For Chartreuse, the rural Icelandic studio Flóki served as a refuge in a myriad of ways. Set in a secluded location on the northern tip of the island, a five-hour drive from Reykjavík, the Black Country band’s two-week stay here in the summer of 2024 was one of escape, connection and understanding. They returned home with a special, urgent and necessary new album, Bless You & Be Well.
The band’s debut album, 2023’s Morning Ritual, introduced a group that swerved the traditional tropes of indie-rock bands, instead using their instruments and innovative production techniques in unusual and thrilling ways. “We’ve always almost been anti-band,” the group’s guitarist and singer Mike Wagstaff says. “Whenever we hear something that sounds familiar, we try to fuck it up in some way. ‘It can’t sound like that, it sounds too real!’”
The four-piece are intimately interconnected – brothers Mike (guitar, vocals) and Rory Wagstaff (drums) are joined by Rory’s long-term partner Hattie Wilson (piano, vocals) and Hattie’s childhood friend Perry Lovering (bass) – and on album two, they lean into this unmistakable chemistry and towards sounds and rhythms they had previously shunned. Working with an external producer for the first time in Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile), Mike handed over the production reins and relished slotting back into the band as one part of the puzzle. As Petts-Davies, a calm and easy-going antidote to the band’s self-declared perfectionists, told them: “You are a band and this is how you sound, so let’s just run with it.”
The idea of being a proper, true band was particularly vital to the members at the time of recording. When heading to Iceland, Lovering was grieving the recent death of his father, while Wilson had just found out that she needed surgery aged 29 after years of pain in her hips. After the recording was finished, she had derotational femoral osteotomy surgery and has since been on crutches and re-learning to walk properly again.
In Bless You & Be Well, Chartreuse have made an album inevitably affected by these happenings, but one that shines a light on the power of finding a sanctuary amongst the struggle, through community, friendship, creativity and being in a band. It’s fitting, then, that – after initial hesitation and with some nudges from Petts-Davies – the quartet lock into an irresistible musical groove across the album that embraces their make-up as a band and truly excels.