Lawi Anywar releases double A-side ‘The Laugher & One’

Earlier this year we stumbled upon the sweet vibes of Lawi Anywar and band at ArcTanGent Festival, crushing and crooning the Elephant in the Bar Room stage. We said we’d be keeping a close eye on this one, and fortunately for us, new tunes abound!

The quietly announced “carrot of vibecraft” double A-side, titled The Laugher & One, was announced via Instagram last week on the groups last day of touring. The release features the live staple “The Laughter” and “Phone”.

We asked Lawi Anywar about the release and were greeted with some of the most thoughtful insight we’ve heard. Anyone who can draw a line from Dave Brubeck to Battles to American Football will have us swooning every time.

Anywar said of “The Laugher”

“The Laughter's rhythm comes from a desire to do something in 5/4 but not necessarily wanting to go down the kind of Brubeck route with it - I wanted to attack it a bit more I guess.

I ended up being heavily inspired by the song TRAS2 from Battles's EP C/B EP compilation - John Stanier just has the heaviest tone and touch without losing any of that ruthless precision we love him for. I actually sampled the drum break from TRAS2 to build the foundation of the demo track, and built the track on top of that, then played my own version when it came time to record. The guitars were inspired a lot by American Football. The band, not the game. Lyrically the track is a lot about anxiety around legacy, fear of directionlessness, lack of purpose, all that good stuff.”

Of “Phone”, Anywar shares:

“Phone was originally a more straightforward kind of pop-structured sad man song with a heavy ending, but during the process of shaping the song I began to find that the heavy ending was too tonally disparate from the rest of the song - the track didn't really "earn" the ending, I guess you could say. Instead of landing the proverbial plane quickly and efficiently, I began toying with the idea of just drawing out the journey a lot, which made sense thematically.

For me, the song deals with realising something's over, or changed, or unrecognisable, and then being stuck in the cyclical thought patterns or spirals that come with that. So the aim became to just have a slow burning build on a heavy groove until the end.

Dom (dear friend, producer & engineer at Humm Studios) and Boci (also friend, incredible artist, songwriter, performer, dreamweaver) were hugely instrumental in taking the song to the next level on that front; Dom with his beautiful mix, making sense of all the chaos and moving parts, and Boci with her empathic understanding of the song's vibe, and the translation of that into incredible string work. It all came together really organically.”

Stream The Laughter & One and find all other releases available to buy on Bandcamp.