lots of hands: three tracks welded into one in a day

lots of hands have been in a proper studio and come out sounding like themselves, only louder and better lit. "anything for now" is two minutes thirty-seven of Newcastle awkwardness with the levels pushed up, and the tidying suits them.

Billy Woodhouse and Elliot Dryden have been putting out records since 2018, small and mostly self-made, until "mistake" from 2020 found an audience on TikTok that nobody had planned for. The debut for their label, into a pretty room, landed early last year and carried the duo further than the bedroom setup suggested it could. This is the first new music since.

Mike O'Malley, a founding member of caroline, chose the song off a long list of what he called "really beautiful songs". He built it with the pair from nothing at Park Chapel Studios in North London in a single day, with an engineer called Joe, in a live room O'Malley likes for how it sounds. Woodhouse says the song has been through about four stages and began as three separate tracks he and Dryden worked on alone before joining them up. Dryden then waited all day and cut every vocal layer at the end of the night, one take each.

Most of the change is in the production. Where earlier lots of hands records sounded like the door was shut, this one has air in it, O'Malley's studio work sitting on top of the duo's rough edges rather than sanding them off. The voice arrives in layers, each done in a single pass, so nothing stacks quite squarely, and the join between Woodhouse's three original pieces is still audible if you listen for it. That join is the best thing in the song.

It is for people who stayed with caroline through the long quiet stretches, or who took My New Band Believe home and played the odd one twice. Anyone who wants a chorus to land on the second listen will find this thin. Anyone who likes a song that behaves like a fragment, thrown further than it was thrown before, will play it four times in a row.

What does not work is the runtime. Three separate ideas get one pass each and then the thing stops, and the final section is gone before it has finished making its case. It reads as a note towards something larger.

At 3.5 this is a good record and an honest one. The cleaning up has cost the duo some of the mess that made "mistake" travel so far, and bought them a song with room around it. That is a trade worth making once.

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