24 KERRANG!
A
couple of months ago,
Lynn Gunn packed up
her life in Brooklyn,
New York and moved
it some 2,500 miles
west to the place that
she is now calling
home: Los Angeles,
California. It’s a change of location that the
PVRIS frontwoman is still
adjusting to. The West
Coast of the United States
was never somewhere
that she had imagined
living while growing up
in the former mill town
of Lowell, Massachusetts,
she confesses, her heart
always drawn towards the
older, colder energies of
the East Coast, or even
Europe. It also seems
that the 25-year-old could
account for a few bags of
bad blood when it comes
to the Golden State.
“Energetically, it has
never felt good to me,”
she explains of her new
hometown. “I’ve always
experienced heartbreak out
there, or just have really bad
memories in Los Angeles
and the West Coast ever
since we first started touring.
I feel like this is the kind of
decision that a crazy person
would make, but I was like,
‘I dislike this place so much
that I’m just going to move
here and conquer it, and
face my fear and surrender
to it.’ It’s kind of a challenge
to myself to not let my
surroundings affect me
and to really just find my
centre in myself and in
the people around me.”
Despite her past
grudges, Lynn admits that
her fledgling weeks out
West have, to her surprise,
actually felt pretty good. She
now finds herself living in
the same city as many of her
closest friends, with whom
she can cook big family dinners and go on
hikes. It also means that she no longer has to
keep making trips from coast to coast in order
to meet with potential musical collaborators
(who tend to huddle in her newly adopted part
of the map) for the next chapter of PVRIS.
Lynn reveals that the search for a
producer-type began in earnest more than a
year ago. The opportunity to work with Lynn
and her bandmates Alex Babinski and Brian
Macdonald on what would be the follow-up
to 2017’s All We Know Of Heaven, All We
Need Of Hell – their second full-length, which
took their monochrome, brooding rock to
the covers of magazines and on to the main
stages of festivals like Reading & Leeds –
unsurprisingly brought forward many suitors.
Since then, the band have been heading in
and out of studios with different prospective
collaborators in short three-day-at-most spells- a process that sounds a bit like producer
speed-dating – to see if they hit it off musically.
One person that they discovered via this route
was JT Daly, a man from Nashville, Tennessee
whose first picture when you search for his
name on the internet shows him in a big
cowboy hat, surrounded by kittens. JT’s most
notable work as a producer to date is with the
alternative hip-hop artist K.Flay, but he can
now add PVRIS’ comeback single, Death Of
Me, to his CV.That era-launching song, which was sent
out into the world last week along with a
video that was conceived by the singer, sees
the band dial up the brashness and dark,
electronic tones of their sound with a wicked
smirk. Ask Lynn to describe it and the word
that she will keep coming back to is “fun”. It’s
a side to the band that she thinks has beenenhanced by working with JT, but one that
also comes from a change that she’s noticed
within herself.
“The process is always really fun,” she
says. “But I think I’ve just been in a better
headspace than I was for the last two records.
I’ve been in a much more self-aware and
open and vulnerable spot than in the past.
I think that shines through; there’s a different
lens that it’s being captured
through now.”S
peaking today in her
home in Los Angeles,
which she shares with
the same friend that she had
been living with in Brooklyn,
there’s a clear buoyancy
and excitement to Lynn as
she outlines what’s to come
in the world of PVRIS. She
stresses that she’s keen to
make the most of – and fully
appreciate – the band’s next
act. It’s a stark contrast to
where she was when she
stepped off a stage in Rhode
Island last September, the
final show that the band
would play under the All We
Know Of Heaven... banner.
“I felt relieved and also
a bit defeated,” she says
of that touring run coming to
an end. “I was pretty much
experiencing vocal issues
the entire cycle. I had to get
up onstage every day and
every night and pretend that
nothing was wrong, pretend
that it was okay. It was really
difficult. I felt like I never was
able to give the performance
that I wanted to, which was
really upsetting and a big
punch to the ego.”
Unsure of quite what
was happening to her
voice, the singer sought
medical advice. She visited
doctors and attended
several ENT appointments,
where she would have a
camera put down her throat.
And still nothing showed up.
Physically, she was fine. The
problem lay elsewhere.
“I think it was just a build-up of stress
and anxiety,” she says. “It felt like a weird
energetic block, almost, and I had to work
through that, rewire that. Because, my whole
relationship with performing and singing,
up until recently, it would have been stress
and pressure: ‘Do it perfectly or you’re doing
it wrong.’ I think it tightened things up so
much that I honestly could not get anything
out. I was so afraid of it by the end. I was so
afraid to make any sound that nothing would
come out.”
The singer’s relationship with stress and
anxiety had already been writ large throughout
the band’s second album. ‘Two years gone,
came back as some bones and so cynical,’
went the opening line to that record’s stand-
out single, What’s Wrong. A life lived on a
conveyor belt of demands and commitments
ever since the breakout success of the band’s
2014 debut album White Noise had left“I THINK I’VE BEEN IN
A BETTER HEADSPACE
THAN I WAS FOR OUR
PAST TWO RECORDS”
LYNN GUNNNature: the
world’s original
photobomber