London based artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Oscar Lang is excited to release his debut album: Chew The Scenery.
Combining his love for bedroom pop, lo-fi indie rock and harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Boys, the album release follows a prolific year for Lang, releasing three EPs over the course of last year.
Chew The Scenery serves as symbol of true musical succession for the artist, where he explained that the sound of his music has changed a lot, “from bedroom pop to rock”.
Like many of us, Lang was affected by the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Working on Chew The Scenery quickly became an outlet for the artist, seeing the topics of growing pains, love, romance, friendships and the pitfalls of social media on our collective mental health all being explored.
On creating the album Lang said, “We recorded the album over a month up in Liverpool. It was a nice break away from the tedious lockdown in the UK as I got to spend a month away with my mates doing what I love. I think you can hear that built-up boredom being released on the record.”
To celebrate the release of Chew The Scenery and as part of our track by track series, Oscar Lang took us through each of the songs on the brand new album.
The whole album is presented as a theatre show and I like to think of this track as like the orchestral warmup before a show. Setting the tone for the album but also just being chaotic.
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This song is the opening track and I wanted it come out, full band blazing. There’s something ethereal about the lead sound that I find powerful and big and I feel like it drops you straight into the world of this album. The song’s about me realising how much time we spend comparing ourselves to others online, and how it’s never healthy for someone to see what everyone else is doing and what you’re not.
‘Could Swear’ has been sittin’ around the song bank for years now. It was one of the first songs I wrote when I started this project and I always knew I wanted to record it. Of course we had to change a few things here and there ’cause 16 year old Oscar wasn’t the greatest lyricist haha.
For this song we wanted it to feel incredibly manic and just absolutely full of sound. The track’s about replaying the same embarrassing or awkward memories in your head over and over, so we really wanted to add lots of noise and voices to recreate that feeling. If you listen closely you can hear me shouting all over the track.
‘Yeah’ stayed as a demo right until the last week of doing the album, as we had a version where I was testing out melodies and just singing gibberish.
But the “All she really says is yeah” was one line that I improvised when doing the gibberish and we really liked the vibe of the track and especially that line. So me and my producer Rich had the painful task of turning gibberish rhythms into actual words.
Just an ode to my headphones this one. A few months ago I started getting that notification that I should turn the volume down on my headphones, and it was then that I realised that most people don’t listen to their music at full volume like me hahaha. (But when you listen to the track I do recommend cranking it for the full experience.)
One thing about this album is that I wanted to incapsulate all the sounds I had done in the last few years but also have them flow into each other. So ‘Write Me A Letter’ is the signal for a change in mood for the album. Written for my girlfriend before she went away on tour, I thought the concept of a letter was very cute and charming.
Again, a signal to change sides on the physical record, this is a little variation on the ‘Write Me A Letter’ chords.
This was another one that stayed as a gibberish demo for quite a while, but it was when we were doing the album and one of my mates was having a hard time that I knew I wanted to write a song for my mates.
I really view my friends as family so its important to check up on them and make sure they’re doing alright.
For some tracks, I like to just write stories rather than talking about something personal and this one of those. It was really nice to lay out a string part for this song, as it’s something I’ve wanted to do for years on my own music.
Over the pandemic I’ve found that a lot of people my age and including myself have had to do a lot of growing up. For me, part of growing up was accepting my mistakes and moving forward and this song is all about that.
It’s about listening when someone is telling you you’re doing something wrong.
This one is written about my struggles with my mental health and what it feels like. I can’t write music, so in order to write the string part we went in the booth and I sung the different violin parts whilst doing my best violin impression. So there’s a version out there that’s pure Acapella.
This is a non-bitter break-up song. I thought that it’s rare you hear non-bitter breakup songs and sticking on the theme of growing up and accepting your faults, I thought it would be sweet to say ‘Thank You’ rather than Fuck You. It also doubles as a little thank you to the audience for listening.
Lang is set to hit the road on a headline tour at the end of this year, alongside Molly Payton.
Stream ‘Chew The Scenery’ by Oscar Lang:
