In Conversation: Child Of The Parish

Picking up repeated Radio 1 Future Artist plays for their recent single Always The Fool as well as rapturous fan reception for Swim With The Tide, Child of the Parish are in inspiring form ahead of the September 6th release of their debut album Sweet Surrender. And that continues with the record’s latest single, Local Bragging Rights. We caught up with them to learn a little more.

We are loving your new single, Local Bragging Rights. Tell us about it...

Local Bragging Rights is one of the more guitar-based tracks on the record; musically, it’s a bit of a favourite, as we like how the arrange jumps around with the post-chorus; there’s quite a lot going on. Lyrically, it’s about relationships in a small town—me and Tom actually grew up in London, but I had a lot of friends who had the small town experience growing up, and I’d rewatched the Richard Ayoade film Submarine recently, which I think was an influence.

You are two EPS into your recording career and many singles; what have you learnt over the half decade since you debuted?

Ha, it’s weird to hear half a decade—that’s mainly because there was a break in the middle for COVID, so learning not to have a global pandemic would be handy! I think our music has gotten a little more personal in that time; the new album touches on some lyrical themes and musical inspirations we may not have tackled before. Maybe part of that was writing through lockdown. I’ve read quite a few things from writers that being confronted with the idea their time was finite affected how they wrote. To not waste time obsessing over how commercial their music is, focus on the honesty.

How have your ambitions altered since that debut single?

I’m not sure my ambitions have massively changed since I started playing the guitar at the age of 9—I've always wanted to challenge myself to be the best songwriter I can, be able to entertain the listener, and have enough success that I can carry on doing it.



Does the overwhelming critical acclaim for your upcoming debut album increase the pressure?

I think Johnny Greenwood said once that positive criticism can be as destructive as negative criticism, but that might have been before Twitter turned into X! You shouldn’t really think about outside views of your music, whether they’re good or bad. Rick Rubin said you should never think about the listener either. As soon as you stop writing to make your own ears happy, you’re probably compromising in some way.

The record is called Sweet Surrender. Tell us more about it...

Sweet Surrender is the title track; as a song, it mainly deals with negative escapism, mainly through substance abuse, but I guess you could interpret it a few ways. It’s not something I’ve had to really deal with myself, but I’ve witnessed it. We went for it as the album title as it was both a subtle favourite of ours from the record, but I guess it also best represented the more personal nature of the record and slight shift in sound.

You have already teased the record with a couple of singles; how does the album's overall sound relate to them?

I think they’ve done quite a good job of representing how diverse the influences are on the record—we've always cast a very wide net with our influences, but possibly more than ever on this record. We’ve always wanted to have a mix of electronic influences side by side with acoustic/rock influences; I think that comes across in the singles.

If you could achieve one thing with the album, what would it be?

The main thing we’ve achieved already is that we got to revisit some old tunes that we’d always had half a mind to finish but never got to. We wrote a load of new stuff too, but there were a bunch of little ideas we’d started over the last couple of years that we were worried were a bit too much of a departure from our sound—for this record, we just stopped worrying and went with our guts, so it’s really satisfying to finally hear these tunes finished.

When and where can I see you live?

We’ve been totally focused on the record for the last few months, so live is the next job.

What is the child of the Parish live experience?

We’ve tried it in a variety of ways; we’ve tended to use other musicians on stage with us, but recently we did some live filming with just the two of us, using a lot of samples and Tom playing some of the beats on pads. There’s a lot of ways to go with it, so we’re still experimenting!