IDER on ‘shame’…

Last Friday the streets were piled high with all the shame we threw out of the window after listening to IDER’s second album shame, full of songs that as well as being a treatise of self-acceptance, really make you want to dance. Formed when they met studying music in Falmouth, IDER is made up of Megan Markwick and Lily Somerville, close friends and collaborators whose relationship is so simpatico that they tell me they’ve “adopted a lot of each others mannerisms… which is probably down to spending every day with someone”. Such a close working relationship is clearly working, The Guardian called their last release Emotional Education “a cigarette paper away from brilliance” and their second album is set to be no exception. We met with Megan and Lily over zoom to talk all things shame, live shows, not being guinea pigs and of course to find out what they listen to on the last bus home. 

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LAST BUS: How are you? Are you feeling excited about the upcoming release? 

IDER: Very, very. You know what, quite tense. Yeah, exactly the word - tense!

Is it kind of like clenching the butt cheeks? 

Exactly. That's what it kind of feels like! Waiting to release…

How does this release feel different to your last one? Because obviously, some of the main themes of a song like BORED is about some of the frustrations of the industry that perhaps were to do with your previous label that you are no longer with.

Well, we're releasing independently. The biggest difference is that we've done it all ourselves this time, with our very small kind of core team, which is essentially our manager, our friends who we're working with, we've got a PR Radio plugger and but you know, it's all very, very small. It's just been such a rewarding experience for us in that sense this time around. We've felt a great sense of ownership and knowing who we are, and not having to answer to anyone or do anything that doesn't feel totally 100% either. So quite freeing in that way.

For our Last Bus readers that might not know who you guys are, how did you meet and become IDER?

We met in Falmouth, at university down in Cornwall, Megan’s from North London and I'm (Lily) from near Birmingham originally. We met on a music course and quite quickly started hanging out and started playing music together. And then when we left uni I moved to London to join Meg. And that's when we started taking it a bit more seriously, writing new music, and then in 2016, we released our first single Story!

Where did the name IDER come from?

It's it's a really lame story. But do you know what, there are quite a few floating theories that we've seen online. And they've cropped up kind of in interviews and things like that. So there's some quite interesting ones that other people have decided. But really, the truth is, we were looking for a name. And we were at that stage where we just like fucking anything! We're like, just for God's sake. Like, let's just name this project. I think you were kind of scanning, you're going to books or something you (Lily) happened to be reading a bird book and came across this duck. Have you heard of the eider duck? But we dropped the “E” and so in a way we feel like we slightly made up that word, for ourselves. 

And you took to it like a duck to water. Do you ever read a theory that is way more interesting than how it happened? 

Yeah, yeah, definitely! International Disaster and Emergency Relief. Someone thought it was an acronym for that, which is a good one. 

How did you develop the new album shame? I know you began it when COVID-19 hit when you were in Berlin and I also wanted to ask if you felt any unwanted pressure to produce something brilliant given all the time lockdown provided, or whether you found it to be quite a creatively fertile time anyway?

It was quite a creatively fertile time. Actually, I think we're quite lucky, because we’d just come out of a big, big stint of touring our first album, so we were fresh off the road. And then we moved to Berlin and lockdown happened. We got Coronavirus, first of all which was a bit of a nightmare ... but yeah, it came a time where there was just absolutely zero pressure, there was nothing. It was just a protected time for our creativity in the beginning. By the end of lockdown it started to become a little bit repetitive but I think definitely at the start of lockdown we had a lot of time to get this right and no pressure and all the space and freedom in the world to be creative, which is great. And that's where shame began.

Just to add to that, actually  it was quite an interesting time for us. It was quite serendipitous in the sense that so we actually came out with our record deal quite early on during lockdown, so it all tied together in a way that really felt like a new track for us in terms of the world is literally changing, we don't know what the future looks like, and we were also coming out of this record deal and moving into an independent way of working. So it kind of was an interesting, quite liberating time and it was great. As dark as that sounds, because obviously the world was fucking crazy. But creatively, it was kind of cool. 

Tell me about the main themes on shame. 

It's called shame because we're sharing our shame across the record, we noticed that about half of the record had the word shame in it. We didn't intend it,  it wasn't like we wanted to create a concept album about shame. So that's why why we ended up calling the album shame. And as we did in our first record, we're very honest, our lyrics are very quite direct. Celebrating and embracing truths and relationships and sex and love. Newfound independence, self acceptance and self worth… I think they're all very strong themes across the record. And just all about sharing, sharing your shit, really.

You clearly have a really tight simpatico working relationship, so with that in mind, how do you go about finding collaborators that can work well with your dynamic?

So with the first album, we worked quite traditionally in the sense that we wrote all the songs and then we brought them to producers that we met through quite standard A&R processes. This time around because we've co produced the record, everything has the writing and the production intertwined much more than it did on our first record. So that our production  was kind of part of the writing, if that makes sense. We worked with people that we've known for years, which is actually really lovely. And I think that was probably spurred on by the lockdown experience, because, you know, studios were closing, people were kind of hibernating and and we were sending people bits and pieces of music that we were working on remotely. Nothing was kind of like orchestrated or playdates, like we've done before. It was much more free flowing

You guys don’t define yourselves as one particular genre, which it seems is happening more and more in music recently, particularly under the wider pop umbrella, do you guys embrace that?

Yeah, I think it's quite exciting, and also quite a natural evolution of music and in the sense that taste is changing, and all those genres are kind of accepted. I think it's so cool. How people are kind of testing boundaries in that way. So interesting and I don't know if it's been ever been really intentional for us, but between the two of us, we listen to quite a broad range of different genres that creep in in different ways. 

I wanted to ask about the song BORED, it’s such a great song and it got me thinking about how when I was growing up I would be told ‘being bored is for boring people’ but you’re capturing something different to that, more like a frustration?

Yeah, that's really interesting. Actually, I hadn't thought about that. But I think that the word bored has slightly changed in recent culture. It's the frustration. 

And are you excited to perform BORED live?

That's going to be a fun one to do live! Our drummer was just saying how fun that ones gonna be live. And I feel like the crowd will love that one. Excited to perform live generally. 

What are your plans touring wise?

So we're doing a really, really low key London show at the Map Cafe. But we've just decided to do a super stripped back piano version of the album for like, 50 people. We’re hoping to be on the road, or do at least some key dates towards the end of the year, beginning of next year. We're kind of waiting to see how everyone else gets on as well. We don't want to be the guinea pigs! 

It’ll be great to get back on the road. I know that you guys supported Sigrid on tour. How was that? Did you have fun? 

It was wild. It was a huge, huge opportunity and so much fun. She's got a good crowd. You can probably imagine the pure, loving, gorgeous group of people that follow her. 

Thanks so much for talking to us IDER, but finally… What do you listen to on your Last Bus home?

Megan: That experience of winding down is  quite reflective, quite like introspective, quite thoughtful. I am reminded straight away of listening to Phoebe Bridgers. Or Better Oblivion Community Centre. I think I listened to a lot of that album, like late at night. 

Lily: I think I'd probably say Natureboy Flako. That would be my go to because it's got a bit more of a beat to it still. 

IDER’s album shame is out NOW. Listen here.

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