caroline have shared details of their second studio album, caroline 2.
Taking in eight tracks, the record features recent single ‘Total Euphoria’, which opens the LP, and a Caroline Polachek-featuring cut called ‘Tell me I never knew that’, for which you can watch a video below.
Speaking about the single in a collective statement, caroline said: “We used to call this one ‘Backstreet boys’ because the opening top line felt like a Backstreet Boys song. The main riff was written by Casper [Hughes] on acoustic guitar and stuck out as a really catchy, bouncy, hypnotic thing. We wrote the opening top line together and straight away we thought ‘this sounds like a melody that Caroline Polachek might sing’ in its hooky-ness. We sort of joked that we’d ask her to sing it but didn’t think it’d actually be on the cards, until about a year later when we sent her the half-finished song and she was up for it!
‘Caroline was amazing. She wrote a load of extra parts that gave the whole thing such a lift, and then spent a few hours tracking a load of more improvised parts. We were still recording at about 1.30am when we decided to call it, but there was no indication that Caroline was the slightest bit tired or that she had lost any momentum in her ability to sing, even though she’d been singing for about six hours. It was an inspiring thing to witness! We did a little bit more re-ordering together with Caroline a few weeks after the session and then the song was finally there.”
caroline 2 was produced by the band’s own Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes and Mike O’Malley, and written and recorded across various studio sessions over an 18-month period. “One of the fundamental themes is the idea of different things happening at once, things that are very different from each other but also simultaneous,” Llewellyn said of the record.
Rough Trade will release caroline 2 on May 30, 2025.
