With the band's sophomore album
Beach Day, that feeling opens a doorway to the most confident, fully formed and forthright version of Another Sky so far.
Frontwoman Catrin Vincent points out the relationship between anger and freedom on this record:
"If you don't move through anger, it'll calcify into bitterness, and it's not worth it," she says, "but it's about having the freedom to find and feel that anger. How can you move through something you don't even know is there?".
The album gave Vincent the opportunity to go
more personal than ever –
Another Sky has always supported and valued their front-woman's vulnerability, but here it's at its rawest.
"Wait, why did I do this? Wait, why did I do this in the first place?" Vincent sings in the propulsive, almost euphoric climax of Death of the Author, one of many tracks on the album wrestling with a lack of control and surrender to the circumstances that great wreckage leave you with, whether you like it or not. The least you can do is make something of the rubble.
That rubble was rebuilt in the crypt of a church for Another Sky: the Covid years saw the band's former studio flooded, as well as the painful consequences of a personal betrayal for all the band members ("all I had to do was be a good view as I fell from the sky you built for me," Vincent spits on the explosive and impossibly direct lead single Psychopath).
Both huge blows razed what you could perhaps call the first version of Another Sky to the ground. They needed a new space, and a new perspective, so they called out to their friends to help.
"Does anyone know of any community spaces?", they asked, and a Vicar, an avid Idles fan desperate to help some musicians, answered.
They built the crypt-based studio from scratch, with help from guitarist Jack Gilbert's builder Dad, where Gilbert produced much of the album himself – costing less and giving the band infinitely more freedom to take back control of their own narrative.
The anger and the fight is real, and it's everything – but that doesn't mean it always will be.