Introducing Lament, London based music group join us in the next installment of our Communi’T Project. Bringing an old school and individualistic sound to their music and having recently released their debut EP ‘In Fear of Faith’ we thought it was only fitting to work together in the next installment of this project.

With an individualistic sound, comes an individualistic eye for design including the message that follows. 

To celebrate we also brought the dou in to sit and chat about how their journey started and where it’s beginning to lead for them now.

Bringing their ideas to life the Lament x Footpatrol ‘Communi T’ will be releasing on Black Friday the 29th November. Sizes range from S – XXL, priced at £30.

Lament welcome, before we get started, introduce yourselves and what you guys do for those who aren’t already aware?

Thanks, man. We’re music producers from the West Midlands, now based in South London. We make a kinda like dark, cinematic hip-hop.

I like the sound of that! Getting straight into it then, what made you both want to produce music? Was it something you knew from day one or was it more of a recent discovery?

It wasn’t really about wanting to produce, but more of wanting to make music and be able to make it instantly. We both grew up playing in punk-rock bands which was fun, it was probably one of the best parts in both our lives, but when you’re a fourteen/fifteen year old kid, a recording studio is expensive, and it still is even now. It was a hard thing for us to get our heads around back then as to why we would save up and pay for studio time with all this gear and not come out sounding like we’d gone platinum. We used to demo on a mic running through to a karaoke machine back then. We’d tape it to a mop stood up in a bucket in the middle of a room and let it pick up whatever it could. As soon as we discovered a microKORG and midi, it changed everything for us as we could get something that sounded good straight away, and we didn’t need any body help to make that happen.

By the sounds of it then your music has a really distinctive sound, where did you find your inspiration?

Life is the main inspiration. All of the good times, and especially all of the bad times. We’ve had a lot go down, so making music is a way to vent, react, say something that’s on your mind without giving that piece of you away. When you sit down and make something whilst you got a weight on your back, it lifts when a beat starts to come to life.

In a more literal sense, ironically, we still take inspiration from punk-rock. Punk-rock has got a good energy that we like to carry with us. We grew up producing on Reason, we still use it now, and because of how analogue it looks as if it still has the feel of real instruments and amps, so it’s easy to have that same feeling when we make music that we did when we were kids.

You said at the start that you would describe your music as ‘dark, cinematic hip-hip’ would you say there’s a lot of inspiration from film also?

Yeah, we take inspiration from movie soundtracks, too. There’s something powerful about a scene in a film without dialogue, but with a sound that amplifies the silence. We try to get that same feeling across parts of our beats.

The meaning of Lament is to express sadness and feeling sorry about something. Do you think that resonates with yourselves and your music? What made you chose your name?

It’s definitely something that resonates. It’s direct definition is something like ‘a passionate expression of grief or sorrow’, and with music and in life in general, we all tend to be drawn to the dark side of things from time to time. That’s what Lament is about. Being ok with things not being cool, being able to express that, and then being able to grow from that very act of expression, with the ultimate goal for all of us, to just be happy.

It’s good to hear that there’s a strong message behind the name and both of your outlooks on life. Moving on to your Communi T you designed we see your groups logo featured on the back what can you tell us about the design?

I’m not sure we’d call it a logo, we can’t even sit down and say ‘when we put this deep, metaphorical concept to MRE to bring to life for us…’ because it didn’t go down like that. We holla’d Ash and said, we’re gonna start making music again and we want you to design everything. Ash hit us straight back and was like ‘Yeah, I wanna get behind it…’ and that was that. He had some old ideas which we reworked together, and that’s how it went down, it was purely an aesthetic to go with the title of our first EP, which was called ‘In Fear and Faith’. What’s cool is, as we’ve settled into this project, it has indirectly, or maybe subconsciously, became something that has meaning to us now. This whole thing is about growth, within ourselves, as artists and every aspect of life. If we’re making music, everything’s a bit better, and to grow is to be better. That metal skeleton now symbolises like a resurrection to us, or something that can never die. There was a point where we were done with music and we left it alone for a long time, but the need to do it for ourselves is first and foremost made itself known to us pretty quickly.

Does the skeleton have a different meaning with and without the gasmask on? Is there a message you are trying to put across to your listeners?

Not at all, it’s just enhanced. That debut release (In Fear and Faith) was inspired by going down a bad path in life that you have no choice on. Seeing as you gotta go down it you may as well learn from it, and become better from it. The idea is that each record progresses in both its vibe and its execution. With all that in mind, the concept of a gas mask is to protect you from something you shouldn’t take in, and to take that skeleton out of darkness (from the In Fear and Faith artwork) and put him in the ‘real world’, or in our case, in the store, the skeleton wearing the gas-mask symbolises a climb from a dark place to somewhere more positive with a revised look on life, so the gasmask is a shield to any bull, and any industry politics its all about no-nonsense. 

What can we see from Lament in the Future, is there anything you guys are excited to share?

We’d like to set up a live show at some point next year, but right now, maybe a couple singles with some features… We’ve started work on a few beats already and have some vocalists in mind who we’d like to hit up, but honestly, our only plan right now is to make music for us. There’s no business hustle, whatever’s next has gotta be organic.

And finally a question we like to ask all Communi T partners.. please describe Lament style in 3 words?

1. Need, 2. More, 3. Than, 4. Three