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The band talk us through the backstory of their beautiful debut EP ahead of its release later this week. |
Photos: Kath Wildman [Unless stated] | Words: Marty Hill
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Over the first five days of 2025, Sam, Olly and Jack rented an Airbnb in rural Yorkshire. They cleared the living room, put a drumkit in the middle, made a makeshift vocal booth out of a curtain draped over a chair and recorded what would become ‘Ruling Overturned by the Committee of Sleep’, their band’s debut EP. |
It was the second time the three childhood friends from the North East had organised a trip like this. |
“The first one was fun,” says Jack, “the second one was not fun. It was worth it though, we got five and a bit songs out of it.” |
Olly adds, “It was intense. The songs in the first one were a bit silly. I didn’t have the sense that I really wanted to nail something, I think there was a sense this time that it could be something worthwhile”. The intensity isn’t something that Sam particularly recalls: “I just remember making really nice food and spending a lot of time in the kitchen” he laughs. |
At the end of the trip, Sam suggested that they put out an ad for a bass player in order to be able to play these songs live. “He was like ‘I actually think these are kind of good, I wouldn’t mind people hearing these songs’” Olly says. Despite having recorded the nylon guitar that each of the songs are built around on an £8 contact mic which kept falling off, there was an agreement that these songs should see the light of day. After sending over an audition tape of her singing and playing some Pixies songs, Jenny was brought on board and the Committee of Sleep evolved into a band. |
When Olly had begun writing songs a couple of years earlier, it was a completely insular and deeply personal exercise. It wasn’t clear how far any of the first songs he penned would ever be able to go. “When I was 22, I had a cancer diagnosis. I was playing bass in a band at the time but I’d never written a song that had my words to it. So the thinking was ‘Oh shit, the time to be self-conscious has passed. If I’m going to die, just try to get one out’. There’s a video of me playing with no hair and my voice is even shakier than it is now.” |
The songs that make up the EP are only the second batch of songs that he had ever written. They’re incredibly vulnerable, written over the first year in remission whilst “putting life back together where old patterns lost their grip.” On ‘Space Time’ in particular, the themes of mortality and illness are laid as bare as possible, but there’s a sense of reckoning with these things across the record. “I think Olly’s songwriting is really interesting,” says Sam. “People might not know specifically where he’s coming from, but they can have their own interpretation.” “I try to be emotionally direct if not completely personal with the lyrics, you know” adds Olly. |
Sonically, everything justifies its place on the record. It has a fondness for effects-toying and makeshift studio smarts, but there’s a band policy that there has to be a convincing pop song at the heart of it all. “Our songs follow a very typical pop structure. Very infrequently is there more than three or four songs in any of them’” laughs Sam. “It’s never going to be like ‘did you hear that reverse reverb effect they’ve got on the snare?’, you know?” adds Olly. “I love that shit, but there has to be the essence of a song there from its inception.” |
The result is a collection of beautiful, tender lo-fi pop songs that are tastefully indebted to Elliot Smith, Guided by Voices and Duster. Warm and deeply melodic, the wider instrumentation swells around the rich nylon guitar and knowingly fragile vocals. The fact that they recorded everything themselves with the cheapest equipment that they could get is evident not in any amateurish quality but in the resourcefulness of the compositions. Everything has its purpose. Nothing is tacked on. You can almost hear these deeply personal songs being built upon delicately over time. It’s one of the most compelling introductions to a new band you’ll hear all year. |
With the EP on its way imminently and a busy live calendar either side of it, you get the sense that it’s just dawning on the four of them that this is now a “proper” band. They’re split over a few different areas of the north but, aside from not being able to have a beer after a show with everyone driving off in different directions (“a fucking nightmare” – Jack), they haven’t found that to be too much of a hindrance. “I think we’re a lot more intentional with our time because we’re further away. Anyway, Olly and I really enjoy roadtrips” explains Jenny. “When you’re in the same city or whatever, there’s not really a great sense of agency about the time you’re spending together,” adds Olly. |
They can also reasonably describe themselves as a Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle band depending on who they’re talking to, which could come in handy. “We’ve got imposter syndrome in a few different places” says Jack. “I think we’re on the periphery of both the Leeds and Manchester scene. I’d like to think we can break into one of them, or both.” |
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if people want to call Committee of Sleep a Manchester band or a Leeds band or anything else. Until the tail end of their last recording session, they didn’t even call themselves a band. It’s kind of fitting that they can’t be succinctly placed geographically. Not only could their sonic makeup put them anywhere from nineties Glasgow to early noughties New York, their songs have shifted so intensely in their emotional setting. The songs on the EP were written in the haze of the most difficult time of somebody’s life, now they’re becoming a social vehicle for his closest friends. “We’ve been mates for like twenty years but we don’t get to see each other that often”, says Sam. “It’s just really nice getting to spend time together.” |
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