“It became a symbol to me of everything that I was marinating in, all this existential fear of this relationship with time that was just changing,” says Cate Le Bon, on her latest studio album, Pompeii. “Someone was just constantly fucking with the focus lens.”
The story of how came to be seems reflective of the artist’s struggle to create amidst a global pandemic: plans were made, flights were booked, studio space was found—only for plans early last year and was looking at recording in beautiful places like Chile and Norway. “I have always got these ideas of, you know, when I make a record, I want to go somewhere and I want to put myself in a vacuum and I don’t want to be disturbed,” the Welsh musician says. But the pandemic hit, she turned to her local surroundings, and found a terrace house in Cardiff, which she’d lived in 15 years ago. “A vacuum was dictated to us,” she laughs, “but not by our own design.”
