The last time Prog spoke to Wheel, the future looked bright. The Anglo-Finnish band were about to release their second album, Resident Human, and frontman James Lascelles seemed in good spirits as he discussed mindfulness and the benefits of yoga and exercise, explaining how they helped him work through issues that had caused him to “completely burn out” in summer 2020. Only, Lascelles wasn’t out of the woods yet.
“It took me quite a while to bounce back,” he admits, a few years on from a period that by his own reckoning almost caused the wheels to come off completely. “Resident Human was a very odd place to be, for all of us. In many ways I think [recording] it was the only thing holding me together. All my paid work in Finland had stopped and I was just trying to grind away.
“Eventually I got a job in a factory,” he reveals. “For a moment it looked like our career was done; 2019 had been such an amazing year for us, so it really felt like this profound sense of loss.
