caroline: the outer reaches of what a band can do as a performing group

Sam Walton meets the post-rock band obsessing over the finer details on their second album

Photography by El Hardwick

The first thing you notice about caroline is that they don’t look like a band. Actually, they don’t look like anything much: amid the lunchtime hub-bub of the hilltop cafe where we’ve arranged to meet, with South London’s late-millennial alt-creatives congregating for coffee and pizza on a sunny Thursday, the four members of the post-rock folk octet who have joined me blend in entirely. Clearly, there is no caroline uniform. There is no caroline strut. No one nudges their friend and points furtively towards our table in the corner. “I think that’s a band over there,” whispers nobody.

The second thing you notice about caroline, after barely five minutes in their company, is that this anti-attention is exactly as it should be. After all, some bands are far more interesting than their music, with their outfits or swagger or politics or partners adding the crucial zest to (or sometimes just propping up) their songs, but caroline are the reverse: this is a collective of eight musicians with a singular focus on crafting their art, near impossible to distract from the goal of making their weird, intimate, beautiful, confrontational, and ultimately rather comforting music. If even one of them were from the rockstar-magnetism factory of Doherty, Casablancas, Gallagher, etc., then you suspect the very essence of the caroline project would evaporate into a puff of hierarchy and toxic ego. As it is, the group appears to exist in a fragile equilibrium of mutual respect, radical empathy, and shared drive, where a sort of benign anarchism, in its purest theoretical form, prevails.

“At the risk of sounding sentimental,” begins clarinettist Alex McKenzie when the conversation naturally swings round to the band’s interpersonal dynamic, “the biggest thing about us is trust, and really trusting that the decisions you’re collectively making in the moment are the right ones, with us as individuals being sublimated into the group setting.”