Accepting yourself is one of the most daunting, challenging and altering things you can do in this life. To see every asset of your being, the good and the bad, the wins and the failures, the lessons and the mistakes, all in the same light, and use the clarity uncovered to push you forward into ever greater things, it takes a lot of work. But when it all slots into place, you wonder why you didn’t take the steps sooner.
James Veck-Gilodi has been confronting this for most of Deaf Havana‘s career. And it is only now, within the creation of their stunning seventh album, ‘We’re Never Getting Out’ (out October 3rd), that it has all started to make sense. The realisation that he has spent years swaying between extremes of existence, never genuinely finding contentment or happiness at either end. Forever feeling like every step of the band’s journey to now – through Top 10 albums, sold-out tours, total breakdowns, and endless rebirths – has been to please someone else rather than himself. A constant battle of expectation, both inside his chest and on the turntable, that was always going to boil over at some point.
“I have always wanted to change myself,” he explains. “But I’ve also never really owned up to and accepted my mistakes. I’ve just punished myself, told myself that I hated myself and ended up cosplaying as a completely different person instead. All it took was for me to take the best parts from everything I have done and apply them without actually trying to totally change who I am in the process. Maybe it’s my age or mindset, but I accept who I am now and feel I know how to make myself a good person.”
Of new single, ‘Tracing Lines’, James says, “it was the last song we wrote for the album. George (Glew, producer) felt like there was something missing and he was right, it ended up being one of my favourite songs on the record.”
“I think it perfectly sums up how I was feeling during that time period, embarrassed about my failed relationship and very aware of my ever increasing age. I found myself at 34 years old, single and living back at my family home with little to nothing to show for the past twenty years of my adult life. It’s really about feeling like you’ve wasted so many years of your life and wondering where they went. Whilst friends were building lives and careers for themselves, I’d just been fucking off and fucking up, never taking anything seriously enough. For me, this is the saddest song on the record, but it still has a little glimmer of hope and I think that translates through the music.”
Until the Summer of 2023, James felt like he was sleepwalking into another edition of this cycle. But over the next twelve months, he would make two decisions that would ignite something different inside of him and would lead him towards ‘We’re Never Getting Out’. The first was taking the initiative to scrap a body of work that he and guitarist and brother Matt Veck-Gilodi had been working on, one that was much in the same vein as 2022’s ‘The Present Is A Foreign Land’ but he felt no emotional resonance with.
The second was in the Summer of 2024 when he finally called time on a marriage which he had felt unhappiness in for longer than he would like to admit, yet had been scared to step out of because the potential uncertainty and loneliness of life on the other side was so great.
In choosing to no longer just coast, to remember that making music should be a pleasure and not a hindrance and to realise that you only mask desolation for so long, he grasped onto the notion that he was the one in control of his life, his trajectory and his future. Nobody else.
“Facing these things made me realise that I had the potential to change how my life was going,” he remarks. “I was probably scared of what was on the other side for so long that I would settle for whatever misery I was living in. But taking those steps made me realise I can do things that will benefit me in the long run and do things that are good for me rather than going in the same loop as I always have.”
Though for such a collection of life and mindset-shifting realisations, the songs that materialised for ‘We’re Never Getting Out’ are, despite their shimmering disposition, devastatingly sad. Every anxiety, every step back, every wrench of the heart that comes with realising the life you thought you had built is crumbling around you is on display in vivid colour. It’s heavy going, heart-breaking and spine-tinglingly honest in equal measure.
Alone, such an undertaking would crush the spirit of many of us, but thankfully, he had George Glew to help. A producer who has worked on pop opuses with the likes of Keir, Hanniou and Scout, he was also staying in James’ spare room whilst in-between houses when all this change started to manifest. What went from broken-bodied diary entries turned into hours of playful musical experimentation between the two. Having never co-written with anyone before, no longer solely bearing the weight of the creative load opened up a whole new world for James and the potential for what Deaf Havana could be. Rather than retracing the same lines that offered some sort of familiar security, he was able to push towards a sound that he realised he had been trying to harness for a decade and a half. It was a shining lightin a truly dark moment.
The result of those hours spent in the spare room has added such different gravitas to the Deaf Havana sound. The heart-on-sleeve directness that British rock music so perfectly embodies and still sits proudly within the band’s foundations is very much present but with lashings of modern pop sensibility and outlandish structuring added, bringing it hurtling into the here and now. Like forcing the timeless passion of Bruce Springsteen and the warts and all unravelling of Weezer through the kaleidoscopic and intimate mesh of Bon Iver. Throw in exemplary performances from Ross MacDonald of The 1975 on bass and Freddie Sheed, who has performed and recorded with everyone from Lewis Capaldi to Take That, on drums – “There are so many times where I wouldn’t have asked either of them to play because I thought there was no reason for them to say yes,” James remarks – and you have Deaf Havana as it has always meant to be. Vibrant, textured, daring and irresistibly catchy.
However, in the aftermath of this episode, it’s only now that James truly sees and appreciates that. Because he was at his lowest in the middle of the creation, from the spare room in London to Otterhead Studios in Rugby in November of 2024. The aftermath of these enormous life decisions not paying off just yet, he is open to admitting that it is the only recording process he has truly hated. But perhaps that was just another facet of change that he needed to go through.
In embracing the rough with the smooth and taking the steps he never thought he was going to, James has found a balance that probably wasn’t possible to locate in the past. And ‘We’re Never Getting Out’ as a title defines that feeling perfectly and reflects even more in how he is looking to the future. There are things we will never truly escape. The life we have lived so far, no matter how much of a success or failure we see it being, is committed to the echelons of history. The scars will remain, and the remnants of our past lives will constantly flow through our bloodstream. But in using that to their advantage, Deaf Havana has never felt more prominent or powerful. Instead of hiding behind what could have been and focusing on the here and now of doing what feels right rather than what others may think, they have ignited the fire that has made them such a force to be reckoned with once more.
“It’s excitement I feel now and not dread,” James smiles broadly. “I used to dread going on stage and on tour. I used to dread releasing albums and talking about them because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now, I’ve never been clearer about what this all is. I know I can back myself enough to know I will put everything I have into this. And I am so proud of these songs because we worked so hard on them. This is the best Deaf Havana album and the best thing I have ever been a part of writing.
“I feel like this is a true fresh start.”
