“There were a couple of points, making this record, where I was on the verge of a breakdown,” says Sydney Minsky Sargeant, chatting to NME from his studio in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. “To deal with the things I was struggling with, I had to be vulnerable. To overcome some difficult thoughts and feelings, I had to put them out on the table.”
The thorny transition between his teens and young adulthood is at the centre of ‘Lunga’, the debut solo album from the Working Men’s Club frontman. He would be at pains to point out that he’s been writing songs like these – sparse, elegant, lyrically close to the bone – since the very beginning. To the wider world, though, the record might represent a remarkable reinvention away from the noisy and atmospheric brand of electronic post-punk that Working Men’s Club are known for.
When Minsky Sargeant played his debut solo show at Manchester Psych Fest last month (August 30), he cut a very different figure to the one he usually does onstage. Where he normally is a ball of furious energy, he was on much more measured form, relaying the songs from ‘Lunga’ in a manner that was actually faithful to the record – just himself and acoustic guitar, with electronic loops providing colour in the background.
It is less a case of the musician having mellowed, and more that he is only now finding himself in the right headspace to release a record that includes material that was written when he was as young as 14. “At an early age, there were definitely some things that, when I was in the middle of them, I felt like I couldn’t comprehend at the time,” he explains. “But I wrote about them, and looking back, some of the things I wrote were actually quite profound to me. It’s just that it’s taken me years to feel at peace with them.”
“I was optimistic, even as a teenager, when I didn’t know how to deal with those feelings”
Throughout the record, he reckons with thorny relationships of all kinds – familial, romantic, professional – as he gradually comes to accept that human interaction is never straightforward. On ‘Lisboa’, a woozy, melancholy dreamscape of a song that moves from elliptical, abstract imagery to a suddenly optimistic refrain (“It’s alright, you know, it’ll be just fine”), he processes finding out a family member was moving away.
“It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it felt like it at the time. It was very fresh, it all felt very full-on,” he reasons. “But listening back to it now, with those really hopeful last lines that it would all be OK – that’s what I mean about it being profound. I was optimistic, even as a teenager, when I didn’t know how to deal with those feelings. It was before we really spoke about mental health in the way we do now.”
Minsky Sargeant is still only 23, but ‘Lunga’ already feels like the opening of his second act. With the encouragement of his long-time producer, Alex Greaves, he holed up in his native Todmorden, in a house on the border of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, to flesh out the record with new songs and ideas. He often worked in both sonic and thematic nods to his past work with Working Men’s Club, even while weaving a very different musical tapestry – one that brings the likes of Bill Callahan or Mazzy Star to mind.
His band, though, remain a fundamental tenet of his musical identity – not least because he is its driving creative force – and the change in direction that ‘Lunga’ represents was a reset after several tumultuous years with the group, which saw a litany of lineup changes. “Despite the highs with Working Men’s Club, there were a lot of lows, and it’s been a very difficult project to work on at times,” he admits.
“I grew up in that sphere, where I couldn’t just be a music maker – I had to be a frontman, too, and a character in the underground music world. I didn’t have the skills or ability to comprehend what was going on; so much happened in a very short space of time. It definitely felt like being thrown in at the deep end, and I just had to deal with it one day at a time.”
“I realised I didn’t want to come at life with a resentful or cynical outlook”
He was still a teenager when the band released their self-titled debut album in 2020, a whirlwind experience made all the headier by the fact that it took place in the thick of the pandemic. Back then, there was an intensity about Minsky Sargeant that suggested he was still figuring out how to navigate being thrust into the indie rock spotlight.
Five years on, he seems much surer of himself – something that’s reflected on ‘Lunga’. It has a hazy ambience to it throughout, particularly on the title track – a seven-minute instrumental interlude on which he ingeniously samples himself, borrowing the strings from ‘The Last One’, the closing track from Working Men’s Club’s second LP, ‘Fear Fear’. In doing so, he recontextualises his formative years in the band sonically, as well as lyrically.
“I wasn’t in a very good place when we were making that last record, and it definitely ended in quite a dark and confusing place for me. So, it was quite cathartic to know I could repurpose certain parts, certain words, that suddenly made a lot more sense for me now than they did then. The metaphor of ‘Lunga’, and that interlude, for me is about spring, new life, the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. So it was nice to take ideas from ‘Fear Fear’ that left the listener in a dark place, and use them to build towards a different kind of crescendo – a hopeful one.”
That might offer clues as to the tone of the next Working Men’s Club record, which Minsky Sargeant says he aims to finish by the end of the year. Throughout the record, he reckons with thorny relationships of all kinds – familial, romantic, professional – as he gradually comes to accept that human interaction is never straightforward. On ‘Lunga’, though, the reasons for his optimism have come from within; it’s clear that a period of introspection has seen him grow both as an artist and as a young man.
“On the second half of the album is where the real soul-searching was happening,” he reflects. “I realised I didn’t want to come at life with a resentful or cynical outlook. I’ve been through moments where certain relationships were not particularly harmonious, but I don’t want to feel like I hate anybody, or resent anybody.”
‘Lunga’ ends on ‘New Day’, a pretty, sonically slight track that shimmers with cautious optimism. Minsky Sargeant describes it as being “about turning over a new leaf, even though it felt like fantasy when I was writing it”. “That could have been the catalyst for another breakdown,” he concedes, “but deep down, I believed there was a way to start a new chapter of my life, and eventually I found that I didn’t need to close the door on past relationships.
“I could just acknowledge them and what they mean to me, accept that, and then use the knowledge and the wisdom that I’ve gained from those experiences to look into the present day, with a more mature outlook on life.” On the basis of ‘Lunga’, he’s succeeded – it’s meditative, thoughtful, and suggests the best is yet to come.”
Sydney Minsky Sargeant’s ‘Lunga’ is out now via Domino.