We caught up with Little May’s Hannah Field ahead of their show tonight at Oxford Art Factory.

It’s been a while between drinks for indie-rock outfit Little May, and though it may be somewhat inordinate to call 2019 a “comeback year”, fans of the duo will undoubtedly be relishing in their first new releases since 2015. Their latest singles – the 90’s-flavoured ‘Lover’ and ‘Apples’ – show a different side to Little May that may have caught listeners who have been spinning their folk-based debut, For The Company, off guard.

A couple of listens and it’s easy to acclimatise to the more direct, more polished version of the band. Their knack for delivering enticing harmonies and hooky melodies remains intact, if not strengthened, and we couldn’t be more excited to see how far they’ve pushed themselves in creating forthcoming album Blame My Body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcMVUrr4bmE

We had a quick chat with vocalist Hannah Field when she was in town for her OAF show (remaining tickets here) about the new songs, new direction, and revamped approach to writing. Check it out below and head here to pre-order your copy of Blame My Body:

From what we’ve heard on ‘Lover’ and ‘Apples’, ‘Blame My Body’ is a step up in terms of crispiness in production and sound from ‘For The Company’. Was this a natural progression for you?

Yeah totally. For The Company was made that with Aaron Dessner and you can hear a lot of The National in that album. I think because we so green and kind of starstruck we just, we loved that sound and we just went with it. I think now, after Annie [Hamilton] left, Liz and I gave ourselves permission to like be more bold, and Liz was writing the stuff that I think she’d always wanted to write.

Then doing a lot of the pre-production with Rob [Muinos], you know, he was just like, “this is going to be different”. With his guitar sounds and his production, it really took it to the place we wanted to get to.

How has your approach to writing changed since For The Company?

Yeah, for me I’d always just written really personally and I didn’t really know how to write in any other way. But we just gave ourselves permission to push outside of our comfort zone. And I think that just comes with gaining a little bit of confidence and backing yourself instead of like trying to live up to other people’s expectation of what you should be writing about.

I think when you release a song like ‘Boardwalks’ and it does well and people really love it It’s kind of like we can either keep doing that and keep our fans or we kind of just be really honest with ourselves. I mean in the music industry that’s kind of what you should be doing. So yeah, that’s what we did.

Can you tell us what ‘Apples’ is about?

Liz wrote Apples and I think she was a little bit lost at the time and was questioning whether making music was like going to ever be sustainable for her and for anyone attempting to make a living from music. Because I think a lot of the time it feels like everybody else is getting your money.

The ‘Apples’ clip has a real 90’s vibe and looked like a lot of fun. What was the inspiration/concept behind it?

Liz came up with the concepts with Nathan who works for Stupid Genius, and it was more just about having fun because our video clips that we’ve made in the past have all be really serious and depressing. Like one of them was about a dead dog and like the dead dog got blown up in fireworks. I think we just wanted to steer away from that especially with ‘Apples’ because it is one of the songs that is a little bit more like light, on the lighter end of the scale.

But Liz and I were like a little bit hungover because we’d been having a couple of drinks with my parents and because they get really excited when we come to town. So we were just a little bit more loose and had fun and weren’t really thinking about you know, how our faces looked and stuff like that which was nice and freeing.

I know you’ve been rehearsing all day, what can fans expect to see/hear at Little May shows on this tour? Are you going to be playing much of Blame My Body?

Yeah, majority new stuff. The band has changed so much with Annie leaving and then Rob coming in, and we just love playing the new stuff so much more than the old. I think it’s just more enjoyable probably for the audience as well because there’s a lot more kick to it. So yeah, some old songs, a couple of oldies in there. But majority new stuff. I think we just want to test it out and see how people feel about it and it’s a lot more fun to play live. I think it cuts through. So fingers crossed it all goes to plan.