Six years after their raw, piano-and-vocals first EP, Exploring Birdsong finally sound like themselves. Ahead of their debut album “Every House We Built,” Matt Waer, Lynsey and Jonny let us inside the property they’ve spent a decade building, one house metaphor at a time.
Words by Tanita Hingerty | July 01, 2026
We got to chat to Exploring Birdsong ahead of the release of their debut album “Every House We Built” They arrived dressed for the occasion in their best interview attire. Formalities were brief; we were quickly into discussions around their inspirations, achievements and of course everything behind the new album;
It’s a super exciting time for you with the new album. I would love to know the concepts around the emotional architecture and the meanings and inspiration behind the songs…
Matt: Where to start…
Lynsey: It didn’t really begin as a conscious effort to make it the kind of record that it turned out to be. We didn’t really have a direction we were driving, as to whether it would be a concept album or not; it’s turned out to be not strictly a concept album; there is a concept behind it, broadly speaking, but it’s not like a narrative; there isn’t a story of fiction to tell. So that kind of turned out to be the case as we were putting the track listing together and as we were getting into the swing of writing for it. I don’t even really think that getting on the road to the album…there wasn’t a moment in time where it was like “right, we’ve got to do the album now”…it just kind of happened quite naturally. I had sent what turned out to be track number one, “Archipelago”, to Matt and Jonny, and it went on from there and created the beginning of the album creation process. As time went on and as the songs came together, it turned out that we were all writing from a more personal place and because we were all doing it just made sense to start as we meant to go on. So yeah, the record just turned out to be quite personal and quite vulnerable for us. It was a nice area to move our songwriting into because we feel that we have the capabilities to do it convincingly now, so yeah… not so much of a really conscious decision. Not to carry on from where “The Thing With Feathers” started as a concept album, but that’s also not to say that we won’t ever do a concept album. We may do it; it very much depends on the mood that we’re in, really, and if we feel that it’s the right direction to take, then that’s what we’ll do. This album was an extension of that thought process, really. We just did what we felt was right.
Matt: Yeah, just to add on to what Lynsey was saying, whilst it’s not a concept in the most obvious sense of like “wizards and magic and loads of bollix” like that, (all laugh) whilst it’s not that…the themes and stuff are conceptual to a degree…before we knew the album title and what the whole thing was going to be, even in the lyrics, it just happened to be that there were a lot of references to houses, and I don’t know whether that informed the choice for the album name subconsciously and all through the record there are different nods to houses or home related things and it was naturally quite nicely tied together without us really putting any deliberate focus on like “Yes, let’s write about this” it was never that like Lynsey said, it was pretty natural. To echo what Lynsey said, also, everything just followed from there; the name of the album came pretty obviously just while I was writing that particular set of lyrics; it was like, alright, yeah…I had in my head I knew what that was going to sound like, and I was like right, if this sounds like I want it to on the actual track “Every House We Built”, then it could work as a really nice album title, even without that particular musical moment I think it worked quite nicely anyway, But then having that particular moment hinged in that song for the album title to be screamed to an extent…. it happened quite nicely. It wasn’t deliberate, but it is conceptual to a degree.
Jonny: The only other thing I would add is that Lynsey is right that it never felt like it was like, “Okay, here we go this is the time to do this” and actually I thought it was going to feel like that because when we were doing our previous E.P “Dancing In The Face of Danger”, I remember us talking and being like “Wow, after this…” because at that point we sort of knew that the next big thing was going to be the album. We knew we weren’t going to do a third E.P., and I was like “Oh man, it’s the album; I don’t know how I’m going to feel about doing this”, and then before we knew it we were just writing it…we were writing songs as we always had and some songs just had an album feel and some just didn’t, which is why we released a few singles in 2024 as well, because we felt that these are songs that need to see the light of day, but just didn’t feel like they had a place on the album, it was so weird because it didn’t feel like there was any formula or way to work out what songs were what, we just kind of were all agreeing which ones belonged on there and which ones didn’t so I think it was really nice that so many things came naturally. As Lynsey said “Okay actually this isn’t going to be a concept” and this is the first time all of us have contributed songs, where we’ve all individually brought demos, that have become songs on the release with lyrics, with instrumentals and we finished it off with the others and all of us brought quite emotional things in and as Matt said things with a metaphor of a house before we’d even decided the album title!…because the album title came from when Matt first brought the demo for “Every House We Built” (the song) and that was halfway through the order of the songs that had been written, so it was halfway into the process and yet things were already connected before then and it felt daunting before we started and then when we were doing it, it was just a great enjoyable process, and cathartic. So yeah, big things- it’s been exciting, and now it’s two weeks out. It’s crazy.
I love that the process all just felt so natural to you. What do you feel makes this album different from, say, your previous releases?
(All take time to think.)
Matt: Hmmm…whenever we’ve written anything for ‘Birdsong’, be it individually or collectively or whatever, there’s an intangible thing that makes it feel like us, so some songs that we’ve written individually or even together, we’ve gone like, this is kind of cool, but it’s not really ‘Birdsong’. But I think we’ve had that through everything we’ve released that has felt like us and has had that intangible ‘Birdsong’ thing to it. I think the thing that makes this album different is that we’ve reached a point where it’s best described as a sound that we always thought we could make but never really got there. The thing with ‘Feathers’ is that when we released it in 2018/2019, it was very raw, sort of, as it was written in a rehearsal room in uni with piano, bass, drums, vocals- that was it. “Dancing In The Face Of Danger” expanded on that a little bit. Being a band without guitars in a predominantly guitar-centric genre, or like a pool of artists and bands… You have to go about things in a slightly different way in order to be able to achieve the sort of things we want. We were never in a position where we could fall on an eight string guitar for a breakdown or whatever we had to go about things in a different way, I think it’s at a point with this record, where we’ve hit a stage where we think we’ve achieved a sound that we always wanted to achieve but sort of didn’t really know how to get there and it’s I think the first time I felt like it’s like, “yeah this is what we want to do, this is “the” sound”, not to say we’ll finish there because we’ll obviously be cool with this for a bit but we will want to progress things forward. I would say it’s the first time for us that we’ve hit a point sonically where it feels like it’s something we always wanted to do but didn’t know how to do until now.
Jonny: We’ve described it as how we needed the first EP and the singles before that to kind of work out what exactly the sound of “Exploring Birdsong” was, this was the sound of the band, it almost could have been a self-titled album, because as Matt says, it’s finding that thing of “this is the sound that we’re going for, this is the sound of the band… of the project” We wouldn’t have got there, without the previous releases and you can hear the progress going through the singles and the first EP and getting to this and now we know what the sound is like alongside that it’s almost like there’s a bit of confidence that came with it, there’s songs on here like “I_You” which is the poppiest thing we’ve ever done, which is two songs away from “You Like It Best when It Hurts” and then you’re straight into “Cartography” and it really does take you on a bit of a journey in terms of the different sounds that Exploring Birdsong can be, but none of it feels at odds with each other, when we were creating the track list for the album it all just felt natural even the order of the songs on the album, we didn’t actually have to think about too much, things just kind of slotted into place. “Archipelago” was the first song written, and we were like, the first thing we said when we listened to it was “Yeah, that’s the opener” “Meadowlands” was the last one finished, and we knew that was going to be the closer, and as the other ones finished, we knew they would be… around track two, or that’s around track six, and that sort of thing. I think it’s nice that we might have taken risks on this that we may not have done if we’d been earlier on, and we could have made the album straight after the first E.P. or gone straight for the debut album back in 2018, but I feel like that journey that we’ve been on since then has helped us to get to this place and brought us to this happy and confident place of the sound we make.
Matt: We wouldn’t have evolved into the “Birdsong” that exists now; if we’d have released that straight after the EP, we needed to have that breathing room to be like, okay, what does “Birdsong” album one feel and sound like…?
Jonny: Yeah, exactly…
Matt: It sounds daft, but we needed that 12 million year gap, (everyone laughs), between the E.P and album one to fully realise it, I think.
Linsey: I would say that through the years, being a band writing together, that has sort of informed the songwriting DNA that lives in “Birdsong” now, and that it’s very easy now for us to access that sort of…I guess you could call it a songwriting style, but for us, that’s just how we write songs, and I think that the fact it developed parallel in all three of us over the same amount of time and we have access to that on an individual basis as well as when we all write collectively… I do think it’s a special thing and reaffirms to me it’s what we’re all meant to do and it’s the music that we’re all being pointed to creating for a reason, and of course, we all have our individual influences that come from a vastly sort of wide array of genres and there’s a lot of things that are maybe not so detectable in our music, I had one recently where somebody commented saying “Who likes Jason Robert Brown? Who’s the Jason Robert Brown fan here?” and I hadn’t even considered that because it’s something we’ve maybe passively listened to and it’s made its way into sort of embedding its way into our subconscious and then you access that and it’s so cool hearing what other people hear and as soon as they say it each of us can say “Oh yeah, I guess it does” and the sound that we’ve landed at now, it’s a kind of a natural evolution of what ‘Birdsong’ music was intended to be from the beginning and it will keep going and keep transforming, and I’m excited to see where it does ultimately end up.
Matt: It’s going to go from unlistenable to like completely unlistenable…
Don’t say that ever! Ever!
Laughs.
I love your experimentation and the subtle views and inspirations that listeners have picked up on… Is there a song from the album that really resonates with you the most, that’s your favourite, or that you’re most looking forward to performing live?
Jonny: We have had chats about this before. We were able to perform some of the cymbals….I mean singles.
All laugh.
Matt: I play the cymbals.
I knew what you meant.
Jonny: (still laughing) We were able to play, some of the singles at the gigs we did back at St. Pancras old church, back in November, I was so excited, like playing “42”, the reaction to the heavy bit, we were all consciously watching the faces of the fans, some who’d been at previous shows, which was amazing, they’re singing along to the previous songs and then you play something new and you’re gauging their reactions to the songs live, and it’s such a great experience doing that. There were definitely ones even back then we were excited for, and now that the album’s going to be out, we have twelve songs we haven’t played live before except for that gig, there’s so many different bits I’m really excited for, I’m really excited for “Meadowlands” for the first time, we want the crowd singing at the end for the chant vocals like the idea of that and picturing us playing that and it feeling like a big emotional moment and hopefully hearing people sing along to that…. so for me, I would say, I think that song almost features the best of what we do individually and what happens when we come together as a group and then the group bit at the end, feels like there will be the group of us and the group of people who enjoy our songs, together like one big unit, like we are one big family, “The Birdsong family”
Matt: The Birdsong family… that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say that, and that threw me. (laughs) Like Jonny said, we’ve had the conversation around what our favourite song from the album is, and I think for different reasons, you could pick a different song on any given day and it fluctuates between any of them really… it’s such a tricky question, if I had to pick a song that encapsulates what we do, not necessarily the best but at the core of “Birdsong” I would say “Meadowlands” because it starts off as we were in the first E.P with piano, bass, vocals and then it expands into us altogether and a big crescendo at the end and I would probably say “42” and “Romanticise” as well as I feel they do a good job of encapsulating what we do. That’s probably why they were picked as singles. The rest of the album meanders through a whole bunch of places, so I’m going to be noncommittal and give you three, and those are “Meadowlands”, “42” and “Romanticise”
Cool!
Linsey: I’ve had the moment that I was waiting for, we performed “Archipelago”, live for the first time, in Dublin actually, when we supported Katatonia and I was very, very nervous because of it being the first time it was a song that was being put out to other people that weren’t Matt and Jonny that I’d written and we’d never done that before, we’d only ever performed songs we’d sat in a room writing together so we all kind of had not-consciously, again it was subconscious but we had this reassurance from each other that it’s all going to be fine, when there’s three of us who’d written it it’s probably fine, it can’t be wrong if not all three of us can think it’s wrong….
Matt: It can!
Linsey: It can! (laughs) The first time we did that “Archipelago” I felt very nervous and suddenly less confident in my songwriting abilities, but that song had already gone through the sort of process of taking it to Matt and Jonny and them improving it and it turning out to be what it was in the end, so getting to have that moment which I do think was the moment I would have waited for, I got to be on stage with Matt and Jonny and we got to do that for the first time, that was maybe two years ago now and I guess it sort of worked in a way as a sort of a workshop process like “Does this work in a live setting? Does this song work as the beginning of the set?” There was utility to using that song in the set but from a personal standpoint of mine it was a milestone moment in terms of I sat by myself writing this and now it’s going to be in a big room of people and it was in the Dublin venue which was big and was pretty full at the time, that was a standout moment for me was doing “Archipelago” and for the same reason Matt and Jonny would pick theirs, I was pick “Archipelago” as it’s the reverse of “Meadowlands” as they bookend the album but they serve the same purpose so you move through that song and it’s a nice introduction and it’s essentially explaining what you’re going to hear for the rest of the album and what we’re trying to say so I would say “Archipelago.”
Love that! You’ve got your UK headline tour coming up in September. One of the shows is your biggest headline show to date, in London. Tell us a bit about this tour, and for people who haven’t seen you live yet, what can they expect from a live performance from you?
Jonny: Cymbals! All laugh.
Matt: Yeah! I play the cymbals! I think what we try to do whenever we play live is make it a thing. What I mean by that, because obviously it sounds stupid, is that whenever anyone plays live…they try to make it a thing, but what I mean by that is like I mean it’s a thing, thing. We’re not the type of band to go and play at five-hundred dive bar shows whenever, and it’s all about being in a super tiny, sweaty room; that’s obviously not the vibe. Whenever we do things we want to make it deliberate and purposeful, we’ve put so much time and attention in to the album and the rollout campaign around it, with the property development aesthetic and we’ve put into it so much attention and detail and we also want to do that for the live stuff so whenever we do these things we think “Okay so what venue would suit us? Would this grotty metal venue suit us? Probably not.” So, let’s try to avoid that, and so, in a similar sense, we’ve done absolutely packed-out shows in London in a church, really, two back-to-back nights in November, and that was deliberate in a sense, as we’d played there ages ago and the aesthetic felt right. These shows are going to be different because they’re going to be bigger and we want people to be able to actually get lost in what’s happening and just dance and shit and not have to worry about any external bullshit that they might be dealing with and …..it’s hard to articulate it but I think what we try to do is make everything deliberate it’s not just like we’re doing a tour for the sake of the tour, it’s like were doing these shows… we’re only doing four so we’ve got to make them good. The venues have been deliberately picked so people can come and dance, and the rooms are big- they’re scary as fuck, but at the same time, if there are enough people there dancing and having a good time, it doesn’t really matter how big the room is. We’ll put everything into it, and we hope that translates to what people hear and see.
Jonny: It’s like bringing the concept and like as we’ve said it’s not really a concept album in the traditional sense of telling a story but we do have concepts running through the album, we have things like the monologue running through, the poem and how that can help link the songs together and the “Birdsong property development” stuff too and it’s trying to translate that to a live space and it’s a fun challenge and that’s something we did a little bit of with the St. Pancras shows and now it’s something we can sort of run with it a little bit more and see how we do with bringing that to a bigger space, while still trying to hold onto that smaller experience feel of a more intimate gig but bringing it to larger spaces like the London show. If you like surprises and stuff, some things will hopefully make it feel more like a show and an experience, because the gigs we’ve loved the most have felt like that as well, so yeah, they’ll have to come and see!
What do you feel have been the highlights for you so far as a band, and what does the future hold for “Exploring Birdsong”?
Linsey: It’s weird actually to now be in a position of looking back at writing the album retrospectively because at the time it was next thing, next thing, write the next song, move up the ladder to get to it being completed, keep climbing up the rungs but I think now it’s actually really seeing the body of work and trying to notice the way that other people would hear it for the first time, like trying to think about how much our songwriting has matured, and I do think that yes it might not be to everybody’s taste, if you’re someone who’s really, really die hard for the first E.P there might be tracks on this record that don’t quite do it for you, but what I would say to that is well on this record, we’re telling you exactly who we are, it’s fair to say and we could argue is it sensible to put a song like “I_You” on an album where you’re trying to tell people who you are? It’s very deliberately Kate Bush; it’s very deliberate, but from my perspective, yes it’s the perfect opportunity to do it because I’m telling you how somebody else has really influenced me and my life, so if my plan for this album and Matt and Jonny also is to be authentic, not for the first time but for the most consistent amount of time I would say then it makes total sense to let people in and what I would also say is, going back to our live shows we have seen people really close up to us have quite an emotional experience and reaction to our music and if people are showing you that they’re so open to you and they’re comfortable being vulnerable with you, in front of you then why wouldn’t we do it in return? Why wouldn’t we reciprocate it? It’s normal; that’s a normal exchange and interaction to have with people. So I think I’m just really proud to look back on how these songs have all come together and how they speak to our experiences growing up into adult people and having experiences everyone has and sharing our perspectives on them.
Matt: I would say to echo what Lynsey said that up to this point, as an artist, everything’s just a big game of chess, it’s very, very easy, especially in the way the industry these days is set up, it’s very, very easy to get lost in the idea of everything is just something to get you to the next place and I’m really excited to be able to have this album release and enjoy release day and be like the album is out and we spent so long crafting these songs, an insane amount….you genuinely wouldn’t believe how much we went through with the mixing process, that’s a whole thing… just to get it to where we wanted it to be and just to be able to enjoy it is something I’m looking forward to and I want to make a deliberate point of not looking too far beyond that point: I don’t want to use it as a pawn on a chessboard; I want to release it and be like, “Okay, that’s album one; that’s really cool”, and then move on to album two or something else we can release that we’re also really proud of.
Jonny: I’ll just add that it’s the album and getting here and the journey, it’s been such a process and like Matt said we’re here now and we just want to enjoy it and every release of the individual singles and announcing the album and each one has been a stepping stone towards it and it’s been amazing and we’ve got our Discord, which is so great and it’s been so nice seeing people in there and it’s been so fun and the big thing on this album campaign release has been when we released “42” and we had a dedicated channel just for people to submit the time they’ve noticed their own “42” and it’s still going. People are still posting and it came out in February and it’s still going which is mint and it’s just like we’re very lucky that all the time we’ve had ‘Birdsong’ we’ve been writing the music that we wanted to write and it’s not like this is what “Exploring Birdsong” is, this is a song that we want to wite and that means that if anyone resonates with it, that’s a bonus at this point and we’ve been really lucky that we don’t have to write within a certain mainframe and this album has really shown us that, as well, there’s no framework to an Exploring Birdsong song and we’re just doing what we want to do, and to be able to have that privilege and have other people resonate with it and to enjoy it and have people come along for the ride, people have gotten into the office visuals and to the “42” and all that sort of stuff, it’s so much fun. The artwork people have made is amazing and that’s based on us and what we’ve created and brought to the table, which is an incredible experience and I’ve enjoyed every step of the journey and now it’s just getting the album out and hopefully that continues and people enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it and putting it out there, it’s for other people, not just for us and its very fun.
Very wholesome! Hopefully, see you at a show soon!
Every House We Built is out now via Long Branch Records.
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