The Armoires have once again crafted a masterful album, ‘Octoberland,’ blending rich pop textures with a sense of creative community and deeply felt collaboration.

Their latest release taps into a collective spirit, with every track showcasing the band’s synergy and vision. In this exclusive interview, Christina and Rex share the stories behind the album’s unique songwriting process, filled with vivid imagery and literary references. They dive deep into how ‘Octoberland’ was shaped by their shared experiences and how they built a world around these themes of connection and creativity. The stories within ‘Octoberland’ are set against a timeless backdrop, enhanced by Ridley Broome’s Art Nouveau-inspired, anime-infused illustrations gracing the LP and CD editions. Blending pop-rock influences from the ’60s to the present, an aesthetic rooted in the 1890s, and lyrical references to ancient folklore and mythology, The Armoires—Rex, Christina, Larysa, Cliff, and John—along with Michael Simmons, have not only crafted their definitive album but have also created a fully realized world…

“Mythology, folklore, literature, storytelling traditions”

‘Octoberland’ sounds like a place we’d love to get lost in. But what’s the weirdest place that’s inspired your songwriting—be it a literal location or a strange headspace you found yourselves in?

We started off a song called ‘Awkward City Limits’ on our previous album (2021’s ‘Incognito’) by singing “The poetry of unloved places,” and it goes on to mention some cities with really unfortunate names… City of Commerce and City of Industry here in California, and Big Ugly, West Virginia—places like that. We think about the fact that no matter how kind of lame a place may seem, it’s central to somebody’s – or a lot of somebodies’ – lives. Maybe it’s a little odd to root for the underdog when the underdog is a place, but we do, a bit. But on ‘Octoberland,’ there’s Snake Island, from ‘Snake Island Thirteen.’ It’s a real place in the Black Sea that came to our attention during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we found that it had a really wild mythological significance of its own. It was already haunted by the ghost of Achilles and inhabited by the white snakes from which it takes its name. A real “liminal space,” in our own lingo… definitely a place that feels like it belongs within the borders of ‘Octoberland,’ although our hearts wish it to remain with Ukraine as it rightfully should.

<a href="https://bigstirrecords.bandcamp.com/album/octoberland">Octoberland by The Armoires</a>

There’s a lot of “we” on ‘Octoberland’—like a rallying cry for togetherness. But what’s the most rebellious or totally unorthodox thing any of you have done in the studio?

We’re pretty collaborative when we run our own sessions, or, on this album, working with Michael Simmons, so things don’t get especially wild! There’s a pretty obscure track we did for a fundraiser during the pandemic, though, called “Ghost of Fall Singer in Depopulated Griefscape.” Counter to our usual sound, which is thought of as, for lack of a better word, “pretty,” we thought up this weird idea of what Mark E. Smith of The Fall would make of the crazy world of that time, and we decided to make a whole “fake Fall song” without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s pretty harsh, but for some reason, to this day, we find it oddly touching, picturing the ghost of MES thinking, “I imagined so many apocalyptic scenarios in my lyrics, but this is just a bit much.”

Would love to know more about the recording and producing process for your latest album…

Probably the most important thing is that we wrote it all together, and all at once. We (Christina and Rex) did demos for all eleven songs, presented them to the band (who fortunately really loved them), and enlisted Michael Simmons (sparkle*jets u.k.) to produce it, and then we started working on pretty much every song at the same time. John Borack tracked almost all the drums in two sessions at Simmons’ place, and we layered over those – recording a lot of it at Big Stir Records HQ in Burbank and a fair bit at Simmons’ studio in Long Beach (and for those not familiar with how big LA is, those locations are not close to each other)! But probably the biggest thing is that, while we certainly all got creative at times, there was no reinventing the wheel… we all really had it as our mission to just do the best and most deeply felt versions of the songs we had at the outset. ‘Octoberland’ sounds immeasurably better than the demos, but if you heard them, you’d hear that it’s very much the same record. It held its shape for the year and a half that we took to make it. The longer it did so, the more confident we were that we were making the album we were meant to make. It still feels a little miraculous to us even now.

Can you share the inspiration behind these songs?

They all come from the same place, having been written at the same time, and they really influenced each other. One thing we knew when we started writing the record was that we wanted to do some really brash, almost goofy things—a theme song for the band, songs with countdowns and spell-along or nonsense choruses, just big, silly gestures embracing the fundamental absurdity of rock and roll. What surprised us was that there came to be this whole underlying thematic thing linking all the songs together… this vibe of mythology, folklore, literature, storytelling traditions— all of them a little skewed and eerie, but all there as a mutual frame of reference in a fractured and overwhelmingly self-interested world. We felt like, by tapping into that, we were creating a sort of communal bond, not just within the band but with our wider musical community, and between us and anyone who cared to listen closely enough. So our main inspiration here was world-building… using our sound to create a welcoming place, the fictional ‘Octoberland,’ for anyone else feeling the same kind of unease about the modern world that we do. We say in the first song, “this was never about comfort, it was always about risk,” but at the end of the record, we concede, “it might be about comfort in the end.” You just have to go through a lot of stuff to get there, and we do.

How does ‘Octoberland’ differ from your previous albums, both in terms of sound and the overall themes you wanted to explore?

Sound-wise, this is the band: the definitive Armoires. We wrote for what we’d come to understand our strengths and our unique quirks to be, and it’s overwhelmingly just the five official members—Rex and Christina, Larysa Bulbenko on viola, John Borack on drums, and Cliff Ulrich on bass—performing it, along with the expected tasteful and brilliant contributions from producer Michael Simmons. It’s just very focused in that sense, after most of our other records having lots of guests—which we loved doing, but here, it was us writing a whole new set of songs and needing them to represent exactly who we are. That’s even a part of our subject matter, the singular nature of the sound we make as a collective. Thematically, like we were saying… it’s about community. That’s always been there in our best songs, but here we push it and focus on it, and it bleeds into whatever story we may be telling. Like you said… there’s a lot of “we” on this album, and that’s by very conscious design!

You’re known for your intricate harmonies and musical chemistry. Did that click right away when you formed, or did it take some awkward first rehearsals? What’s the funniest memory from your early days as a band?

We figured out we had a good harmony sound before we even thought of forming the band… that was something we discovered by singing karaoke together and teaching music together. The sort of oddball instrumentation was more a function of what we had at hand, at least initially. There was this decision early on that it was going to be a really twelve-string-centered band (Rex has always played at least half his material on a 12-string, and Christina was just really partial to making it the main thing), and it was just so cool to bring Christina’s daughter Larysa in, with her main instrument being viola… so we immediately had two sonic lynchpins that were a little unusual, with the keys being the most variable sound in the regular lineup. And walking into the recording of Octoberland, we were pretty honest with ourselves that the earlier records had been a lot of trial and error in learning how to arrange for our instrumental lineup. But we learned! We took a good hard look at what had worked and what hadn’t, what made a good Armoires song, and tried to do only that, being pretty confident we had it worked out… which felt good.

Funny early story? The first record ‘Incidental Lightshow’ was really hard to make for so many reasons. We hadn’t met so many of the key collaborators we know now and didn’t have a local producer, so we were having tracks mixed by a friend of a friend in Canada. He did a great job, but we were pretty naive about engineering ourselves and handling the files. So we got our first “final” mix back and we were a bundle of nerves cuing it up to hear it. It kicks off and… the vocals don’t come in. Half a measure later, they do… all the vocals, including the big stacks of harmonies, are two beats late for the entire song! And amazingly, the melody tracks with the chord changes, all the way through. It’s a perfectly functional song, just not the song we wrote! Totally our fault, but it was the start of us learning to get ourselves together and take more control of our own work. Our process has changed so much since then that it’s almost unrecognizable. But that did happen!

Big Stir Records feels like a natural extension of your creative community. What’s been the most surreal experience from running a label alongside making your own music? Any stories about unexpected encounters with fellow artists?

The first few that come to mind are absolutely bittersweet. Sharing a bill with The Records just months before John Wicks passed away. The surreal experience of having Pat Fish, The Jazz Butcher himself, see us play in Northampton – he had very kind words for us, too, which was fair because we did one of our best sets ever there – only a year before he, too, passed (it makes no sense that we never got to see him perform in turn). And the loss of Matthew Seligman (of The Soft Boys, among others) just shortly after he’d contributed his exquisite bass playing to one of our songs. Most of our encounters with “legends” are delightful, though… working with Graham Parker has been a dream. It was fun watching him tour the US and meet up with the other artists on the label, from town to town, resulting in a photo album of “GP meets everyone coast to coast”… that was really cool!

“We feel like ‘Octoberland’ created its own little world”

‘From We Absolutely Mean It’ to ‘Snake Island Thirteen,’ you’ve tackled everything from personal moments to global issues. What’s a theme or story you haven’t explored yet, but feel is lurking just under the surface, waiting for its moment?

Lurking under the surface is probably the exactly correct way to put it! We feel like ‘Octoberland’ created its own little world, but the record is kind of the trip to the place, only arriving at the end. The next set of songs probably takes place there. The little bits of them that we have in our heads are a bit “witchier” still. And it’s kind of partly in the past, partly in a different version of “now”… we considered the songwriting on this album to be world-building, and we might need to define that world a tiny bit more so we know what kind of things the people living there would sing about. It’ll sound good to people living in the now and on this planet, too, but we like having guidelines for ourselves, so we might need to understand our own magical system, who and what our witches are and what they’re up to. Or maybe we’ll take a whole different tack, who knows? That’s just where our heads are at now… with the witches in the hills.

What’s next for you?

There’s still a lot of caretaking for ‘Octoberland’ yet to go. We’ve made the whole promotional campaign into a series of little events, unveiling the songs and the aesthetic bit by bit, and that’s not entirely done… there’s another video, and probably another single yet to see release. We’ve also started to think about playing live again. At the outset of recording this record, we assumed we’d play a big release show, but in the end, all the media stuff that had to be done took the idea of rehearsals off the board. So we may look at doing that next year. On the other hand, we’re sort of feeling a lot of creative wind in our sails, and it’s hard not to want to dive into the next set of songs. We’ll probably have a clearer picture in the next few months.

What about for the label?

It’s interesting, but every year in the life of Big Stir Records seems to have its own identity. We love our 2024 releases so much… there was a real feeling of diversity and experimentation without any loss of the melodic focus, with everything from post-punk (The Jack Rubies) to folk rock (Hungrytown) to hometown heroes and collaborators like sparkle*jets u.k. and Blake Jones & The Trike Shop, and real ’60s veterans like The Cyrkle… the core of it all felt like ’80s college rock, and the wide span of genres that scene embraced. We ended the year with our own album and Librarians With Hickeys, which seemed very, very “college rock”, and that felt really good. Next year, between our wonderful partners at SpyderPop Records and our own roster, we’re looking at some really exciting releases from some power pop veterans at the top of their game… and, of course, a few surprises. It’s still all coming into focus, but there’s a lot to be excited about!

Klemen Breznikar

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