An interview with Moreish Idols about their LP 'All In The Game' and working with Dan Carey
- Damien Joyce
- Mar 30
- 12 min read
Damien Joyce (aka The Human Recommendation) chats to London via Falmouth five piece Moreish Idols about the music and the making of their debut LP All In The Game
2026 has already been a dizzying year with the amount of new music released but there is another 2025 release that I think warrants more attention. I was late to the party on an excellent debut album released back in March last year called All in the Game by Moreish Idols. The band is made up of friends Jude Lilley (vocals/guitar), Tom Wilson Kellett (vocals/guitar/synth), Caspar Swindells (bass/backing vocals), Solomon (Sol) Lamey (drums/backing vocals), and Dylan Humphries (saxophone/clarinet/synth) who met at Falmouth University and have been playing together since.
Their debut album was produced and mixed by Dan Carey, and is available via the London independent record label Speedy Wunderground. It’s a slow burning record, blending multiple genres. It was their Glastonbury performance that first caught my attention, but what really got me into the record was when the band released their Live at Studio Orbb session. I went back and listened to the record again, and it grew on me. I ended up buying the record, and I’ve been playing it a LOT since.
Recently I got the opportunity to talk with the band and started by telling them what I really liked about it, especially that side A and side B are like two acts in a movie.
Tom commented, "Side B is the evil side” and laughed. I continued, explaining I found Side A so accessible; it gets you hooked right from the start. Then I found the more I listened to it, the more I liked Side B, but it took me a while to get into it. I went back listening to their two EPs as well, where there’s a real musical progression from their debut EP Float to Lock Eyes and Collide.
Damien: How do you find, looking back at where you’ve come from the two EPs to your debut album All in the Game?
Tom replied: We were sort of joking at one point that All in the Game was like all the elements of the two EPs, but better. We’ve learned from the two EPs because we were figuring things out as well. So, when it came to the album, I think we had a bit more of a strong idea about what we’ve maybe learned from those first two and maybe just tried to focus on the best sort of moments of both. Not on purpose, but I think when we did it, we realised maybe that was part of the appeal. It’s obviously different as well, but there’s the heaviness of Flow and the kind of whimsical stuff of the second EP is in there, but maybe slightly more controlled or something.
Jude: Yes, we were trying to find our feet and work out where we’re going, and this album, All in the Game, is where we ended up. So, naturally we took the best bits from Float and Lock Eyes and Collide.
Damien: There’s nothing better than playing music with your friends, I imagine?
Jude: Oh, yes, absolutely. I feel very proud of it that we’ve all been together for so long because we get on and collaborate so well; we just work through it. And because of that, it’s just such a joy playing music with four other musicians who I know extremely well, both musically and just as friends as well.
All in the Game shows us where we’re most comfortable now. We’re still always going to be learning, and we’re always going to be trying to work it out. We know how to bounce off each other and how to give each other room now. I feel like Float was throwing everything at the wall, everyone’s playing at the same time. It’s loads of noise and chaos. Lock Eyes and Collide started to get a little bit more kind of let’s try and start giving each other a bit more space. Then we started to work out which bits work and when all of us should be playing, less of us should be playing. By the time we got to All in the Game, we were able to capture the room better or at least get the room sounding better by giving each other as much room as we can.
Damien: And how instrumental has producer Dan Carey been on that journey with you?
Tom: He’s a good sort of litmus test for what is good and what is bad. He’s quite good at supporting whichever direction we want to go. There’s never been a whole lot of involvement when it comes to writing, if any. But then before we’ve recorded, we’ve always shown it to him. With the album, we just played it for him live in the studio without recording it. That was where the collaboration began on the album because he had some interesting notes about certain edits of the tracks and the flow of it. It’s like a gentle push in the right direction and then really when you get to record it, there isn’t a whole lot of time. It’s just his way of working, very direct and flowing. Nothing stands in the way, it’s all very fast.
Damien: Did Dan spot you playing live?
Tom (laughing): No. I actually met him when he knocked on the door of my house asking for a synth from my housemate!
Damien: When you look at his list of album credits, it’s so impressive. I really like this American band Been Stellar he’s worked with. Dan has previously produced Franz Ferdinand, Bat For Lashes, TOY, Kae Tempest, black midi, Fontaines DC, MIA, Wet Leg, Squid, Geese, the list goes on and on. I was curious of what you thought he saw in you guys that he really liked. Did he see potential, chaos or what was it exactly?
Jude: Dan likes to go to shows specifically for Speedy Underground as a label and as a concept. He likes to go to shows at London venues like The Windmill, seeing bands that are new and extremely DIY and independent and going … oh, I can get this lot in the studio, and I can maybe capture a song in a day. That was kind of his thing.
We had moved to London, and Tom had this idea for us to film a live session of us playing in our friend’s studio. We filmed it nicely, acted as if we were going to release it. We then sent it around to labels, booking agents, all sorts. Ironically, the only person who replied was Dan, and he really liked it because it probably fit in with that kind of process that he was already doing, and one had just landed in his inbox without him even having to go to the Windmill.
Then all of a sudden, he’s like, let’s start this relationship with these guys. It happened to be at the same time that Speedy was starting to do 12-inch records, starting to do albums and EPs. So, we were the first wave with a bunch of other bands and artists that became almost official roster signings of the label. It’s all thanks to his process of Speedy Wunderground. His approach as a major label producer is extremely different.
Damien: There’s a couple of songs where you’ve got Annie Walton playing cello on. When do
you start considering how we are going to play this live?
Jude: Well, with that string part specifically, Dan said from the get-go. He didn’t want it to sound like a cello. It doesn’t really on Slouch, he’s just adding to a drone with Dylan’s synth and then Dan’s Swarmatron synth. On Railway, it does add a nice dramatic melody.
Damien: Cinematic?
Jude: Exactly, you know through the Studio Orbb anyway, I mean the live version is still the
proper meat and potatoes of the song, and we can get away with that.
Casper: It’d be great to get some strings onto a live performance at some point, but that has
never really been there.
Tom: You just don’t consider it when it’s two tracks. Even when we were recording it, the whole thing was going to be a selective choice. It’s one of those things where you don’t make it too obvious, and then no one really cares when you play.
Damien: I’m old school, but I believe there’s two non-negotiables for a band, and that’s a good drummer and being able to perform live. I think Sol’s drumming is amazing; that mixture of gentle jazz drumming and sheer pummeling at times it’s the heartbeat of the band.
Sol: I feel like the way we wrote all the songs, it was a lot of the time quite instinctual, just like what we were all doing, because we’ve been playing together for a while, like you say. All the different intensities in the drumming just kind of happened naturally. So yes, it’s nice for you to mention it.
Damien: I know sometimes the drummer doesn’t get the visibility physically as well on set because you don’t see them, but I think it’s nice to get the recognition. I saw MONO and Mogwai perform last year. When you go see a post rock band live with no lead singer, your gaze moves from musician to musician, as the music is played, it’s a different experience for the audience. Your band has two lead singers; you must also have thought about that visually, how that looks for your live set?
Casper: Definitely, we played around a lot with the stage setups and on the most recent tour, for a few shows we had Sol off to the side a bit more so that he’s not just at the back. It kind of goes along with the rest of our practice where we’re trying not to focus on any one member of the band and try to have it as more of a holistic thing. We’ve been trying to stagger if the stage allows for it so that there’s a clear view of everyone. For me, personally, I love watching drummers, so it’s great to have sort of to the side where the audience can really see what he’s doing.
Damien: Totally, I love that. I know I mentioned post rock because there are elements of post rock, jazz, and art infused indie on this record. In his book from a couple of years ago called Every Song Ever Ben Ratliff mentioned genre as a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less. I was curious how you guys feel about genre?
Tom: Well, you’d probably just summed it up in a sentence then; that makes a lot of sense. When you’re moaning about genre, you don’t really realize that it is just a kind of a commercial product-based thing, isn’t it? We just don’t think about it.
Casper: This is a big reflection of as well that conversation we’ve had in Paris with a master’s student. I can’t remember her name; she was writing a thesis about the kind of music in the Windmills scene in London and was asking why everything is post punk? Why isn’t there a differentiation? Because post punk can be anything at this point and so we had a really interesting discussion about it.
My take is that, not only is it the fact that it’s a selling point, but it’s also something that has kind of that has been historically come up with by music journalists. The quality of music journalism in this country has just been going down the pan for so long that there’s just not enough people talking about these things in a more mainstream setting for things to catch on in the same way anymore.
There’s no doubt there’s so much diversity of music, especially in underground scenes and dance scenes. The amount of music now must be more varied than it was in the eighties. But in the eighties and nineties, you had so many of these little micro genres everywhere and because people are going out and documenting it, writing about it and building these histories and these kinds of many traditions in the music space. To me, it definitely feels kind of reductive at this point. There’s this joke that we had when that guy made that video about crank wave.
Tom: Oh, yes, I like that.
Casper: There was this guy who was listening to every microgenre that Spotify made. This is another thing about the insane commodification of music is that Spotify is using algorithms to do the work of human journalists and coming up with these kinds of semi name names for things that don’t exist in the real world. One of the genres that we fell into was ‘crank wave’, which is so funny!
Damien: I’ll have to remember that!
Casper: In that conversation we had in France, what we kind of came up with is an idea of metapunk or metarock where there’s a kind of new genre where everyone’s looking back and things are kind of ouroboros, where everything is consuming itself. There’s a film theory when everything has become self-referential; it was when the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once had just come out. I thought that was a neat way to describe some of the music that was happening and some of the things that we were seeing in the London scene.
Damien: What is really fascinating to me with the slow core genre, is that artists release so much music, so frequently, and they don’t have this traditional release cycle. The songs are shorter, some of them are created in bedroom studios, recorded on a laptop and just released on a Friday. Then release another single two weeks later, an EP three weeks later. It’s very different, with lots of singles, EPs and short songs. It suits a particular pocket of the Internet, but it’s not going to work for everybody. The more frequent release cycle I do think is interesting.
Jude: The infrastructure of the music industry is quite a dated program. This whole two-year album cycle, it’s not really how the world works anymore. We’re just lucky enough that because we’ve worked with each other for so long now, we write by jamming. In terms of our circle and our process, as far as we are concerned, we’ve mastered that craft.
Not as in the music we make is amazing, I’m just saying, we know how to do it. We’ve all got laptops. I can probably make a song tonight. I’m not saying again it will be any good, but we can just make music. If we can make music, we may as well release it. I think it’s a balancing act, there’s a danger that obviously it could be quantity over quality, you got to respect the art that you’re making a little bit.
Damien: Definitely, I still believe the album is still the organising principle for an artist. I think it’s hugely valuable for so many different reasons and I wouldn’t like to see that being devalued in any way, but I just thought that it is interesting that you’ve got this younger group of people constantly releasing music.
Jude: I do think that’s rad. I love songs that are under two minutes. Our albums are full of songs that are under two minutes. I think it’s great because it’s almost like a comic book, like vignettes and sketches, which is in its own world is brilliant, but I don’t think necessarily everyone can really do that?
Casper: It’s a totally different art form. As well as putting together a single song as opposed to
putting albums together. It’s just like it depends on what you want from the music.
Damien: Do you think it took you the right amount of time to get that music right and get
to where you want to be?
Casper: I think we’re very lucky to be well advised after the first EP into doing another EP, because I think that when we did eventually come around to doing the album, it really all came together at the right time. We had the right number of songs and chemistry as a band.
To me, the first time I really felt like we were really making work to our fullest potential was when we first recorded that album, I’m very thankful for how it’s turned out.
We’ve seen a lot of bands where the song comes out, and they’ve skyrocketed to fame and success. That is great for some people; it works really well. But for a lot of people it’s actually too fast and I’m thankful for the organic way that we’ve kind of been slowly growing and getting a wide fan base and people who are really invested in the project as opposed to just getting it suggested to everyone’s Spotify and then just, amassing.
Damien: At this juncture, I know you’re continually evolving and trying things, and have been
playing together since university. When you look back, has that time flown by?
Tom (joking): Been bloody ages! It still feels slow and fast at the same time. But it almost feels like chunks of time, and they’ve all moved at different speeds. The first chunk being the least crazy and the most relaxed. Then we’ve slowly sort of come here to London where it moves fast and then you kind of have to work your ass off. Otherwise, things might just get left behind.
But I mean eventually, you just get to a certain point where you built your brand. Then you can probably do whatever you want, but I don’t know if we’re there yet. I feel like we probably have to keep building quite a lot. We’re sort of thinking that in the next couple of years, we’re going to probably make quite a lot of music and release a lot more rapidly than we’ve done in the past. I think just because that feels like the appropriate response to what’s going on, I think we’re happier when we do that as well.
Damien: Well, I’ll be with you until the end of this journey because of that slow progression. I would love to see you grow further as a band and look forward to more records!
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