A few weeks ago I chanced upon a song called Shapes Appearing by the ludicrously (well) named Merry Christmas. The song was an utterly brilliant, colourful, and joyous mess of pop hooks and melancholia, and the band turned out to be one of the most batshit insane unique that I’ve ever come across. On the strength of that one song, I ended up listening to their debut album The Night The Night Fell in amazement. You can read my embarrassingly gushing review here, but the short version is that I was really blown away by and I’m already staking claim to a place in the queue for a vinyl copy (more on that later).

Because Merry Christmas seem such an interesting and endlessly creative bunch of people, I wanted to throw some of my typically convoluted questions their way. Fortunately they turned out to be into the idea too, and Ben (and Yuki) from the band took the time to talk about influences, that band name, artwork, plans for the future, COVID-19 (inevitably), and of course the magnificent The Night The Night Fell. They also kindly sent across a number of cool photographs from the making of the record, which are scattered throughout the piece.

(Note: just a reminder, as always, that my questions are in bold and Ben & Yuki’s responses are in plain text).

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• Hi Ben. Obviously I thought the album was great, so I’m happy you wanted to talk a little about it. Anyway, to kick things off, I’m really interested in how the band started. I did see somewhere that you’re split between the UK and Japan at the moment. How did the band form? I could be wrong here, but I’m presuming that three of you are from the UK, so how did you find yourself in Japan to begin with? Also, how did you join up with Yuki and Yurie?

Actually the band started with a classified ad I posted shortly after arriving in Tokyo. Matt (drums and actually American) and a mysterious Swedish guitarist responded to my cries for attention and we got on with throwing music at each other until it started to stick. Joe-Joe swung in to fulfil bass duties on his Bottom Master (imagine a guitar but in the range of a normal bass). Unfortunately, the mysterious Swedish guitarist mysteriously disappeared and so we were back to three. At a friend’s show around the time, Yuki had painted a fridge as an art installation and she confessed to wanting to play live music despite never having done so before. Grabbing a synth and a mic she confidently strode into the recording studio as we put our first demos to tape. Our first show, despite being raucous and nerve-wracking, caught the eye of Barihi who was friends with friends and afterwards she made a formal request to join the band (“I want to join” – “Yes, that’s fine”). With trombone and glockenspiel skills in her repertoire, who were we to refuse? Merry Christmas was born. Last year, Yuki and I moved back to the troubled isles I call my homeland but the band is currently still working hard despite the distance and the nightmare world that abounds. 

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• While on the subject of the band’s formation, I really love the name. Perhaps that’s because I’m speaking as somebody that’s part of a band with a somewhat unwieldy name myself, but I think it suits the sound perfectly and I like the audacity of using something so ubiquitous. Anyway, how did you arrive at Merry Christmas, and do you think it has its disadvantages?

Band names are really fun to think up and the less generic the more likely I am to be interested in a band initially. I just thought that no one would call their band Merry Christmas because it’s too ridiculous. Turns out I was wrong and there are a few other bands with this name. I emailed one in San Francisco asking if they would do a split CD with us, but they never got back to me. They’re good too which was a refreshing surprise (great minds, thanks a lot) but a shame we couldn’t make that happen. My old band was called Cats and Cats and Cats and we didn’t predict how popular cat videos would become on YouTube. However, I really should have predicted Merry Christmas being completely ungooglable at any time of the year (try “Merry Christmas bandcamp” folks). I do get to make the joke around October each year that all stores have started stocking our merch. Small victories. 

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• With The Night The Night Fell, I picked out a few bands/records that it reminded me of in places. My reference points were quite broad – Flaming Lips, Vampire Weekend, Neutral Milk Hotel – and I was curious as to who you guys were listening to around the time that you made it? Are there any particular artists or records that directly influence what you do?

Neutral Milk Hotel was our biggest influence when starting the band and while with the new album we tried to retain the warm, lofi folk sound we had started with, our drummer began experimenting a lot with timings and after getting over the shifting time signatures of Forest of Bones we all ended up writing more complex rhythms into our songs. Another band most of us like are the London art nutters Buttonhead and we fed off their unpredictable song structures. Personally I was also influenced a lot by Japanese artists Oono Yuuki and Play New Moments, who we played a few shows with. In addition, we did a lot of gigs with these wonderful people who certainly helped shape our sound: Echoscape, Loqto, Eupholks, Metro Ongen, Sir Fennek, Blanco and Spiro. Listen to them.  

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• How does the writing process for the band work? Do the songs typically come from one person and then get fleshed out together?

It really depends on the song but often it goes like this:

1) We write a short riff or melody line while messing about in the practice room.

2) I take it home and see where it goes in my brain/when I’m twiddling on guitar. If it’s good, it’ll normally grow into a hideous monster.

3) I bring hideous monster back to the studio and we trim its peripheries, shift around all of its internal organs and then play it exactly one billion times until we’re blindfolded in separate prefectures yet still playing in time with each other.

4) The song name game begins! Changes to Numbers Broken was coined by Matt’s four-year-old son when describing a broken lift display. Magnets is a shortening of I Can’t, I Have Magnets which I received in a drunken text at 4am one night. 

Other songs though have appeared fully formed and one or two were stitched together in the recording studio and then named something sensible. For further reading here’s a story about the writing of Changes to Numbers Broken.

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• The arrangements on the record are fantastic. I can’t even begin to get my head around how you arrive at a song like Darkness Will Find Us All. How do the arrangements tend to develop?

Often it’s a case of trial and error where we take a section that maybe lacks interest or flair and keep messing with it until we’re happy that it’s the best it can be. Sometimes this takes months, in the case of songs like Shapes Appearing or Magnets, but we got a lot more efficient at this over the writing of the album and tracks like Changes to Numbers Broken came together a lot more quickly as we got better at working like this. Darkness evolved pretty naturally from chords and a melody line I brought into practice one day. Gradually as we all got more confident it became faster and faster and became a favourite live due to its energy. However, later on I stumbled upon the original demos I had made and really liked that style and mood too, so we put together Darkness Will Find Us All Part 2 which is on the Dark Forest Be Gone EP. 

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• Even though it stands as a body of music whether you are aware of it or not, I touched on the narrative that runs through the record in my review. Can you give a bit more information on the story and where it came from?

The narrative follows the journey of a girl who has fallen into a coma after a car crash on a snowy mountain road. She wakes up in the perma-dark, surrealist land of her unconscious and begins moving through the landscape which is also her own body while outside surgeons operate to keep her alive and her boyfriend wrestles with how long he should hold on for her. There are polygonal castles she has to destroy, flying machines she has to pilot, and in the end a mountain to climb topped with a huge crown she enters and a big stone carving of her brain inside. I won’t spoil the ending for you, because really I left it vague enough to be unspoilable. Make up your own mind… or don’t? As for where it came from, this is a really hard question as I don’t really know where this kind of idea comes from, but I would certainly say the imagery I had in mind when writing a lot of this stuff was heavily inspired by a zine called The End is Neat by Michael McCardle about a cute little guy traveling through hell. 

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• I’d be interested to know what success means to you as a band. Having listened through the album quite a lot, I think it’s totally an artistic success, but I guess what I mean is: what does success look like to you? Is it reaching that one person who really gets it, or selling loads of units?

Success is making a piece of art that I can still listen to in ten years time and be proud of. We still have nine years and eleven months until I can test this with The Night The Night Fell, but I’m pretty confident I’ll still be listening to it and smiling. Everything else is pretty much out of my control so I try not to base my idea of success on that, but I won’t pretend it’s not awesome when we meet someone that it really resonates with. I just know how it feels to be completely in love with an album or song and so it does feel very special when we can make other people feel that way. If we sell a bunch of downloads (or eventually physical merch) it’ll help us record in the future so it’s much more a practical thing for us.  

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• The artwork is amazing too. Really fits the record, and would look great on a 12″ sleeve. Who made that? Also, do you think that the artwork is a big part of what you’re about?

Our multi-talented vocalist/synth player Yuki did all of the artwork, so over to her…

Yuki: As I’m an illustrator by trade, the band’s artwork means a lot to me. I want to make something personal that I can be proud of but also that suits the mood of the music and who we are as a band. This can be a hard balance as my personal style often tends towards a surreal and slightly grotesque feel, whereas Merry Christmas artwork requires a little more charm and joy on top of the weirdness. The album cover is how I imagined the scene of one of the songs from the album, Darkness Will Find Us All, where black avalanches of darkness pour down from the mountains. I thought this was a good opening scene in the story where something ominous is starting to happen. If you look closely there are details referring to other songs on the album, but we’ll leave them up to you to find (hint: look in the sky to start with). As Ben has mentioned, we’re planning a physical release soon on CD and vinyl so I’m looking forward to depicting other settings from the album on the back and inside covers. Ambitiously, I’m thinking of turning this album into a graphic novel, so please wish me luck!

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• Obviously I can’t do one of these interview features at the moment without mentioning COVID. Has it had a big effect on you as a band? Are you split between the UK and Japan because of it?

Actually no, Yuki and I had already moved to the UK so it’s a convenient excuse to explain why we haven’t done a proper album launch show yet! In fact we did some lockdown live shows (up here which we probably wouldn’t have, had it not been for everyone being on lockdown so we actually did more than we’d planned! We are still gutted that we can’t go back to Japan to play a launch show yet. We’ll just have to be patient with that one. 

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• What are your future plans for Merry Christmas? You’ve ticked off the ‘joyous album about a girl in a coma’ box now. What comes after that?

Pandemic depending we’ve got some surprises around our namesake’s festive season this year. As mentioned above we’re discussing some merch options at the moment and Yuki is currently burning the midnight oil to get some more artwork pasted together. Personally I’m pushing for a world tour once we get out of this mess, but we might have to wait those nine years, eleven months for things to be tour-friendly again. The next item on our to-do list is a math-pop soap opera about embezzling dolphins.

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Thanks so much to Ben and Yuki for taking part in this. I’m sure I don’t have to say it again, but I will anyway: Merry Christmas really are quite something and I’m excited to see where they go next. Go seek them out on Instagram, Twitter, Bandcamp, and Facebook.