Off Bloom talk constant release cycles, community building, and their new EP

BEST FIT: Tell us about “Lover Like Me” the final track to be taken from your new EP which is out now.
Alex Flockhart: It’s a love song that you haven’t heard before, it’s a love song that looks inwards to yourself and fucks with all the people who aren’t as good as you at being a lover. You can call it banger, kind-of, but also like low-key.
Mads Christensen: To me it’s ballad. But, I think that during the process of writing that song, we did it really quickly and then that was basically the song that everyone on our team started being like “whaaaat” a long, long time ago and we just never really finished it and now we’ve finished it and it’s been a really fun process.

You’re doing a music video trilogy with the EP, we’ve seen “Shut Up And Let Me Walk” what’s going to be the running theme in the videos?
Flockhart: It’s more an aesthetic really than anything else. “Rockafe11a” is the next part and we haven’t actually shot “Lover Like Me” yet, but they hang together aesthetically and they’re supposed to show the journey of the EP is some ways because the songs are obviously different and they relate to what the songs are about.
Christensen: It’s also focused on primary colours, because there’s some simplicity that we didn’t have in the first EP, especially with “Lover Like Me”. Some of the most amazing things about that song is that it’s so simple and I think the simplicity and using primary colours to create different vibes, that are connecting with the songs, in terms of “Shut Up And Let Me Walk” which is a yellow, jealous kind of song, into this one which is to me a ballad and a very melancholic song and the red one which is pure fucking love in “Rockafe11a”, so in that sense they correspond really well with the colours.
Mette Mortensen: I think these videos, the trilogy, are describes the journey of the emotions through the EP and it goes from the really punchy, aggressive thing into a more passionate, smouldering love, but also a frustration and then into the last colour - which is blue, which will dominate the last one, which is definitely more melancholy and looks inward.
Christensen: But it still corresponds with the other songs, because the idea of the trilogy is that they all hang together. Mette was part of a human specific theatre, where her scene was based on a Danish poet called Inger Christensen who does a lot of sonnets and does them really well. The way you end one video and start the next with that, to tell the a continual story.
Flockhart: That’s what she did with those sonnets, there was a collection, where each would go into the next.
Christensen: At the end of the book will be all of the final lines making one last sonnet.

What's your favourite track from the new EP?
Flockhart: I don’t know, it’s funny because it’s not out yet, so I’m not sure, probably “Rockafe11a” right now, that song just hits everything in me that I want a song to hit. It’s powerful, it’s got attitude, but it also has some melancholy and real emotions in there.
Mortensen: I’m also of course very fond of “Rockafe11a”, I’m fond of all of them because they’re like children, but I’d say “Hey Bae”, that’s one I’ve been listening to on the way here. I just really love that song and can’t wait for us to play that live, I think that’s going to be really sick.
Christensen: To me it’s definitely “Lover Like Me”, but also I fucking love the other songs, but “Love Like Me” speaks to me.

You’re back on tour with Dua Lipa, what have your highlights been this time?
Christensen: Glasgow was fucking fun.
Mortensen: The Scottish people are really fucking giving it up.
Flockhart: Glasgow was great and none of us had been to Glasgow and it was just fucking awesome.
Mortensen: We loved the accent, they’re really rowdy and then we had such a fun night out afterwards.
Flockhart: We got absolutely blasted.

The food as well?
Mortensen: We got the whole package, the Mars bar and the pizza.
Flockhart: Deep fried.

What it’s been like playing in some bigger venues on this tour?
Mortensen: Super sick, we love it, the more better.
Christensen: We are made for bigger venues.

You’ve just moved to London from Copenhagen, what’s the worst thing about London?
Flockhart: Travel.
Christensen: The constant battle of trying to get somewhere that’s not going to take you an hour. Even though you like really close to each other, or it’s the same thing, it’s always an hour, but then we found out you can travel by bicycle. So we’re doing that a lot, because everyone does that in Denmark.
Mortensen: It is a lot faster.
Christensen: It’s so much faster, there’s no traffic, well there’s loads of traffic, but you just drive by it which is amazing.

Have you found anything has changed in your creative process now you’re in London?
Christensen: It was pretty inspiring to begin with, but to be honest, we haven’t had that much time to do anything as we’ve only been here for a little over a month and we’ve been touring for two weeks now.
Flockhart: But, we’ve written a lot in London over the last year. We’ve had a lot of sessions here and I was living there the year before, so you guys were coming over then, but while we’ve been living there we haven’t actually had a lot of time.
Christensen: Not to write new stuff, but we’ve been finishing a lot of stuff for the next thing that comes after the EP.

You like to work by yourselves.
Flockhart: Yeah, we know it works.
Christensen: The other thing is we are a band and we are fortunate enough to be able to be good enough writers to do it by ourselves and good enough producers to do it by ourselves and I think that makes us really happy, that we can do it all by ourselves. A lot of other artists need a producer and sometimes it feels less free if you always have to have somebody else help you with it.
Flockhart: Nowhere in the process are we stopped by our own abilities, we can do everything from start to finish, which has always been our biggest strength.
Mortensen: It can be so inspiring to be in sessions and work with other people and see how they do it.
Christensen: That’s something we choose do to because we want to be better and learn.
Mortensen: But there’s something really special about when we write music, just the three of us. Before we moved to London we had a week in Copenhagen where we didn’t have a real studio, so were just in my bedroom and we just wrote 3 or 4 new songs in like 5 days and “Rockafe11a” was one of those. When you don’t write music regularly you do all sorts of other stuff and sometimes it’s easier to get in a rut and think “what are we doing?”. At least I get a bit confused and don’t feel like I’m working enough. I think being in that kind of work flow is really important for all us.
Christensen: It keeps out the self-loathing.

Do you think it’s important to keep pushing out new music?
Christensen: I think for us, it’s about getting into a flow and releasing stuff while it still feels fresh for us and if we don’t start releasing a lot of the tracks that we have then our A&R and everyone around us will start talking about singles and we’ll just constantly be waiting with stuff, waiting for the right time. We don’t have to, we’ll just write some new, better songs. Also, I think it’s really important as in the old days you’d release an album and show a body of work and today if you release constantly you can still show that in real time. You can show how we are learning and changing and what we’re into at the moment, which I find more interesting also as a music listener when other bands do it.

Do you think there will be an off bloom album eventually?
Christensen: Probably.
Flockhart: I think the album is partially dead, I don’t think people seriously listen to albums anymore, there are very few artists that they do listen to whole albums or it’s a niche part of whatever audience you have that will go out and actually listen to it.
Christensen: That’s the thing, if we’re going to release an album.
Flockhart: It needs to work in the new format, because the format is new and that’s super exciting.
Christensen: It’s also fucking bullshit that in the old days you’d release an album and then a lot of people bought the album because of a single and then when they listen to the album another song became their favourite anyway, but now they only listen to the single. It’s also super exciting because there is so much new music all the time.
Flockhart: As the streaming services keep changing as well, people listen to Spotify differently as what they did five years ago. There’s a lot more playlisting and obviously there’s the Top 5 tracks and people don’t notice anything else.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Mortensen: We’ve been talking about recently how we can make people understand who we are and what we are about.
Christensen: Our identity.
Flockhart: Because we would like people to be able to join in to a community with us and we want to communicate with our fans, our thoughts and feelings and have them understand the way we feel and how that could help them. We always talk about how feeling shit is alright, it’s part of life. There’s a lot of bullshit at the moment about how everything has to be just right and everyone has to be the perfect person and everyone has to fix themselves by doing yoga or eating right or having more followers, all this shit which isn’t conducive to a healthy mental state.
Christensen: It’s kind of frowned upon, there’s a lot of feelings that are not good. For instance being angry, which I think is a big thing in our music as well. I think we’ve always talked about having an inclusive community rather than the exclusive community that is happening in the media. In our music and all music the beautiful thing is that all feelings are allowed and that can be political, [of identity], cultural, it can be anything. I think that’s really beautiful.
Flockhart: I think once you understand those things about yourself and people around you and connect with the people around you and create that community, that’s when we can really combat the political state the world seems to be in at the moment, because there’s a lot of scary identity politics and so much fear which leads to a political elite that can manipulate whole countries into doing something that’s just not good for them the majority of people. That’s what we want to fix with our music [laughs].
Mortensen: The mission is accepting that we are not perfect and that we are human and that’s the best thing there is and then we should start talking to each other instead of hating each other.
Christenen: Being on Twitter, being on Instagram, that’s not our thing to begin with, none of us had accounts before, but then have this band so now we do. We were like if we’re going to have these social media accounts then we need to use them for what they’re good at, connecting with people and talking to them and if we don’t answer people then why should we have it. Then, at the same time we can’t answer everything all the time, but we really try and that’s how we can learn from people, because that’s essentially what we wanna do.