The Leaf Library Interview: “We didn’t hold back on things we wanted to hear”

The Leaf Library have been one of the few acts in the world of dream-pop that have consistently been hard to define. Consisting of co-founders Kate Gibson (vocals) and Matt Ashton (guitar), Lewis Young (drums) and Gareth Jones (bass), their mission statement has been to exist outside the conventional paradigm.

Not that their music has always suggested that. It’s their attitude outside of the music, making The Leaf Library all about the music. Their love for releasing singles and remixes as they see fit, against the norms of the album-every-two-years model. It’s resulted in The Leaf Library’s story as one akin to a choose-your-own adventure. A beautiful mystery in a world that no longer has much of it.

Like their music, The Leaf Library always stretch beyond, welcoming new voices into the fold. (Firestation’s Mike Cranny and keyboardist Irina Shtreis round out the live embodiment of the band.) The Leaf Library’s fourth full-length release After the Rain, Strange Seeds, is like an open invitation. The return of Iskra Strings, the quartet that drifts in and out of the album like a gentle breeze. Then there’s regular contributors Melinda Bronstein (vocals) and Dimorphodons’ Will Twynham (harpsichord), as well as organist Paddy Milner and guitarist Scott McKeon. The latter two, currently plying their trades in Tom Jones’ band.

It’s this fluidity that further demonstrates The Leaf Library as a musical mosaic. Notwithstanding their plethora of releases over the last decade, while four full-lengths remain at the core, every year sees the band springing more surprises. Following Melody Tomb, the excellent collaboration alongside Teruyuki Kurihara in 2022 (which sounds something akin to a lost archive from Seefeel’s basement), the band have gone on to scatter cosmic fairy dust elsewhere.

In 2024 the band linked up with Castles In Space Subscription Library for The Long Dead King EP as well as remix of it. More recently, there was also a pre-remixed version of After the Rain, Strange Seeds, made available to the band’s mailing list, not to mention Mirrored Daughters’ eponymous 2025 LP. (The collaboration featuring the band alongside Marlody and Cranny).

Elsewhere, Young’s endeavours in Boa Resa and Molch and Ashton’s work as The Form Group and Sun Drawing have also informed the beautiful racket they make together as The Leaf Library. The London band’s world, brought together on After the Rain, Strange Seeds.

While The World Is A Bell (2019) saw The Leaf Library flirting with the more hypnotic side of dream-pop (led by the woozy long-form jams, An Endless and Paper Boats on Black Ink Lake), After the Rain, Strange Seeds sees the band blend their curiosity with immediacy. Despite its title, opening gambit, Colour Chant, sees the band exploring the darker frontiers in their world. Brooding and orchestral, largely underpinned by Jones’ bass lines that come on like a low growl.

Of course, they pivot on The Reader’s Lamp, which is the kind of saccharine pop that dovetails with Sun In My Room, which is exactly that. Meanwhile, on the motorik Still & Moving and Catch Up, Isobel, The Leaf Library pay homage to heyday Stereolab. Songs that put all the loose fragments in your mind back together in what are some of the finest moments the band has committed to tape.

And while the acoustic led Carry A River In Your Mouth possesses similar sonic bedding to Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, Some Circling just about ties After the Rain, Strange Seeds together. The Leaf Library’s mission to intersect dream-pop with alt-rock, complete with something purely panoramic.

Last week, Ashton and Jones answered some questions about The Leaf Library’s journey so far. One that has been elusive as much as it has been bright. The band, subtle masters of the juxtaposition, as demonstrated on After the Rain, Strange Seeds.

S13: You’ve just been on tour in support of After the Rain, Strange Seeds. How were those shows?

Matt Ashton: “Wonderful. For a long time, we’ve wanted to get out of London a bit more and take the risk of playing to a handful of people in places we’d never been in order to try and meet some new faces. The new album seemed to be the right point to do it, and all the shows have been nice and busy. And we’ve met lots of new people! It’s the best of people – folks running small venues and small bands playing them. Everybody seemed to know who everybody else was.”

Gareth Jones: “Yeah, they’ve been great! I’ve been playing music almost as long as Matt and this is my first time ‘on the road’, playing shows on successive nights in different towns. It’s everything I always dreamed it would be! Particularly good to hear regional variations on the ‘play the whole kit please’ in soundchecks.”

S13: So many bands seem pressured to be out there across all social media and listening platforms, however The Leaf Library don’t seem too bothered about these aspects. Has this approach been by design?

MA: “We’re bothered to a certain extent – we want people to be able to hear us without always having to buy something physical – but I (Matt) have certainly come to terms with not having every single piece of music every recorded at my fingertips, so it’s made it easier to come off Spotify. We’re still on most of the other streaming services.

“As for social media, I like to be accessible to people on there, and I enjoy the conversations I have with people that get in touch with us. As an eternal music obsessive, it’s something I’ve appreciated when I’ve had the chance to make contact with groups I’ve loved. One of my favourite parts of touring is the merch table chat and I think it’s important to make yourself available for that, to learn some names and connect with people a bit.”

S13: Was the recording for After the Rain, Strange Seeds any different from your past albums?

MA: “We made a deliberate decision not to include any synth drones or layers, and to stick to instrumentation that was playable in a room. Not through any particular ideology, really, just to see if we could do it. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could write songs that were strong enough to stand up to a bit more exposure.” 

GJ: “We did a lot of our previous recordings at Studio Klank in Wood Green (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore) with SJ Nelson, but a combination of COVID-19 and greedy landlords have put an end to that. There was definitely a lot less ‘band sitting around discussing sounds / performances / crisp flavours’, and I think that comes through on the record.”

S13: What was the most important aspect you wanted to capture with the record?

MA: “In musical terms, it was really a combination of the sound of people in a room, and songs that were melodically full, as in every part had to have a purpose and really mean something in the song. Lyrically, it was more about trying to get slightly more emotion or genuine feeling in there, though I’m not sure if we’ve really managed it. Aside from Colour Chant which was the product of automatic writing, all the other songs have a (admittedly very tenuous) connection to a real world situation, usually a memory.”

S13: John McEntire mixed the record. How did your alliance with him come about? 

MA: “We wrote to him! I, slightly mischievously, thought I’d get in touch and ask about his fee. But he was interested in the project and liked what we were doing, so we worked out an amount and here we are. Still seems a little unreal, to be quite honest.”  

S13: With songs like Colour Chant and Sun In My Room, all told, it feels like an album that is a great introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the band. Is that something you’ve thought about with these songs?

MA: “Not deliberately, but I can see what you mean. Perhaps it’s because we spent a bit more time than we had before on the structure of the songs. And because it was a ‘big’ album for us, we felt that we were able to chuck a lot of elements at it, including the strings, woodwind, organ, harpsichord etc. So, it’s maybe a good summation of the sounds in our heads, as opposed to being a bit of a compromise. We didn’t hold back on things we wanted to hear in there!”

S13: Paddy Milner and Scott McKeon feature on closing track, There Was Always A Golden Age. How did you come to work with both artists?

MA: “Paddy is a friend from Walthamstow. When we were adding things to There Was Always A Golden Age we decided that it definitely needed a Hammond organ part, sort of like Steve Winwood did for Talk Talk. At the time, Paddy’s Hammond was in a studio in Salisbury run by Scott. We had a bit of time left over in the session after recording the organ and, like you’re meant to do if you’ve got a famous musician in the studio with you, asked Scott if he’d play a bit of guitar on the track as well.

“He’s mostly known for his blues playing but was really open to trying something a little more abstract. His guitar and the spinning Leslie speaker from the Hammond are the last two things you hear at the very end of the album.”

“Paddy also plays electric piano on The Reader’s Lamp, this time recorded in his front room in Walthamstow.”

S13: Again, given the contrast in so much of your work, was it always the intention to operate outside the conventional forms of guitar-based music, or has it just evolved this way over the years? 

MA: “I think it’s probably because I / we get bored pretty easily. I’ve a fear of making the same record twice, mainly because I would be worried that people would ‘find out’ and think we were trying to sell them the same thing again. But I’m also very easily swayed by hearing new things and wanting to try and emulate them.

“Finally, I think it’s also a lot to do with trying to make music in an ever-changing personal landscape, band members moving about, schedules shifting, people / equipment / spaces less (or more) accessible. Being able to make music on a laptop at home has meant that we can carry on being productive, but it’s pretty hard to record drums and strings and guitars, so you have to turn to other things now and then. We made an album in lockdown that was entirely instrument-free (Quiet House), though that is a particularly extreme example.” 

S13: How much do you think your immediate surroundings influence the band?

MA: “A fair amount, though I think living in London means the writing is generally a reaction against urban living rather than using it for subject matter. A lot of our songs end up being small worlds that you can escape to / in.” 

S13: Do you think the band is an accurate reflection on your personality?

MA: “Ha, I’ve no idea! Quiet, thoughtful and maybe a bit repetitive. Maybe it is my personality? 

GJ: “We’re also a bit taller.”

After the Rain, Strange Seeds is out now via Fika Recordings. Purchase from here.