Say Lou Lou on making their return with new EP ‘Dust Pt.1’: ‘The itch came back!’

As Say Lou Lou return with new EP Dust, the Swedish/Australian twins have told Rolling Stone UK the story behind their first release in six years – and why now is the perfect time to launch tier comeback.

The twins, Elektra and Miranda Kilbey-Jansson, describe their latest EP as “a candid collection of songs that chronicle various steps of a break up; mourning, anger, remorse and forgiveness. Being in it, being out of it, being under someone else, being over it,” they say.

“This record is us going through the motions and realising that love always looks clearer in the rear view mirror.”

But as they tell Rolling Stone UK, this is merely the first part – a full album is on the cards. You can read our chat with the duo below.

After six years away, why is now the right time for your return?

We needed to take time away from each other and music in order to find inspiration and excitement again. We started the band fresh out of high school and went hard for many years- we woke up after our second album feeling pretty disillusioned and burned out. On each other. On touring. On writing. On the industry. We had nothing left to say and no energy to create. Elektra steered into acting and went away for a year to shoot an Apple TV-show and Miranda worked on music and creative direction projects . We needed to try something else and express ourselves in new ways and individually. We had no plans of starting the band again, but then out of nowhere the itch came back – and pretty soon thereafter found ourselves in the studio and instantly wrote ‘Waiting For A Boy’, the first single we released from the EP. Since then it’s flowed more naturally than it ever has before. It feels amazing.

You say that the songs reflect “various steps of a break up; mourning, anger, remorse and forgiveness”. Was this your personal experience and how cathartic was it to mine that?

Both of us had rough pandemic breakups and moved on very quickly, never really taking inventory or reflecting much on the grief, sadness or anger we’d felt back then. And then when we started the process of writing again, we both realized that all the mixed feelings we’d ignored in the past was beautiful and untapped inspiration. We found old diary notes and morning pages from 2020 and they ended up being the blueprint for most lyrics on the record. Definitely cathartic, like wrapping up the last little pieces of heartbreak in a pretty bow and burying them forever!

Does this mark a full return? Is a new album on the horizon?

Yes and yes!

How does it change from previous offerings, sonically, how has your sound evolved?

In previous iterations of our band we tended to always keep the lyrics removed from our inner lives, we wanted to express ourselves within metaphors within concepts within poems within stories of other people and other lives. Which was fun. But we always felt slightly disconnected. This time we decided to be so simple it almost verges on being banal at times, but unapologetically so.
Production wise we’ve been inspired by the pop music we grew up liking in the late 90s early 00s – Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ and ‘Music’, All Saints, Texas, Sugababes, Beck, The Verve and of course AIR – mixing acoustic guitars with electronic shimmery sounds and certain types of harmonies and vocal stacks. We’ve also had hard rules about over working songs, not letting ourselves get too much of a perfectionist and just release, release, release…