London Grammar’s Dan Rothman thinks the band’s fourth album might mark the death of their youth. “There was a naivety about our process sometimes that we maybe have left in this record,” the guitarist and keyboardist tells Apple Music. “There were moments where we were testing a slightly more elevated process.” The grandly titled The Greatest Love signals the end of one era for the electronic-pop trio and the beginning of another. Eleven years since Rothman, vocalist Hannah Reid and drummer and programmer Dot Major emerged with their debut If You Wait, The Greatest Love is the sound of a band with miles in their legs and hard-won wisdom in their heads. It’s a rich, sumptuous listen, taking in minimalist dance bangers, contemplative folktronica, plaintive piano ballads and mellow, melodious indie pop. Key to its creation was the band coming by their own studio to operate from, setting up base in a room at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 complex and working to their own timescale. “You could take some time away and come back to it,” explains Major. “Before, we were always booking a big block of time in a big commercial studio but this time we had a freedom we didn’t have before. You could spend all day setting up a weird sound in a way that you just would never do in a studio because it would be costing you.” Rothman said the new approach brought an element of unpredictability, where the three-piece could mix up how they tackled each song, sometimes working alone, sometimes as pairs, sometimes all three of them contributing at the same time. It has resulted in London Grammar’s most expansive record yet. Let Rothman and Major guide you through The Greatest Love, track by track… “House” Dan Rothman: “This one has been around for quite a while as a piece of music but it took a long time to get right. There was an original demo that I’d made with Hannah and then Dot elevated it from there, and we also worked with George FitzGerald, who elevated it further, and Tim [Bran, producer] also got involved. We had a few different producers come into the fray to finish it. Hannah’s top line was so obviously hooky that it was one of those songs that stuck around. It always seemed like it would be the starting point of the record.” “Fakest Bitch” Dot Major: “Hannah’s lyrics are as dark as they are on the whole album on this. It almost sounds like it’s a song that she could have written with a songwriter in LA, but it wasn’t. It sounds further away.” DR: “We came together in one moment in the studio and it literally was written and almost recorded as it is. A lot of people commented to me about the lyrics, they think that the lyric is unlike Hannah because it’s not so esoteric.” “You and I” DM: “We went around a million different versions of it. In the end, we recorded that with a live rhythm section where a friend of ours, Seth Tackaberry, played bass live and I’m playing drums live, and then we underpinned the whole structure of it from that.” DR: “The feeling we were trying to tap into ended up being this kind of Michael Jackson, ‘Heal the World’ thing, which we probably have fucked up. Dot used lots of FM synthesis, those kind of sparkly ’80s sounds—which ironically is actually quite of the moment now. The turning point was when we were in rehearsals to go on tour with Coldplay and I had become obsessed with the idea of the rhythm section being a live rhythm section. We set up our rehearsal room as a recording studio environment and recorded Dot and Seth playing this rhythm section together. It had more like a Steely Dan thing going on and then everything could be tightened up and made drier, it suddenly sounded more like those records we were referencing.” “LA” DR: “It’s been quite a fragmented process because the album was recorded in all sorts of different studios. We came to Studio 13 to finish this particular track and did a couple of songs. That was a turning point and from there we found our studio, which is in Studio 13. It became a very symbolic moment of finishing this record because when we finished ‘LA’, we found the new home for ourselves here and that’s where we finished the record.” “Ordinary Life” DR: “Again, this was originally a demo that I made with Hannah a long, long time ago. I heard ‘Mood’ by 24kGoldn and then I went to the studio and wrote this riff and piano part, Hannah added a top line and then Dot took it, reproduced it, elevated it. It’s very much a Dot production in its entirety this track.” DM: “It was the first one that felt finished. We could have put that out two years ago.” “Santa Fe” DR: “The lyric and melody was from a dream Hannah had. Me and Dot did one day with a songwriter called Pablo Bowman. He heard the demo of ‘Santa Fe’ and was like, ‘Oh, I really like it,’ and he helped us restructure it and added another hook. He’s since had an enormous hit record—he co-wrote ‘Miracle’ by Ellie Goulding and Calvin Harris. But at the time, he hadn’t written that song. They always seem to write hits with other people!” “Kind of Man” DR: “I feel really content with how this is and where it landed. I wrote the original loop, the original idea, maybe six years ago or something. It lived on a computer and whilst we were on tour with Coldplay, Hannah heard it and she was like, ‘I really like this guitar loop.’ Seth then wrote this bass part to it which informed another melodic part and inferred this rhythmic thing which Dot developed on. We also got a guy called Jon Hoskins involved, who, again, since working with us has had the biggest hit in the world. I’m not joking, he wrote and produced the Post Malone track ‘I Had Some Help’—and ‘Kind of Man’ was released on the same day!” “Rescue” DM: “George FitzGerald literally did rescue this one. I really struggled to figure out how it should sound. When I first had a go at it, I kind of made it like Kelis’ ‘Millionaire’, that’s just how I heard it. I kept speaking to Hannah about it and she thought it should sound like ‘Paradise’ by Coldplay—there was a miscommunication! I was like, ‘I just can’t see that.’ We gave it to George and we were like, ‘Can you try and figure it out?’ He made the piano melody the main thing at the start of the track and it completely changed the feeling of it, and it was like, ‘This is it!’ George was hugely instrumental on the production of this track. He had the most prominent role of any of us.” “Into Gold” DR: “We were desperate for one more song and I was flicking through my laptop, playing shit demo after shit demo and Dot was like, ‘What’s that one? I like that one.’” DM: “Dan couldn’t even find the original stems to it, so I’ve actually AI-ed the vocal out from the original record. Hannah’s voice is from six years ago or whatever. I love Hannah’s lyrics on this and it was just worth exploring. Me and Dan did a day together where we recorded at my home studio, we had a great day in there, and this was done start to finish.” “The Greatest Love” DR: “This is very much Hannah’s song, it was really born completely out of her. She almost dreamt this song. Sometimes Hannah does that. She’ll literally write a song almost entirely in her head and then me and Dot have to try and somehow create the palette that she’s imagining.” DM: “You can hear the influence on this where Hannah listens to a lot of classic songs, even a kind of Disney-like element, like ‘Colors of the Wind’ from Pocahontas, things like that.” DR: “It seemed like an obvious album closer because it’s just so epic. The lyrical direction all stems from Hannah and she just had in her mind that The Greatest Love was the name of the album and it seemed like an obvious choice to close the record with this song.”