OCTOBERLAND is our fourth album, but in many ways it's the first one on which we're truly the band that The Armoires were always meant to be. For the first time in our ten-year history, the two of us sat down and wrote all the songs at once, together. It was a true joy and a revelation to do so: the more we worked, the more the songs started to “talk to” and inform each other. Imagery and themes crossed from one to another, and the process quickly turned into something that felt more like “world-building” than songwriting. That said, we were having so much fun that it was easy to keep the upper level of the songs open and inviting – we were feeling pretty confident about doing silly, almost novelty or kids' song things like counting, spelling words out, chanting, nonsense choruses built out into huge harmonies on the surface of things, because it was fun for us, and we knew that underneath that were some weighty, spooky things fueled by cultural anxiety, and expressed as “omens” in the songs. There's a tangled and intricate web of literary, mythological, folkloric and modern-media references describing the landscape of the world we're traversing here, and there were some difficult things to get past on the way to our destination, and the giddy surface details leavened that a bit. So maybe this is sort of like The B-52s doing Leonard Cohen songs, in a way, but that kept an ember of hope aglow no matter how dark things got.
About that destination: “Octoberland” is of course a totally made up place, one we dreamt up midway through the writing process in, naturally, October of 2022. The creative energy was good and we instinctively felt that we needed a name for the semi-utopia where creative, collaborative magic could happen. Likely it came from our love for Autumn, and Halloween being the one time of the year when the populace is given leave to pursue creativity without being questioned (not to mention the “veil between the worlds” being legendarily thin). We relate it to the “artistocracy” mentioned in “Ridley & Me”. We don't harbor the illusion that artists would make a great ruling class, but a mixture of empathy and communication necessary for artistic collaboration is at the root of any band or creative community, and that did feel like a balm or a bulwark against what we saw as a real plague of self-interest in our wider culture. We were briefly revelling in it and dreaming of a place where it could be a permanent state – not one that closes its eyes to the very real problems of the world, but one that views them through a more thoughtful and caring lens. So we put a name to that place, and our album.
One more thing: these are what we call “we” songs. Writing exclusively for this band for the first time, we realised that one of the one of the most potent arrows in our quiver was the fact that we sing together almost all the time. That has an intrinsically inviting effect, but it's also a little disarming and eerie, and we decided to use every bit of that to erase singular perspectives for this whole record. As a record or a “narrative,” it's a love letter to collaboration and a statement against toxic self-involvement... so we're using what we happen to be good at to create a little form-mirrors-substance magic, even if it's only ever going to be noticed on a subconscious level. We know it's there, and it means the world to us.
1. WE ABSOLUTELY MEAN IT
Writing a “theme song” for your band is a brazen move – “Hey hey, we're the Monkees,” “Are we not men? We are Devo” and all of that – and we planned to make grand gestures on this records, so why not? As a single, it was our ten-year-anniversary manifesto and mission statement – “this is not a single point of view, this is a collective” – and it nicely mixed tongue-in-cheek absurdity with total sincerity. As the opening track to the album, it serves a different purpose: we're introducing ourselves as the Greek chorus who's going to be narrating the travels to come. We're going to be swimming in some mythical waters, so we'll start by mythologizing ourselves, and establishing that “we song” template. This is where we go big indeed.
2. THIS ONE'S FOR THE SWEDES
And right away, we pivot from mythologizing ourselves as a band to making a legend of our Big Stir Records labelmates and 2020 tourmates In Deed, who hail from Uppsala, Sweden and inspired this song. The semi-shoegaze sound is nod to some of their superb work, and the surreal imagery is equal parts borrowed from their own lyrics or drawn from our adventures on the road together. Here we start to tap our primary themes, that communal and creative experiences are vital saving graces in the modern world. It's something we profoundly felt while sharing stages with In Deed across California. In San Diego at the last show of the tour, watching our friends create a sound that truly did feel like they were levitating off the stage, we looked at each other and agreed that this was the greatest thing that ever happened in life: departing from reality to create something new and beautiful in the company of friends who share the same goal, however absurd it may be. It was a feeling we tried to capture in this song, and across this whole record.
3. RIDLEY & ME AFTER THE APOCALYPSE
A very different kind of road trip. This one finds us digging deep at the underlying narrative tropes that shape genre fiction, among other things. The “Ridley” of the title is Rex's daughter Ridley, who's responsible for neo-Art Nouveau graphic design aesthetic of Octoberland and its related singles. A keen student of world-building and story structure in modern fantasy and SF media (“Training montage! Transformation sequence! Magical system! Character development, character design!”) and its roots in older mythology, lit and folklore, Ridley's mind is constantly humming with analyses of whatever animated series, videogame or novel she's engaging with, and her conversations with her dad provide, often verbatim, many of the key phrases in this song. The conceit here is that these conversations are occurring within – and ultimately shaping – a post-apocalyptic narrative for the characters themselves. Towards the end, one of the key adventure tropes – “found family” – manifests itself in a way that's a part of our record's themes: communal creativity as a saving grace in a hostile world of self-interest. In this story we call it “the Artistocracy”, and it's to be understood as the ruling principle of Octoberland as a place. If you get the references, this song is really funny, but somehow it's one of the ones that makes us misty-eyed the most often. Maybe it's the fleeting fantasy that the beautiful freaks might win on their own terms?
4. OUROBOROS BLUES (CROW WHISPERER)
After running hard through the first three numbers, this is where we step back and take stock of where we've already been and where we're heading. It's also where we start getting really explicit about the key problem we're trying to address on this collection: rampant self-involvement, especially in the realm of “what used to be civil discourse”, something for which the Ouroboros (the iconic snake-swallowing-its-own-tail) has long served as an apt metaphor. Things pivot from the “modern” narrative tropes of “Ridley & Me” to some pretty ancient ones here: there's a bit of Shakespeare and a lot of folkloric stuff, the first of many uses of the word “omen” and the crow, cat and snake avatars that will be back again and again, and to be blunt, this is where we start to get genuinely witchy (and there's no coming back from that). It makes sense that this would be one of the songs where we use a more “traditional” song structure than usual – it's a refrain rather than a chorus, in the 12-bar blues style – and the fadeout is a tipoff that, like the Ouroboros, the song just continues in a circular fashion forever, somewhere out there in the ether.
5. GREEN HELLFIRE AT THE 7-11
On which the stakes become clear and “which side are you on, Armoires” becomes a question that no longer needs answering. There are enough details in this one to tell its own tale; like “Ridley & Me”, this is a parent-child dialogue about troubled times, but the roles are reversed. The kid's in the process of developing a cultural and political worldview and the parent has been around long enough to have seen some real history, and they're both together at a happening that seems to herald a real and dangerous sea change for the world in which they live – an event frightening enough that they both instinctively flee the scene, and it opens up a cross-generational exchange about just what's going on and what it might all mean for the future. A sort of classic songwriting gambit of taking on the big picture via one small microcosmic event, it's written from the perspective of the younger generation (although like all of these songs it settles into a “we” in the end). We have the utmost respect for Gen Z and dare to hope they'll actually be able to make something of the mess we're handing them. Note that the omens and witchy elements are here to stay.
6. HERE COMES THE SONG
This is a sort of Faustian tale, minus any actual appearance of the devil. We often feel (and we both know and know of many songwriters who say the same thing) that we're not so much “writing” a song as plucking it from some realm where it already exists, just waiting for a conduit into reality. The question here is, what if an artist “channels” a song that has a completely different intent or agenda from what the writer may picture – something perhaps even malevolent, but definitely ineffable, along the lines of any number of iconic songs that are almost universally misconstrued, much to the chagrin of their creators. We're imagining an extreme case of that here. And the witchiness continues, with a third consecutive deployment of the word “omen” (this one a flabbergasting omen of death, no less).
Midway through recording, Larysa (who's as proficient on violin as viola) had the idea that there should be a quartet for one of the songs on the album. The dramatic rise and fall of this song made it the obvious choice. The arrangement was cooked up in stages by producer Michael Simmons, Rex, and Larysa herself, who played every part except the cello. This one still kind of thrills us every time we hear it, and it's hard to remember the zillions of times we listened to this tune without the big strings swelling and falling along with us. Like The Song in the song, that arrangement feels like it's older than the hills.
7. YOU OUGHTA BE CUT IN HALF
The title here is admittedly a low level bait-and-switch, but it tips its hand early on: if you're expecting an angry personal diatribe, you get hit with some positively chipper chamber pop vibes and massive, celebratory slabs of harmonies right out of the gate, and it's only going to get poppier from there. This song is in no way directed at any individual, but even if it were, it's actually well-intentioned advice that gets to the core of this album's themes: “discard the part that's holding you down,” Christina sings in the pre-chorus,and that's what it's all about. The person being addressed is outwardly doing alright, but there are signs that they're struggling personally and know something has to change. The narrators are gently suggesting letting go of the “spiritual gangrene” that's going to take its toll... it's an expression of kindness and concern. (Unless you take the view that they're being judgmental, interfering busybodies, which would make this song into a variation on “Making Plans For Nigel” – and we're okay with a little ambiguity on that front!)
A lot of Armoires songwriting owes a debt to The Go-Betweens and the brilliant, much-missed Grant McLennan, and here we come closer than ever to actually sounding like that band in its five-piece Iineup from the end of their original run – this song is definitely cut from the same cloth as “Bye Bye Pride,” “Love Goes On!” and “Streets Of Your Town”.
8. SICKENING THUD
Deep into witchy territory here – we refer to ourselves as “dryads” for the second time in our lyrical catalog, and the omens and crows are back – this one's a pretty straightforward story-song on the surface. It's probably going to be taken by some as an environmental anthem, and to be clear, we very much support any actions to save this beleaguered planet. But there's a much more visceral thing at the core of the complaint here, which is that we kind of just really love trees... and it hurts us to see them coming down. We're primarily digging at the same thing here as on the rest of the album, though: the toll of indifference and self-involvement that's such a barrier to human connection in the modern world. Here as in the other songs on the album, there are things at work beneath the surface, both in the natural world and in our shared artistic and storytelling traditions, that just might bring us all together better than, like, whatever we as a culture have going on right now. It's a sister song with “Ouroboros Blues” in a way, but that theme is all over the record in one form or another.
Of all the Octoberland songs, this is the only one that changed on any fundamental level from the demo stage to the final track. Quite simply, it got faster: it started out “Gimme Shelter” and wound up “Jumping Jack Flash”, all at the suggestion of our producer Michael Simmons and to its infinite improvement.
9. SNAKE ISLAND THIRTEEN
What started as an outlier song became the lynchpin of the whole album's thematic concerns. At the outbreak of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we felt compelled to do something artistically to support the Ukrainian people (the whole Bulbenko family being of Ukrainian descent and Christina in particular being a first-generation kid who grew up with Ukrainian as her first language). It was meant to be an immediate, standalone single response, sung in Ukrainian – something few American bands could bring to the table. We were deeply moved by the widely-reported story of the soldiers defending the Ukrainian outpost on Snake Island in the Black Sea when they were threatened by a Russian warship: their brave response against overwhelming odds of “go f*** yourself, Russian warship” had become a viral rallying cry for the defense effort. The music and a loose English draft of the lyrics, essentially imagery and “story beats”, were crafted and the basic tracks recorded in March of 2022, and then it was set aside.
When we started writing the proper album, we weren't sure this song would fit, but we discovered to our surprise that what we'd written was almost entirely in line with the concerns of the rest of the record. We'd read up on the history of Snake Island itself, and its strange ties to Greek mythology (it really is said to be last resting place of Achilles and haunted by his ghost), and we found everything we'd been exploring in the other songs, from snake and bird imagery to mythical underpinnings, was right there. There was an untethered-in-time feeling where Homerian situations intertwined with a modern tragedy that reached the world through the most modern of means (“wireless streams and endless memes”) and the sudden literalization of our role as the “Greek chorus” narrating the journey. The song suddenly felt both worthy of its subject matter and like the height of the album's dramatic arc. We would likely have included it for emotional reasons even if it hadn't come together like this, but it's endlessly gratifying that it did, and we hope it serves as reminder of the ongoing atrocity in Christina's family homeland.
10. IT'S A GOOD TIME TO COME BACK DOWN FROM THE COLD
The denouement and in many ways the summation of Octoberland's intentions, “It's A Good Time To Come Back Down From The Cold” existed for quite a few years as a simple chord sequence and refrain – a phrase that came to Rex in a dream replete with the seemingly out-of-place “down” where “in” would normally go, a small tweak that just felt right. The lyrics finally clicked into place when we realized that a true story Christina just happened to be telling was also a rich framework for a song. By then we had the big picture of the record's themes and recurring imagery already in hand, and we were able to call back to the previous songs' omens, hellfire, and the armoires and tour vans filled with possibilities. And we directly circle back to the opening song's “this was never about comfort, this was always about risk” – a fundamental tenet of our artistic approach – and amend it: “this might be about comfort in the end”. That's to say that the restless pursuit of new ideas, and the challenge of musical world-building, and the risks themselves ARE a comfort, that they provide meaning in themselves. It's the meaning we'd invested into the idea of “Octoberland” as our destination: not a true utopia devoid of conflict, but a place of thoughtfulness where problems can be considered and resolved without rancor, as they are in the healthiest of creative collaborations. And once again, we're inviting the listener to come along... join us in the caravan.
11. MUSIC & ANIMALS
The last song we wrote and the last song on the record, albeit the first one anyone heard when it was released as a single at the end of 2023, “Music & Animals” fell out of the sky almost fully formed when we were in a very, very happy place with how the record was shaping up. It immediately felt very much a part of the developing “narrative” and told us we had a finished record, track sequence and all. It's a celebration of the two things that have, as Christina often observes, kept us sane in recent years, and we unselfconsciously set out to make it the sweetest, twee-est thing we'd ever recorded (albeit, in typical Armoires style, the kind of “sweet” that still contains lines like “they would burn us as witches if they knew”). It was a joy to create in every way: roll-calling our beloved pets alternating with verbatim quotes about the writing process, and bringing it all home, at last, to our destination of Octoberland. Simmons said to us “Your souls are in this song,” and he's not wrong.
Simmons also thought this song should be earlier in the album sequence, but we felt that too many of the things we were referencing – cats and snakes and crows, omens and world-building, and Octoberland itself – needed to be heard in their original contexts first. This was always the epilogue, the arrival after a fraught journey: “Maybe out of all the myths and omens, we built a place to feel at home in”. The compromise was that this would be the first single, so that when the album arrived it would be a known quantity and a sweet and – yes – comforting treat at the end. It might be our favorite of all our songs to date, and we think it serves its function quite well right where it is.
Essential Information
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