LICE: A Journey Through Third Time At The Beach

LICE, the Bristol-based experimental rock quartet, have steadily carved out a reputation as one of the UK's most inventive and daring acts. Following their acclaimed debut WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear, the band returns with their ambitious second album, Third Time At The Beach, a three-part epic exploring the human struggle to make sense of the world. Combining elements of minimalism, rock, techno, and more, the album transports listeners across time and space, weaving together stories of astronauts, cavemen, and dinosaurs in its vast sonic journey.

In this interview, we'll delve into LICE's creative process, the themes behind Third Time At The Beach, and how they’ve continued to push the boundaries of avant-garde rock.

1. Your upcoming album, "Third Time At The Beach," is described as a three-part epic exploring the struggle to better understand the world around us. Can you elaborate on how you conceptualized this ambitious narrative and what inspired the division into three distinct movements?

Our first album WASTELAND explored our own identity as a nominal punk band, and what we thought about the genre itself: questioning how ideas about the world were formed, lived in the music, and how that music then lived in the world. Around the time we finished it, Silas started reading more philosophy, introducing me to ideas about language, economics and reification. We wanted to broaden our scope with an album that dealt with all that stuff: how we make sense of the world, and the paths we take through it. The three-part structure presents the child being hammered into shape as they grow up, setting out to develop their understanding of themselves by unsettling their most basic conceptions, then finally achieving an improved grasp of themselves and the world around them. That structure borrows ideas from ‘the hero’s journey’: a common template for storytelling comprising a ’separation’ (hero sets out on a journey), ‘initiation’ (trials faced in a supernatural world), and ‘return’.

2. Lyrically, "Third Time At The Beach" employs a scattershot style and takes listeners through various historical and fantastical settings. How do these diverse elements and characters, such as astronauts, cavemen, and Napoleon, contribute to the album's overall message?

The lyrics jump around in time and space, pulling in lots of different historical figures, events and texts. The reason is that, for me at least, that’s how explaining stuff works – you refer to different things and places you’ve picked up and stored in your memory. It also helps express how certain ideas develop over large periods of time: ‘Mown In Circles’ gives a condensed history of language and misinformation, with its references to theology, astronomy and the media. It’s all a mess, but I think that helps to build a realistic sense of how people actually learn and explain things.

3. "Red Fibres," the lead single from your new album, addresses the frustration of reaching adulthood with a limited understanding of the world. Can you discuss the significance of the historical references within the song, and what message you hope listeners take away from it?

The opening section is about how eyes evolved, leading up to the development of complex eyes in trilobites – which enabled them to become successful predators. Then we leap ahead to human beings starting to record their experience with the Stele Of The Vultures – a 4,000 year-old tablet presenting a battle in Mesopotamia. Already you can see how the history of trying to understand and communicate things is bound up in violence and competition. This song is about a battle between the curious mind and the rigid mind which has been hammered into shape by the geometry of society. So we have a few battles in this song. There’s the fight between two shipwreck survivors, modelled on Arghol and Hanp in Wyndham Lewis’ Enemy Of The Stars. There’s the bullfighter Conchita Cintron facing off with a bull during her final fight. There’s the invasion of Corsica, seen from the perspective of Napoleon’s parents. It all ends with shipwreck survivor 1 (the curious mind) killing shipwreck survivor 2 (the rigid mind) and setting out to map the strange place they’ve landed on – setting up the exploration that takes up the second act of the album. A snake bites 1, but drops to the ground leaving 1 unharmed. This is modelled off the Biblical story of St Paul arriving on the island of Malta, where he is suspected by locals of murder untila snake fails to kill him – leading locals to believe he is a higher entity. In a line, it all means:

“I’ve reached adulthood with a narrow view of the world but I’m going to try and learn more about it now, even though it’ll be tough because I’m having to unlearn some pretty hard-wired ideas about it all.”

4. Your debut album, "WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear," received critical acclaim for its inventive approach to avant-rock. How has your musical and lyrical evolution from that album to "Third Time At The Beach" shaped your current sound and thematic focus?

When we finished WASTELAND, we felt we’d slayed the dragon of writing a compelling experimental rock record with lyrics that worked as a standalone piece. That liberated us to basically start over with Third Time At The Beach, and – especially given that Nat had properly joined LICE by then – it felt like a new band. We became a lot freer in the stuff we added, and the ideas we tried. While WASTELAND was recorded in two short trips to a studio, Third Time At The Beach was recorded over many years in lots of different places: bedrooms, places we stayed on tour, London’s 100 Club and the basement under Bristol’s Louisiana. Thematically though, Third Time At The Beach builds on what WASTELAND was trying to do: they’re both albums about asking questions, but while WASTELAND asked questions about music, Third Time At The Beach asks questions about everything.

5.LICE's music is known for its genre-blending and experimental nature. In "Third Time At The Beach," you shift from piano balladry to industrial, and from avant-garde compositions to rock freakouts. How do you approach the creative process to ensure these transitions feel cohesive and maintain the album's narrative flow?

We went in with a pretty good idea of the story the album would tell through those three parts, so we could write around that, but it relies a lot on this collage style. It pieces together sounds and recordings from different genres and physical environments – the robotic vocals on ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’ were recorded in my bedroom at 3AM, while the creak on ‘White Tubes’ is from a door in a French farmhouse where we set up an impromptu studio to demo some stuff between shows. I think that disjointed sound contributes to that sense of ideas being gradually formed, and the story being told. As for moving between the parts, it became obvious as we went – the first part’s all about something soft (the piano in Unscrewed) being hammered into shape (the industrial sounds of White Tubes and heavy rock of Red Fibres), then you’ve got the eery, surreal tenor of the second act, and the third is more celebratory. Making this album often felt like building a spaceship – we make everything extremely complicated forourselves – but every now and then the right path was clear.