder what they want Name Your Sorrow to muster up in their listeners?
For Cathy, it’s experiencing the album as a fully realised journey, and listening to it from start to finish. “I would love for people to really connect with it and connect with themselves.” This sentiment is echoed by Sarah: “I hope people put themselves in the first person and be the main character of the album. To experience the record as themselves. We wrote it for a certain reason, but I would love for people to have that themselves, regardless of our own personal intent. Enjoy the catharsis that’s there to be enjoyed.”
For Pamela, it’s all about that raw, emotional response: “I hope people can pick up on and appreciate what we’re trying to do sonically. The drums and the harmonies and all these things that, for me, make the album. I want people to listen to it and get a huge emotional response.”
Since their inception in 2016, Pillow Queens broke onto the global stage with a flourish. Touring across the UK, US, and Europe, supporting some of their own musical heroes including Phoebe Bridgers and Pavement, appearing on the Late Late Show with James Corden, being called ‘life affirming’ by NME — the accolades are endless, and their star is absolutely still on the rise.
Name Your Sorrow exists where audacious vulnerability and powerful, polished craftsmanship meet, and though it may be early doors, it sounds a lot like Irish Album of the Year to me. With their biggest headline show to date taking place at the Iveagh Gardens on 13 July, a string of UK dates rapidly selling out this June, and whispers of international festival slots in the pipeline for summer, Pillow Queens are without a doubt one of Ireland’s best musical exports.
Irish acts Pillow Queens are listening to lately…
Words of wisdom…
“Keep your peers around you and surround yourself with people who understand what it’s like to be in the music industry. Success in this space doesn’t look the same as success in any other industry. There’s a lack of understanding, because these ‘impressive’ feats don’t necessarily translate into monetary rewards.”
‘Name Your Sorrow’ is out now.
Photography by Mark McGuinness and Martyna Bannister.
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