Embedded Files
Words by Meg Sweeney | Photo by Ciara Delaney
There’s a realness and rawness to Crop Circles that feels inseparable from where it was made.
Where REA’s 2025 debut EP Garden Shed experimented with recording outdoors, Crop Circles is built wholeheartedly around that process. Recorded live at Future Roots in a wooded clearing in Stanmer Park, the EP holds onto the imperfections of its environment: fire crackling at the edge of a microphone, birdsong moving in and out of frame, the elements sitting directly inside the mix. Nothing is isolated from the space it was recorded in, and that vulnerability becomes part of how the record is experienced.
It gives the music a quality that feels both intimate and exposed all at once. The recordings carry a soft blur and a muffled texture shaped by air and the outdoors. Opener ‘benny’ sets the tone with the crackle of embers, flurry of birdsong and the low hum of the world enveloping REA and her band. ‘you make the plants grow’ explores the groundedness of love, with a delicate, almost shy tempo that unfolds like a slow spring morning: dew lifting, flowers blooming. ‘2005’ reflects on growing older through a conversation with a younger self, whilst ‘june, soon’ moves through seasonal depression, changing love and the pull towards light.
Throughout, REA’s voice feels certain and steady at the centre; a growing power in its delicacy. Songs circle ideas rather than resolve them, approaching themes of love and grief from different angles, grounded in the understanding that experience is cyclical. Time moves in loops rather than lines, much like the seasons that determine how we move through the world. We hear winter as withdrawal, spring as rebirth and summer full of promise and pressure.
Since the release of her debut, REA has been performing live with an extended band, whose presence is felt across the record. The group expands the singer-songwriter palette into richer, more ambient folk hues with pedal steel, banjo, guitar, bass and layered harmonies. The pedal steel in particular adds a fluid, ethereal quality that sits naturally within the atmosphere of the songs but enhances everything it touches. Small details surface and fade, echoing the movement of the environment around them.
Just over a year since we first sat down with REA (read), we caught up to talk through the making of Crop Circles and how the project has evolved. Released in March via Bandcamp, the EP saw REA step away from Spotify for this release and experiment with a more artist-led platform complete with listening parties and direct-to-fan cassette sales. The slower approach suits the project and allows the music to exist on its own terms rather than within the pressure of constant release cycles and playlists.
It’s a record that moves at its own pace.
Crop Circles artwork by Esmé Gardner
We last caught up on the release of your debut EP Garden Shed. How does this new chapter with Crop Circles feel?
It feels like a bit of an extension to that project; it feels like it lives in the Garden Shed world. It's not quite peaked out into a new era, but it feels like I've technically explored some of the experiments that I did with Garden Shed, like outdoor recording and raw live sound and leaving mistakes in. But I've taken that and embodied it in its own project.
Your debut experimented with recording outdoors and weaving in sounds of the natural world, but Crop Circles takes this even further. Can you talk us through that decision and process?
After we did it with Garden Shed, it felt really aligned with where I wanted my music to go. I was in the studio again, and I was talking with my producer Joshua about where else we could take it and what other soundscapes we could explore.
With the process, I really trusted all the people I was playing with. They're so good at hearing a piece of music, practicing a few times on their own, and then joining me when we can finally get everyone together, and just making it work. I threw the idea out there and everyone was on board with it. I think we had one rehearsal and I finished some of the tracks a few days before I sent them. It was recorded at Future Roots in Stanmer Park.
Opener ‘benny’ foregrounds the crackle of the fire, whereas ‘you make the plants grow’ leans into the birdsong. This feels so intuitive for each track. How did you technically achieve that balance?
Honestly, it was an accident. It’s what nature did at the time, which was really nice for ‘you make the plants grow’. With ‘benny’, it was the first song we did and we had just lit the fire, so that was where the fire was really crackling. All of the soundscape elements were very much just what the environment was doing. We recorded each track maybe two or three times, so it was just fate that some things happened. There was a microphone placed to pick up the environment, one next to the fire, and we all had one towards us.
Last time, you mentioned wanting to better integrate natural sounds into your live performances. Is that something you’ve been able to develop?
This is still a process and feels like the next stage of the project, but I've started to integrate it where I use a sample pedal with birdsong and campfire ambience. I would love to have a loop pedal, something that I could operate myself, but it's slowly getting there. There's also a couple of gigs that I'm doing and I'll be back at Future Roots doing Crop Circles live, which will be fun. That also feels like integrating it in the performance, just being in the space itself, being outside.
You’ve expanded your sound with a full band, creating a richer, more rounded folk palette. I especially love the addition of pedal steel - it brings such an ethereal, fluid quality. Could you tell us more about the musicians you’re working with and how those collaborations shaped the record?
They were such a big part of this record and a big part of wanting to do this was to get the band involved. Garden Shed was very much me on guitar, Josh in the studio, and Les helping here and there. Then I expanded into playing live and brought in Sam, James, Molly and Josh.
I’ve collaborated with Sam, one of the guitarists, for many years. James is a good friend of Sam’s, and they have a really nice connection when they play, they just know. James plays pedal steel and that has elevated not only the live sound, but also this project, because it’s adding something that I can’t even explain. It takes the music to places that I didn’t even know I wanted. Josh knows the project so well, and he plays with my band and adds a delicacy, he’s good at hearing the whole picture and has an ear for dynamics. And then Molly, and also Felicity, who I actually met the day before this whole recording as she was visiting Molly. Both of them added so much, a really nice soprano and a rich alto sound.
They all made it sound like I couldn’t imagine, until I heard it. I'm really lucky to play with them.
There’s a strong thematic thread across the EP that ties human experience to the cycles of the natural world - the ebb and flow of both joy and difficulty. The songs almost feel seasonal in themselves. How do the changing seasons influence your songwriting and creativity?
A lot. Seasonal depression and seasonal change is something that I hadn’t really acknowledged just how much it affects me until last year. It’s a really big part of the way I see the world and my life and everything around it.
‘June, soon’ is about feeling sad and getting stuck in my room, but coming back to life again and having experiences and holding out for better; I think I link that a lot to the change of seasons. I think you can also hear it on ‘you make the plants grow’, about falling in love and finding your feet again after feeling like you've lost yourself, but kind of intertwining that with the way that plants grow. I think there's a lot of links between the way I experience those two songs, they kind of emulate both life and seasons.
I relate to that a lot. Winter can be especially difficult living on the coast.
With the whole EP, I wanted to address the feeling of cycles and things ebbing and flowing and things hitting different parts of your life. I think we've all experienced seasonal depression. We've all experienced feeling like we're getting old and then it being fine, and falling in love, and then feeling like we're falling out of love. They're things that we experience in cycles. You're always in a cycle at some point of your life.
Your voice, both in tone and in presence, feels especially assured on this record. Do you feel a shift in your confidence or creative identity between the EPs?
I suppose, actually, yes. Garden Shed was my first time in the studio and I felt really nervous to sing, and you can hear the really soft qualities of my voice. But I don’t think that’s the way I sing live because no one can hear it and you’re putting more emotion into it. Since playing with the band properly since releasing Garden Shed, there’s probably a sense of it being familiar territory and something I’m not scared to do.
You chose to release the EP exclusively on Bandcamp, keeping it off streaming platforms like Spotify. What motivated that decision, and what does it mean for you in practice as an artist?
In practice, it's an interesting one. There's obviously the bigger, more obvious answer, which is that Spotify has its bad side. That's not to say this project would never be on streaming platforms, but it just felt like it belonged more on Bandcamp. It was kind of an experiment for myself.
I also had a desire to use all of Bandcamp’s features and see how it would elevate the project. I really liked the listening party feature, where I got lots of people to tune in and listen to it wherever they were and write in the chat box. It was cute. I mean, it could have just been my mum on there, but it was really nice.
It feels like it was a slower approach to putting music out, which feels almost counter intuitive to the narrative you’re told in the industry. Bandcamp pushes in a different direction and holds the artist first. It felt right and gave me the opportunity to make merch and some little tapes.
Grab your copy of crop circles on limited edition cassette via Bandcamp.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse