February 18th, 2018. Hayden Thorpe awakes in a London hotel room as a newly-single man. Wild Beasts, the band he'd been part of since he was a teenager, played their final show the night before, and with the future stretching out before him, his next steps are unprecedented, left to the will of the Gods.
"The only sensation I can compare it to is the day after the last day of school, where you know there is no going back," he recalls. "I've always felt a little allergic to nostalgia, and I was very reluctant to do a victory lap, in all honesty. In the end, there was a feeling of such responsibility to turn up and do justice to all the work we'd done over the years, a tribute to the love and respect we had between us as men and as brothers, as fellow dreamers. We just woke up from the dream. The way you wake up kind of defines your day, so we took care to make sure we all woke up in our adulthood in as peaceful a way as we could. I left the hotel room as quickly as I could, and it wasn't until I got back to my own house that I realised I'd left my favourite coat behind. I had to decide if I was going to go back to that room to get the coat, to go back to that place. I decided not to – I decided that that coat was something that the me before wore, and that felt kind of symbolic."
The experience of donning a new coat wasn't one that came completely naturally. Having been part of one the UK's most critically championed acts, the desire to enter another musical orbit was one that had to be well timed. "I didn't really want any of the past to contaminate the future." He explains. "They were very distinct waters, and I was very aware of not having my new work, whatever it was, feel like an extension or a satellite of the world I had created before. The worst thing I could have done was to make the Wild Beasts album that never was."
