After years of bringing their own songs to Penelope Isles, Jack and Lily Wolter started work on their third album, ‘3,’ with a blank page and discovered what they could create together. Recorded largely live as a three-piece, the bigger, more immediate record carries heartbreak, memory, coastal imagery, and a decade of shared history into a new chapter for the band.

Stream: “I Loved You, Robert Pattinson” – Penelope Isles

Penelope Isles needed some time apart.

After years of making music and touring together, siblings Jack and Lily Wolter stepped away from the band following their second album, Which Way to Happy. Lily spent six months traveling through Sri Lanka and Indonesia, while Jack toured with other artists and both pursued projects of their own. The distance gave them room to come back to Penelope Isles differently.

Their third album, 3, reflects that change. Drummer Joe Taylor has become an integral part of the band, and the record was largely recorded live as a three-piece. Jack and Lily also wrote together from the beginning for the first time, rather than bringing separately written songs into the studio.

The roots of Penelope Isles stretch much further back. Jack and Lily grew up on the Isle of Man in a house where music was constantly playing. When Jack returned home from university around 2013, he taught Lily to play bass through Pixies songs. They started playing around the island together in Your Gold Teeth and eventually toured the UK and Spain through DIY shows. Lily later began writing her own music as Kookie Lou and moved to Brighton for university. Jack followed a year later, and Penelope Isles began.

For Jack, what they went through while making 3 has become more important than the finished songs themselves. After a decade of making music together and living through the changes that come with their twenties and thirties, the record carries the history of the people they were while creating it.

Lily immediately understands what he means. She feels the same way about her tattoos: the memory of getting one, who she was with and what was happening in her life can matter more to her than how the tattoo ultimately looks. “It’s about the time,” she says, before laughing at herself for being “so goddamn sentimental.”

Talking to Jack and Lily, there’s an immediate ease between them.

Conversation flows naturally, with each picking up where the other leaves off and laughter coming easily. Their British accents add a warmth to the exchange, and they seem genuinely entertained by each other. There’s no sense of taking themselves too seriously. Mostly, they come across as two people who truly enjoy being together, with the familiarity and natural rhythm of siblings who have shared most of their lives.

Atwood Magazine had the pleasure of speaking with Jack and Lily about growing up together, returning to Penelope Isles after three years away, making 3, heartbreak, life on the road, Robert Pattinson and Euphoria.

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:: stream/purchase 3 here ::

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Stream: ‘3’ – Penelope Isles

A CONVERSATION WITH PENELOPE ISLES

Atwood Magazine: People often talk about the distinctive quality of sibling harmonies. Do you think there’s something in the way your voices blend together that comes specifically from being brother and sister?

Jack Wolter: We’re from the same womb, so I guess so.

Lily Wolter: If we send our mum demos or new songs, sometimes she has to ask who it is that’s singing. She can’t tell. We have the same sort of tones and sometimes the same reactions. Our friends are sometimes like, “You look like your brother there.”

You grew up together on the Isle of Man and have been making music together for years. Can you tell me a little about how you first started making music together and how that eventually became Penelope Isles?

Jack: We’ve always been around music, as our parents were constantly playing music around the house. We started making music together around 2013, when I came back home to the Isle of Man from university.

I taught Lily how to play bass through Pixies songs, and we became really solid friends very quickly. We started playing loads of shows around the island with our band, Your Gold Teeth. It was a really beautiful time for us. We toured the UK and Spain together for the first time, playing DIY shows and figuring everything out as we went.

Then Lily started writing her own music and began her own project, Kookie Lou, before leaving for university in Brighton. I followed her down a year later, and that’s when we combined forces and began Penelope Isles.

At this point, how much of the way your voices lock together feels instinctive, and how much do you still consciously work on those harmonies?

Lily: I think, out of all of it, singing together is what we find easiest. Probably because we’ve grown up on the same music. I think that’s where it all started for us. We can just slot in very comfortably, and we know exactly where the other one’s going to go most of the time. I feel like that’s the one thing we’re most comfy with, in my opinion.

Jack: singing vocally, as well as arranging stuff and working stuff out musically, compared to working with other people in different projects, when me and Lily work together there’s almost a kind of fast track. There’s a little secret knowing between us. Usually you’d have to explain something to somebody or give a reference or talk about it first. Even recently, we’ve been rehearsing for a bunch of shows we’ve got coming up, and working stuff out just doesn’t take long. There’s a language that we have.

Lily: It’s a dynamic language as well. Siblings aside, I think you get that from playing in a band with someone for over a decade. You get to a point where you learn new songs and you fast-track it. That’s how we do it in Penny Isles. It’s a bit of a Penny Isles style that we just know now.

Three years have passed between your last show and this new chapter. Lily, you spent six months in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, while Jack toured with other artists, and you both pursued solo projects. When did this project begin to feel necessary again?

Jack: I guess it was necessary to take a break more than anything at the start of it. It was necessary to have some space from Penelope Isles. We had about a year off completely. Lily did a bit of traveling, and I was working with other projects. It was about a year into that break that we thought it was necessary to get going again. This record has taken us a lot longer than we initially wanted it to because of solo projects and other projects. It’s always been important for us to make time for it and make the right time for it. We didn’t really rush it.

Because we’re both quite busy, we had to schedule it throughout a two-year period. With a bit of breathing room at the start, it’s taken us three years to make it and carve out the time. It was an important record for us to piece together. We wanted to make sure that we did it at the right time and made space for it rather than rushing something and putting it out while we were still doing other projects.

You wrote 3 during a month-long surf trip in Portugal. What did being somewhere warm, outdoors and removed from your usual surroundings bring out in the songs?

Lily: It was pretty idyllic, wasn’t it? A friend of ours rented us this amazing surf and yoga retreat called Soul & Surf in Lagos, Portugal. They were renovating a new building, and we went and stayed in it while they were renovating it, so we got a cheap deal. It was basically just us and the staff living there. We wanted to include surfing in the trip. In hindsight, it made us extremely tired, surfing every day.

Jack: We’d get up in the morning and wake up in Portugal in this beautiful heat. It was autumn as well, so it wasn’t too hot. It was October time, I think. We were living our best lives, honestly. We’d surf every morning, come home and spend a couple of hours writing and demoing. Then we’d have a barbecue and pass out because we were so unfit and thought we were professional surfers. (both laugh)

Lily: I don’t think we ever intend for our songs to sound sunny and surfy. I think we write a lot about the sea because we’re always by the sea. We both live by the sea, and we’ve grown up by the sea. We write about the sea, summer, being underwater. It always ends up making a little appearance.

Jack: It was beautiful. The building had that kind of European coastal feel where everything is quite echoey. It had this lovely natural reverb when we were demoing everything, which was really nice. We were in our shorts and all sandy.

Lily: I remember because it was autumn, all the leaves were falling and coming into our little chalet thing. We found a sweet bowl. We found a ping-pong table. It was just great. It was just us two.

Jack: I do think Lily and I find a lot of inspiration in the coast because it’s so familiar. We’ve always lived by the sea, and I think we gravitate towards it. Maybe we find it easier to use the geography and the landscape as material.

Lily: We do write about being in the city as well. We write about feeling trapped, going out and getting steaming all the time, feeling run-down in the city and then wanting to escape and be in the country. I think we write about that quite a lot, don’t we?

Can you talk a little about YUGAKI, where that comes from and what it means to you?

Lily: It’s spelled YUGAKI, “you guys are killing it.” It’s an acronym. See? I knew I was going to use that word today. It’s basically an acronym for “you guys are killing it,” which is what our drummer Joe invented as a word to lift morale when we feel like we’re really not killing it and things feel like a bit of a struggle.

Which in the touring industry is very relatable for everybody. I feel like the stars at the very top would relate to it because it’s very unglamorous most of the time. Especially when you’re a DIY band, you haven’t been signed yet, you haven’t got much budget, your van breaks down, everything costs money and you can’t pay yourselves enough, you’re not getting paid enough.

Jack: On Instagram and your socials, obviously,

Lily: It looks like you’re killing it. (laughs)

Jack: You get a message from your mate from school and they’re like, “Oh man, you’re really killing it at the moment.” And it’s like, I just slept in the van because I was scared it was going to get robbed. Or I just had a shower out of a bottle on the side of the road.

Lily: I’ve just had meal deals once a day for a week. So yeah, that’s what it means. It always tends to lift spirits, and we’re trying to spread it. We’ve been trying to spread it to other bands over the past few years, and there are a few other bands that say it now as well.

Jack: We’re all very lucky to be doing what we’re doing, side note. Sometimes when you’re feeling it, it’s just good to let out a little (raises voice) YUGAKI!

(Lily laughs)

Joe Taylor has become a third member for this record. How did writing and recording with Joe change the rhythmic possibilities, rather than simply adding drums to what you were already doing?

Jack: When Joe joined the band, we were doing stuff that we’d already recorded. He was learning all the drums we’d written in the past. You could tell he was adding his little thing. It was like he was getting held down. You could feel him trying to do more, and I was like, “No, keep it simple.” Stuff like “Narbonne” has this very krautrocky beat, and I think he struggled not to do his Joe Taylor-y thing over it. But actually, I know he loves playing that song now. It’s very simple.

When it came to actually writing with him, he really is one-third of the album. He’s such a colorful drummer. He’s really filled in the gaps, and he’s such a voice on the record. It was a lot of fun. We didn’t really think too much about it. A lot of the takes you hear on the record are sometimes the second, third or fourth take that we did in the room because we had such a limited amount of time to make the record. Joe just did his thing without thinking about it too much. Lily and I are both perfectionists when we’re making stuff, so we didn’t really have time to think about it too much either. We just went with each other’s trust. He’s been a big part of it. We love Joe and his drumming, with his top skills.

You’ve been closely involved with the band’s visual world over the years. Do the artwork and videos develop alongside the music, or do you need to finish the songs before you understand what everything should look like?

Lily: This album campaign has been hard for us visually because we’re on such different schedules and in such different places. We’ve had to really think outside the box about what we can create. Luckily, we documented our time making the album really well.

Jack: That’s been a big part of it, hasn’t it? The actual recording process and photography. Between you and Joe, the still photography has become a big part of it. We didn’t have anything visually in mind before we started making the record. What did we want?

Lily: We wanted a crab.

Jack: We wanted a really cool picture of a crab because we did lots of fishing and crabbing when we were making the record. Toby Hayes, who’s a really good mate of ours, is an incredible graphic designer.

Lily: His design name is Bureau de Figue. He’s an incredible graphic designer.

Jack: He’s been a really big part of the artwork of this album, and he essentially curated the front cover. It was his idea to use that photograph. I don’t think we would ever really have thought to use that artwork for the album. When he was piecing together the artwork for the LP sleeve, he suggested it, and it became a really important part of the album.

Lily: I don’t think we could have made anything near as amazing and perfect for it, to be honest. We had to have a little bit of help because of how busy we were. I think he nailed our experience making it and turned it into this beautiful visual art.

Jack:Yeah, we wanted it to be Buzz, our lovebird who passed away early last year. Buzz was like a mascot for the band since the start, so we wanted to put him on the front cover. He does live within the album artwork. You just have to find him. He’s not on the front cover. He’s secretly hidden within the artwork, if you care to look when you get a copy.

“Am I Going Through This on My Own?” felt like a standout track to me. It’s beautiful, with a sense of melancholy that I think runs some of the record. Can you talk about the headspace you were in when it was written and what it means to you?

Lily: Thank you very much. Cool. I like that you like that one because I see that one as just a little

Jack: Yipper?

Lily: Yeah, a little nipper, as opposed to the big-hit singles. So that’s cool. I was just heartbroken. Rejected and completely heartbroken, to be honest. I think a one-sided heartbreak is way worse than a mutual heartbreak, in my opinion. I’ve had both. That’s it. Just one of those ones that spilled out.

Calling the album simply 3 could refer to several things: Your third album, the new three-piece configuration, and a third chapter for the band. What did the title mean when you chose it? Was it simply that this was your third album?

Jack: It’s genius, isn’t it? Absolutely genius. (laughs)

Lily: We’ve got these really shitty little hand tattoos that we did about 10 years ago. I did a three on Jack’s finger, and then on me I did a five. They’re our favorite numbers. We got to the third record and it was like, “Let’s name it 3.” That’s also cool because we’ve got a song called “Three.”

Jack loves things in threes, and I think we all know what’s going to happen when we get to the fifth one.

Jack: Our albums are named after songs as well. We’ve got a song called “Three,” so we narcissistically named our own album after our own song. The first album is named after a Thrills song, and the second album is named after a song by the Magic Numbers. I like it when bands do that.

The record deals heavily with love, heartbreak, memory and what remains after relationships change. Did spending time apart from each other alter the way you approached vulnerability when you started sharing songs again?

Lily: Damn. That’s a really good question. Do you write all these questions?

I do, except for a question I usually ask that my editor inspired.

Lily: You’re really good at it.

Oh, thank you!

Lily: Some might say you should do this as a job.

(laughs) I appreciate your vote of confidence!

Lily: I think it was also because it’s kind of the first time we’ve written an album together. Normally I would write my songs that I sing, and Jack would write his that he sings. We’d bring them together, and then we’d take it from there and work on all the parts and bits and bobs.

For this one, we were literally going from blank. That’s a very vulnerable thing to do. I think it took years of maturing and building up to it. I hope now every time we do it, it’ll just get easier and easier.

Jack: Yeah. We created something from scratch together. Obviously there were certain lyrics or ideas that we’d already come up with, and then we would come together and start again with it. I think both Lily and I, as brother and sister, during the making of this album, we’ve both gone through certain stages in our lives. We’ve been making music with each other for a decade now. Naturally over that time, especially in your twenties and your thirties, shit happens.

It feels like a more emotional record. Never mind what the album is, never mind how the songs sound and never mind what the art is that exists when you listen to it. The process of making it, what it was to make it and what it was to go through what we’ve done is, is to me, more important than what the song is that people are going to listen to. The making of it is more important than the actual thing. That’s why it feels like a special record.

Lily: That’s so funny because I always say that about tattoos as well. I always think the experience of getting a tattoo is more important than how it looks. That’s a really controversial opinion, but I look at all my tattoos and think about what happened at the time, what was going on, who did it and my surroundings. If it was really uncomfortable, I hate the tattoo, even if it’s the most perfect thing on my body. Do you know what I mean? It’s about the time, which is so goddamn sentimental. (laughs)

“Thinking Seat” deals with the strange mental space that can develop when you’re alone with your thoughts while driving. What was it about that particular setting that inspired the song?

Lily: We spend a lot of time in our van driving. Not only with Penelope Isles, but we both drive other bands for a living. Shout-out to any bands looking for a driver with a Sprinter van in the UK. We spend a lot of time behind the wheel, and we’ve always called the driver’s seat the thinking seat because you can just sit there and be in your own thoughts and hours go past. If something’s on your mind, like heartache, drama or a fallout with a friend, it can be torturous. It’s like a black hole, the thinking seat. You can just sink into this heavy, heavy, heavy weight.

That’s mainly what the song’s about. The chorus is actually quite light because we wrote it when we got back from Portugal. We were modifying a few last-minute bits and tweaking things, and we wrote the chorus in a bit of a different headspace. We ended up writing a load of mumbo jumbo, gobbledygook. Because that’s what goes on as well. Random shit.

Jack: I think when you’re forced to think about stuff, like when you’re driving, you obviously can’t go on your phone. We’re all so used to going on our phones now and distracting ourselves. ADHD, distracting yourself, attention spans, all of that.

Lily: Intrusive thoughts.

Jack: Yeah, it’s part of everyone’s days now. The chorus is a little playful comment on scattiness in general, not being able to hold any attention down or just being a bit useless. It’s also just a lot of stuff we quite like.

Dave Fridmann mixed Which Way to Happy. How has your idea of what a record should sound like changed between those two albums?

Jack: I think it’s very different. Straight off the bat, it’s the first record we’ve done in a different studio. We put our trust in somebody else in terms of engineering it. We just turned up as a band who could play our songs, and somebody else recorded it.

Lily: And we did it live as well.

Jack: Obviously we had some overdubs and stuff. In terms of the mixing situation, the finished product and how it sounds sonically, it’s so different to Fridmann’s. That whole process, as much of an honor as it was to work with him, and I think he did a fantastic job, was quite intense. He mixed that album, 10 songs, over 10 days. Each day he would mix one song, then he’d send it to me and Lily. We’d have a few hours to listen to it and send him some notes back. Then he would do those notes, print it, and that was it.

Like I said before, we’re quite perfectionist when it comes to making stuff, so that was a really stressful album. The whole album itself was quite a hectic time. He also made quite bold choices, and that’s why he is amazing. He makes bold moves.

With this album, we went into the studio and had 10 days to make it. It was a little bit more free. When it came to the mixing, we had a lot longer and discussed it with the guys at Black Bay. Pete, who recorded and engineered it, actually mixed it too, so it was a little bit more chill. I think this album sounds a lot bigger just from the space that we used. I’m really happy with how it sounds. I don’t think we’ve ever made anything like that before because we’ve always used a smaller, DIY studio-esque room.

Lily: I think it sounds bigger as well because we did it live. I don’t think our live sound translated much on our previous records. This time, it feels like you’re in the room with us.

What made you decide to record the album live?

Jack: When we finished touring the last album campaign, we did a couple of tours as a three-piece. Previous to that, we’d had four members, five members. Then we went down to three for financial reasons.

We got offered a tour with Bright Eyes, and we could only really do it without bringing a sound engineer and extra people. We just said, “Let’s do it as a three-piece.” We had such a good time. The three of us as people, as mates, and sonically as a band, it felt really exciting. I remember we said, “Next time we make a record, we should do it as a three-piece.”

Lily: That’s another reason why the album is called 3. We forgot to say that. We were just buzzing off the fact that the three of us could make that kind of noise. I feel like less is more. Stuff that we had tried to make sound really big as a five-piece, we could make sound bigger as a three-piece. There was a real beauty in that.

Lily: We also got really into that band Cola. They’re a three-piece formed in Montreal.

Jack: We had a bit of a rule that we were like, “Let’s just make something that is the three of us,” something that when we go and tour it, we can play as a three. We don’t have to worry about getting extra people in to do those little lead parts. In theory, anyway. We haven’t actually done it yet.

Lily: Not sure how we’re going to do lighting, but we’ll work it out.

Lily, you’ve talked about loving Robert Pattinson during the Twilight years. How did that memory become part of a song? What interested you in turning it into one?

Lily: I actually just watched the trailer for the new film with Robert Pattinson about the predator-catching thing. Do you guys know what that is? The predator hunters. It was a show on primetime American television where they would catch predators, pretend to be young kids and then catch them. Anyway, they’ve now made a film and he’s the host. It’s called Primetime. Ugh, I just can’t wait to watch that!

The reason why I put him in is because I feel like he has been quite a consistent love for me since the age of 13. I’ve always really, really loved him. The song isn’t about him. He’s a metaphor for thinking you’re a Billy Big Bollocks and thinking you know what you’re doing, thinking you’re good at writing music and thinking you have it all sorted, when really you’re just literally a kid who doesn’t know shit. The whole song is split into little chunks where we go back and talk about certain people we love and chapters of their lives. Then the chorus is me reflecting on my own childhood.

None of it is ever that deep for me personally. What about him in The Drama, though, when he has to do that wedding speech? Unbelievable. Have you seen The Drama?!

No.

Lily: Oh my God, you’ve got to stream it tonight. Absolutely one of the best films I’ve ever seen, to be honest.

Really?

Lily: Yeah. With Zendaya. I just finished Euphoria last night, guys.

Oh yeah? How’s that?

Lily: The new season is unbelievable. Everyone was writing it off.

I heard it was very controversial and there were all these articles about it, but I liked the seasons that I saw.

Lily: It is controversial. But don’t you want that? We don’t want another season that’s just suburban high school kids doing drugs. I wanted something a little different, and it definitely was. I was gripped from start to finish. It was like Tarantino.

You’re going on tour soon. Are you doing an album release show?

Lily: We’re separated when the album actually comes out, which is a bit annoying. We’ve got a bunch of shows in the following weeks. We’ll do something fun on the album release.

Jack: We’re going to get some Bombay.

Lily: Yeah, we’re going to go to Bombay. It’s a restaurant in Brighton that we’ve got a song named after.

Are there any songs in particular that you’re excited for people to hear that aren’t out yet?

Lily: “Moonwalk,” which is a song Jack’s been playing for about 15 years. Finally, we’re doing it in Penelope Isles. It’s so exciting. We used to have a band together called Your Gold Teeth back on the Isle of Man. That was a song Jack wrote back in those days. Every now and then, with every album, we’ve brought a Your Gold Teeth song onto a Penelope Isles album. For 3, we’ve got “Moonwalk.”

After stepping away, pursuing separate projects, traveling, touring with other artists and finally finding your way back to Penelope Isles, is there anything that feels possible for the band now that didn’t feel possible before?

Lily: That’s such a lovely question. So sweet. How do I answer it, though?

I feel like we’ve worked quite hard on mental health, particularly over the past year. In general, all of it feels so much more possible now compared to when we stopped three years ago.

It feels like we’re actually more excited than we ever have been to be cramped in a van for two or three weeks. We’re really, genuinely excited about it. Whereas before, there have been times when maybe there was a little bit of escapism involved.

Jack: I fully agree with that. What she said.

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