Justin Young and Timothy Lanham finish each other’s musical sentences with new outfit Halloweens

The Vaccines met Lanham in 2015 when playing at a wedding and promptly invited him on tour with them as their keyboardist. Four years later, as The Vaccines embarked on 2019’s Combat Sports, Lanham and Young noticed that some of the music belonged in a separate category. “We really wanted to make a rock record, but none of the stuff we were writing was particularly hard hitting. There were songs we really liked, we started thinking that maybe they belong in a different world.” The pair went to Paris for a few weeks to write, and returned with an ensemble of edgy rock tunes, each with its own unique energy.

This new indie-rock outfit falls by the side of numerous notable side-projects: Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s The Last Shadow Puppets, for example, or else Connor Oburst and Phoebe Bridgers’ Better Oblivion Community Centre. For Young, side-projects are borne not out of dissatisfaction with your primary band, but out of the need to be creative in different realms. “We write every day, and you get to a point where you’ve amassed material which doesn’t necessarily fit into one camp. The Halloweens had its own place in the world,” says Young, before adding: “and I just love writing songs.”

“The Vaccines are the great love of my life – it changed everything for me. It’s the thing I lose sleep over, the thing I think about all morning and night, it’s the main and most important thing in our lives. But when you’re in a band for almost ten years with four other people, you do have to collaborate and compromise. There are consequences to everything.”

“Although Vaccines feel like a free flowing environment to create in, you are still answering to each other, to an audience, to a label, PR, radio pluggers, management – and they get in your head. Halloweens was just nice to be able to create something that nobody knew existed right from inception to the mastering of the record.”

While The Vaccines is the centre of Young’s world, being creative with Halloweens has been a liberation for him, evident in the playfulness of the duo's new album Morning Kiss at the Acropolis. The duo approached the project as more of a ‘hobby’, which led to a more relaxed attitude to writing and recording. “I would write the lyrics, then go to Tim and put the lyrics to music with him sat at the piano,” Young tells me. “So, there was a very defined way of writing the record which we didn’t veer from – which isn’t necessarily how I write the Vaccines stuff. But at the same time, I was just writing every day, so I had all these lyrics I wanted to put to music and Tim is so musical. In that way it was a very organic, natural process. But there was a process.”

Young’s blunted vocals are a trademark of his day job: the fun falsetto highs in “Lady” and rising choruses straight out of Come of Age. Then the twang of English Graffiti-like vintage pop on “Hannah You’re Amazing”, and the neo-nostalgia of deep cuts “Corridors of Love” and “Pizza shop by Poison Beret.”

Young has said it annoys him that people don’t appreciate his lyricism. Was Halloweens an effort to correct that? “I think to an extent that it’s understandable because so much of what The Vaccines are about is spirit, energy, noise and speed. The lyrics aren’t overtly clever or wordy. I’ve always wanted to have a distinctive voice as a songwriter – and I think my lyricism is becoming more important, more at the forefront of what we’re doing,” says Young.

Morning Kiss at the Acropolis comments on enlightenment and entitlement. “I think they go hand in hand,” Young tells me. “There is this paradox where it’s very much the age of opinion: we are living these paradoxical lives. Like, we say ‘fuck plastic bottles’ but then every Friday night we are in our fast fashion.”

“I wasn’t looking at it in a judgemental way, but more observational. I think if anything this is a celebration of humanity.” “Ur Kinda Man” is a perfect example of this paradox: “No matter what age you are, sometimes it can be scary when the world around you is changing more quickly than you are. But you are confronted with the fact that you’re changing just as quickly, you’re just not necessarily as aware.” After a pause he adds, “I think it’s less a social commentary and more a social questioning.”

“During the conception of the record, I was scrolling and scrolling through Instagram and was inundated with these vapor waves of retrofuture aesthetics – Greek and Roman visuals mixed with computer game graphics. It reminded me that all these great empires were very enlightened modern civilisations, that essentially crumbled.”