When IDER found themselves sleeping in a church in Barry, they knew this album would be different. The duo of Lily Somerville and Megan Markwick wound up in the Welsh seaside town after a chat with producer Dann Hume established they were on the same page: keen to swerve the breakneck pace of the music industry and immerse themselves in big projects. Hume had recently converted the building into a studio and invited the duo to visit towards the end of 2022. “We’d only met for half an hour over coffee, but we got our stuff together, drove five hours to a church and spent five days writing,” Somerville reflects, chuckling. Though they weren’t in “album mode” at the time, the trip would prove serendipitous. “The first songs came very instinctively,” adds Markwick. “I remember feeling: this is really speaking to what we want to say right now.”
