In his round-up of music in 2022, the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis praised acts like The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Arctic Monkeys and Beyonce for making immersive album experiences over disposable singles. Daniel Dunlevy follows a similar idea for his band’s second album Hoping for a Pyramid, a set of ten tracks with thematic and sonic unity.
The title is nothing to do with Toblerones but a wry epitaph Dan had spotted. First album But That’s The Thing was a promising start to the band’s career and this second effort builds on both live performances and the studio experience. This is a band recording, with bassist Ben, guitarist Simon and drummer Sam helping to flesh out the sounds, along with live keyboardist Ed who has taken over from former bandmember Tim as Dan’s main collaborator. Tim’s services, as well as other past members Chris and Josh, were called upon too.
As in the modern style, audiences know many of these songs because they have been part of the band’s setlist for a wee while. These produced takes try to nail down the essence of the song, add a bit of production and musicians that can’t usually fit on a stage.
Simon’s guitar kicks off Making Memories, which is in the same tenor as California, the famous theme to TV show The O.C. The lyric, sung near the top of Dan’s range, is about self-expression and seizing the day: ‘Why do I need to compare if I’m being true to me?’ The grungy Answer To My Needs is a drummer’s song where Dan channels his angst about ‘blocking toxic people from your life’. With double-tracked vocals, he wants them to ‘walk away’. It would sound great live beside My Paradise, another melodic rock song.
Naomi, with its memorable extended na-na section, finally gets a studio recording and has come a long way from its origin as a voicenote in Ed’s phone thanks to the horns decorating the melody. It’s part of the ‘girl’s name’ trilogy in a typical setlist along with Her Name Was Stephanie and Talk To Elizabeth. The song, whose verse is in G and whose bridge and chorus modulates up to C, is influenced by a lot of 2000s indie songs like Ruby and Valerie, as well as the protagonist of She Moves In Her Own Way, The Kooks’ best song. Our heroine here is one who, despite her mystery, captures the hearts and minds of the guys who surround her. She is ‘a teaser’, thus like the girl in Day Tripper by The Beatles; like that song, Naomi fades out tantalisingly.
Notice Me is another tune regularly heard live, with Simon singing the hooky chorus (‘When you gonna come down and notice my emotion’) which like Naomi has never left my head since I first heard it. The lyric is purposefully at odds with its melody, with Simon’s love going unrequited and our poor narrator falling for someone who isn’t right for him. The arrangement is excellent, with acoustic rhythm guitar anchoring the song as much as the backbeat.
Harmless Ricochets, meanwhile, is an example of one of my favourite musical genres: songs about songwriting. The title is a way of referring to ‘the creative, and ultimately constructive, tension’ that Dan and Ed share when working up a song: ‘Jam around till we feel at ease…Arguments after too much to drink…We need each other more than we like to admit.’ It sounds like a Paul Heaton song, especially with a rhythm to get your toes tapping, and can be extrapolated from writing partners to romantic partners, which makes the middle eight (‘something you will hear tonight’) mean something completely different.
Talking Silently, a song about frustrations in a relationship (‘no point talking if one side has the answer’), begins with a string section to remind listeners of songs like History by The Verve. It’s led by Dan’s tenor and layers some terrific harmonies from Zoe and John Coutinho on top of the diminished chords in the chorus. The middle eight is even better, while three vocalists all intone the buried background vocal line ‘What was I supposed to say?’ No wonder it is Dan’s choice as his go-to track on the album.
It’s interesting that the album kicks off with a polemic. Twenty seconds of Morse code introduces Lights Click On, which has a lyrical focus on the UK’s housing situation, as Dan explains: ‘I was walking down a street in one of the posher parts of London on a late spring evening. I think it was near Grosvenor Crescent in Belgravia. The time must have been 8:59 PM, and then suddenly I noticed that the lights in all the (very expensive) residential houses started turning on, one by one, all at the same time.’
It turns out that this is common in London streets which are unoccupied, with house lights set to a timer, ‘so sometimes whole streets could light up, in some kind of poignantly melancholic synchronicity’. Listen out for the shift in tonality from major to minor in the explosive and melodic chorus, with added horn section, which explains its position at the top of the album.
With lyrics like ‘illuminate an empty shell’ and ‘our sense of purpose devalued’, its singer agrees that the song is quite angry with ‘how a political system could let this happen when not far away you have families crammed into small flats and children living on top of each other. It’s also slightly wistful and nostalgic as it imagines the streets during the postwar era as an area of opportunity and community. But now the soul of the streets has been lost to ultra-wealthy people using London property as a deposit box.’
Leaving is the most interesting on the album from a production perspective, with a baggy shuffle and spiky guitar lines. It also starts with another catchy chorus, something Dan wanted to avoid on the album as a whole as it’s cliched in the current streaming era. Underneath the rhythm is a lyric which has empathy with the other side of the debate over the UK’s departure from the European Union; listen out for ‘Project Fear’, ‘your pot of gold’, ‘you’ll take it back’ and ‘you threw it all away’. Dan says it’s ‘about the sadness of moving on with things, but also with a message of “you made your bed, now you must lie in it”.’
An alternative lyric of Ed’s is from a romantic viewpoint: ‘It was from the perspective of a newly single person pretending to their ex to be super confident about their freedom when clearly that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’ Rather aptly, Leaving was pieced together from memory because there was no worktape the night it was being written, with drink overtaking the writing session, proving that Ed and Dan engage in harmless ricochets while not entirely sober.
Nostalgia in Your Dreams is a more obvious polemic, a sort of editorial about England in song. Nobody under the age of 80 today remembers Britain having an Empire, even as that becomes the totem for sovereignty and nationhood. In a protest song style, the track is unvarnished by production and is deeply pessimistic: ‘We don’t rule the waves…We will only feel it getting worse…What will it take now to keep the stars aligned?’
‘I just felt, at times, that a younger generation who were looking forward with progressive optimism were shot down by a somewhat older generation that were overly nostalgic for a version of this country that no longer existed,’ Dan says.
Into The Darkness, which opens with three bars of flute, closes the album with some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Dan is in his mid-thirties and has tried, he says, ‘to consciously practice the skill of listening to others. ‘Slowly some people, whether they’re close friends or even total strangers, started to share their inner monologues.’
He concluded that it was ‘helplessness’ rather than sadness that was the worst feeling. It should bring comfort to listeners, especially with its warm arrangement which may remind them of Stand By Me in parts. ‘Scar tissue around your soul’ is the most emotive line on the album, closely followed by ‘the train on the track that you can’t control’, which appears in the same stanza. It stands alone on the album and, given that it comes out in February, fits the gloomier time of the year perfectly.
More impressive than the arrangements, production and performances is the variety of topics tackled on Hoping for a Pyramid: songwriting, romantic despair, confidence in yourself and the state of the nation. Topics big and small, set to indelible melodies.
Daniel Dunlevy launches the album at London’s Courtyard Theatre on Saturday February 11. Tickets are available via thecourtyard.org.uk.