onion

*onion* is the product of a difficult time for hard life’s Murray Matravers. In 2022, the Leicester band—then known as easy life—were on the up with second album *MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE…* scaling the higher reaches of the UK charts. But when they became entangled in a legal row with a certain budget airline the following year, though, it was revealed that they were being sued for trademark infringement by easyGroup, owners of the easyJet airline. It led to a name change, a pause on touring, and band members going off to do other things. That breakup, which coincided with a romantic one, left Matravers feeling adrift. “It was very overwhelming to the point where I needed to basically run away from my problems and fly to the other side of the world,” he tells Apple Music. Matravers decamped to Tokyo (he’d fallen in love with Japan on a previous tour) and found the inspiration he needed to write *onion*, named after the studio where it was created. It’s a collection of 14 raw and personal tracks that, like previous records, draws multiple styles and ideas around a foundation of hip-hop and alt-pop, veering from the instant pop of “OGRE” to the thoughtful reflection of “end credits.” “It was a bit of a soft quit,” he says. “More like, ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, so I’m going on holiday.’ I was working on the album for such a long time, but then ironically ended up writing the whole thing in about three weeks. It was this moment of inspiration. I was desperate to be in the studio, and I haven’t felt like that since I was 16.” In Tokyo, he met producer Taka Perry, who became his confidant and co-creator, giving him assurance in his ideas and the sense of urgency he needed to get the album finished. “I feel very different about things now. I’m hopeful. I love it as a body of work, but it also gave me my confidence back in writing music and that’s always something that makes me happy,” he says. Read on as Matravers peels back the layers of *onion*, track by track. “tears” “This was one of the only songs that was written in England, with my friend Rob \[Milton, producer of 2020 mixtape *junk food* and co-producer of 2021 debut album *life’s a beach*\]. Writing a whole album about the lawsuit would have been fairly dull, but I wanted to make sure the first song back after disappearing addressed it. I’d also gone through a romantic breakup, so ‘tears’ is an ode to the friendships that really held it down for me. The sample’s from Natalie Bergman’s ‘Keep Those Teardrops from Falling.’ When she had to clear it for us, she sent me an email saying, ‘I love what you’ve done to the song.’ That’s super cute because that doesn’t usually happen. It was a real moment.” **“OGRE”** “I don’t often have favorites, but ‘OGRE’ is a special song for me. It’s about a romantic breakup. It would’ve been easier if we hated each other or someone had really fucked up, but we just drifted apart. So the premise is: ‘If it’s easier for you, paint me as this terrible, ugly ogre and maybe that would help us get over it.’ Taka and I wrote and recorded it in two hours, with a particularly bad hangover. We were both crying. It’s one of the first songs that I wrote for *onion*. Knowing that we could make something this raw and beautiful kept us going.” **“y3llow bike”** “‘y3llow bike’ offers some light relief from what’s otherwise quite a heavy album. It’s literally about a girl that I met on a yellow bike and I thought it was so cool. I always start with a title and I’d written ‘yellow bike’ down, so I just kept saying, ‘Yellow bike, yellow bike, yellow bike,’ on top of the beat. Taka was like, ‘Yo, that’s sick.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? I’m just saying the title.’ After that, the rest of the song just happened.” **“crickets!!!”** “This is another one about the romantic breakup. We were doing no contact, which is good, but I wanted to say so much and there was just silence. You go from talking to this person every day, and then all I hear is crickets. I was working on the lyrics and Taka was working on the beat. For the first time, I barely played any instruments on this album. I was always on the lyrics, sat on my laptop or phone frantically. Taka made this super wonky song and we kept the vocal and deleted everything else.” **“proximityeffect”** “*onion*’s really helped me find a flow and a pattern that works for creating music. It was a bridge into a new mindset for myself. I’ve got my confidence back and I’ve started working on my next record, too.” **“Jane”** “‘Jane’ is definitely a more abstract part of the album. ‘y3llow bike’ was obviously this catchy pop song, so when we made ‘Jane,’ we were like, ‘That’s quite weird.’ I was so sad in Tokyo because I was missing my ex that I’d often cry in the streets, on the trains, or in an art gallery. And I talk about this in ‘Jane.’ I’m not embarrassed to cry, but I couldn’t stop. It’s very much an autobiographical little moment. I suppose it’s just one of the moments where I really admit, ‘Fuck, I’m lost.’” **“OCTOpus”** “I have this never-ending list of titles for each album and I shared it with Taka and I actually had the word ‘tako’ on it, which is the Japanese word for octopus. He preferred the English word. This is about a breakup, but also about how I want this octopus to tangle me up and strangle me. I felt like I was getting completely entangled in this person and couldn’t really get free of it, but I wasn’t mad about it. Musically, I think it sounds like quite a lot of our old songs.” **“tele9raph hill”** “Joe Armon-Jones from Ezra Collective plays some of the keyboards on this. It’s about the feeling of being stood on Telegraph Hill in Southeast London, looking out at the horizon, but also looking at your own life playing out in front of your eyes and how that makes you feel. I talk about some books in there. It’s a stream of consciousness and I talk about Bessel van der Kolk’s book *The Body Keeps the Score* and what’s it like to be a man in this world.” **“P1L0T”** “On my trip to Japan I was running away from all my problems: I’d had the breakdown with the label, I’d split with my ex. Sam had left the band. ‘P1L0T’ was one of the last songs we wrote, just before I was going home. And I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m going to get on this plane, and then it’s going to touch down and I’m going to have to deal with all of it.’ The top three panic attacks I’ve ever had have been in airports.” **“p a n o r a m a”** “This was the first song we wrote in Tokyo and it was the foundation of the sound of what later became the rest of the album. So it was an important song in terms of the sonics of it. I love having a bird’s-eye view of everything and things look very different when you’re in it on a macro scale. The lyrics are: ‘Watching that TV/Same old recipe/I change my POV/See it in a new light/Like a panorama.’ Like all these lyrics, I don’t think they’re abstract.” **“othello”** “‘othello’ was the last song we wrote for the album. It felt like the most immediate and I was like, ‘I want to put this one out. I love it.’ It’s about the old pub game, Othello, which Taka knew as well. We made this lyric together, ‘It’s never black and white. It’s playing on my mind like Othello.’ It’s about the feeling when someone’s there so much in such a big way, and then all of a sudden they just vanish. People literally just disappear. Retrospectively, we were thinking about how it could apply to Shakespeare’s *Othello* too, which is about jealousy and tragedy.” **“end credits.”** “The last stage of grief is acceptance and I think ‘end credits.’ was me saying, ‘That’s the way it ends. If this is my end credits, I think it’s all right.’ I shout out the fans and I say, ‘Thank you for waiting at the barrier and outside the tour bus and all those crazy times, and look how far we’ve come.’ I suppose there’s a bit of an arrogance to it, but I hope it doesn’t come across like that. I’m grateful for those experiences and, if this is the end, it’s the end of a very poignant, important story for me. And I should be OK with that, rather than being angry.”

A title which suggests multitudes, yet in reality - as with its edible namesake - just repeats more of the same.