Upon first listen to any track by the Leeds-based band, or rather, musical collective, HONESTY, there's a sense of fluidity that is hard to miss. The band's full-length album, U R HERE, arrives today on Partisan Records, and it's filled with sputtering synths, ambient, electronic production, and a cast of musical contributors that question the idea of what it means to be a band in 2025.
The core of the group are members George Mitchell, Matt Peel, Josh Lewis, and Imi Marston, but no member has a cemented role, allowing no one to be constrained to any certain position within the band.
"We don't really have any strict roles. Musically, we all chip in separately on various different things within the studio," said Peel.
When it comes to songwriting, the group's ethos of changeability begins here.
"We all start songs differently and then work on them together. It usually reaches a point where we're like, 'Is this ready for vocals now?' Maybe we've reached a point where we think a vocal will inform where the song goes or what kind of song it is. We then work the vocal or send it to one of our collaborators who will flesh it out," said Lewis.
HONESTY's collaborators range from Dry Cleaning's front woman, Florence Shaw, to softlizard, the project of Menace Beach's Liza Violet, to Liam Bailey, to UK rapper, Kosi Tides. Each vocalist's unique style brings a new sense of life to HONESTY's compositions, ranging from the anxious, indie-rock sound of "MEASURE ME" with softlizard, to the ambient soundscape of "NO RIGHT 2 LOVE" riddled with Liam Bailey's dynamic, soul-filled vocals. The compositions of HONESTY keep listeners alert, anticipating where the next track may lead. Oftentimes, the band is on the same page with listeners in this way.
"We might even spend a bit of time working on a song's structure based on what vocal part they've sent back," said Lewis.
"'NO RIGHT 2 LOVE' started that way, as an ambient tune, really no beats whatsoever. When Liam sent his vocal back, which was kind of just like a poem on top of it, I could just hear loads of really hooky bits in it. We wrote the second half of the song after that. It's a kind of reaction to someone doing something, and then you create the next thing," said Peel.
"The song didn't properly exist until he sent that vocal. It was an ambient jam with a song in there," said Lewis.
Imi Marston became involved with the band as a consistent vocal contributor, so much so, that she became one of the group's four principal members.
"The most highly aspirational bit of HONESTY is to do something that sounds really otherworldly and really beautiful, sort of in that YACHT-type area where it seems like it's just been written by an alien or something. That's the most highly prized stuff that we do, and Imi can just do that stuff, which we can't. That's why she's so valuable," said Peel.
While U R HERE is the band's debut full-length album, it was finished before the release of last year's mixtape, BOX. Born from the label's idea to give the collective a prelude and introduction before the release of the album, it serves as the perfect precursor to the ideas that serve as the focus of U R HERE. The album maintains an immense sense of danceability and kinetic energy throughout, but BOX gives us a more introspective look at the collective.
"The mixtape was made super quickly. It was made up of a lot of ideas that didn't make it on the record, a lot of ideas that we were working on that never got finished. We thought why not put it together into one big, coherent piece," said Mitchell.
"We thought it was great because we could use all the bits that never made it into a song for the album. There's just all these pieces; it's like looking at someone's messy work desk," said Peel.
While the format for creating a project may not be linear for HONESTY, it's given the group the freedom to keep the scraps of songs and repurpose them for future compositions, creating an auditory collage of sound on that intangible, metaphorical work desk. This process allowed the band to create a polished full-length debut without restrictions or limitations. The music would find itself a home elsewhere on BOX, or beyond.
The band hasn't slowed down their efforts as they continue to create new songs from those audio collage scraps, but U R HERE serves as a polished introduction to the band's experimental, electronic soundscape and as a natural follow-up to the sounds on the mixtape. If BOX was the party’s primer, U R HERE is the electrifying entrance to the nightclub. It’s full of life, bright, and exhilarating. It’s a heightened version of what the mixtape had to offer, but it’s never predictable where that sound will guide you. We always hope that the main event of a night out is as exciting as its beginning, and in HONESTY’s case, it is.
"There's less bits now. The desk is less messy. You kind of know what we're doing a little bit more now. A lot of the bits on BOX are just us experimenting on what HONESTY is meant to sound like in the first place," said Peel.
"We've finally worked out how to clean our desks," Mitchell laughs.
U R HERE is out now on Partisan Records.
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