SORRY

Who are Sorry? A gang of fools consisting of Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, Campbell
Baum, Marco Pini and Lincoln Barrett. They have been making music together since their
teens, have released one acclaimed album, a batch of singles and a series of videos co-
directed by their songwriter and vocalist, Asha and her best friend Flo Webb (FLASHA
Prod). Emerging from Brixton’s Windmill scene, where they played alongside Shame, Goat
Girl and Black Midi, Sorry have created their own distinctive musical world – one that draws
together a shared passion for lo-fi sounds of grunge, trap, and shoegaze.
Sorry are a band with a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic. Their 2018 single
‘Starstruck’, with its hook of a blocked throat clearing itself, has over 7 million plays on
Spotify. The jittery ‘Cigarette Packet’ was arguably one of the best singles of 2021, with a
video featuring an array of smokers with varying degrees of bad teeth. It’s a simple visual
device, elegantly executed.
Asha and Louis first started experimenting with songs at school in 2015, where they
recorded soundscapes and beats in their North London bedrooms, uploading them in a
battle to achieve the most plays. It started out as a game between the two. ‘You’d be crying
on Soundcloud at midnight when you should be sleeping, then you find this perfect beat,’
Asha recalls of that time. ‘I still take pride in it.’ Home Demo/ns Vol. I + II are the band’s early
mixtapes and provide a snapshot of deep cuts from the band’s beloved, genre-defying
catalogue to date.
If their first full-length album 925 (produced by Lana Del Rey and Gorillaz producer, Jamie
Dring) was more electronic, Anywhere But Here pays homage to classic songwriters of the
1970s, such as Carly Simon and Randy Newman. Asha’s nonchalant salty-sweet vocals
contrast with detuned/discordant guitar sounds echoing early 90s bands, Slint and Tortoise,
and the irregular beats of Kanye or Capital Steez. The superficial naivete is a ruse for the
underlying bitterness of sentiment. Their distinctive brand of Diazepam dreampop can be
surprisingly angular and acerbic in parts.
Anywhere But Here was produced by Louis, Asha and Ali Chant with Portishead’s Adrian
Utley in Bristol. The heady rush of its infectious opener ‘Let the Lights On’ gives way to a
melancholic duet, a form which marks the album, and one that Sorry have clearly mastered.
Listen closely and you can hear it roll through the realm of a hypnogogic sunrise in ‘Tell Me’,
or in ‘Screaming in the Rain’ with ‘Cold coffee on your bedstand / I have lost the ability to
understand.’ These are coming-of-age songs set against the backdrop of a changing city;
songs of addiction, songs of infatuation, songs of duality – the oscillating boy-girl vocals play
with perspective and time.
Earwigged conversations, text messages, snatched speech recorded underground; the city’s
discarded words fed into the lyrics which map the experience of urban life on a young and
frustrated generation. But it’s not all grime and grit and murkiness. Theirs is a city where
incandescent light illuminates the murkiest corners. As a person of mixed heritage, Asha
views her hometown, with its often frantic and overwhelming atmosphere, as a place of rich
inspiration. ‘Not being British at all makes me feel like a chameleon,’ she says. ‘I’m not patriotic about my own heritage but I’m interested in everybody’s else’s culture. I feel like a
patriot for love and other people, and I cling onto that.’
London features as a prominent character on the album. The echoes of its empty streets in
2021 can be heard in tracks such as ‘Key to the City’, a doomed romantic ballad where a
jilted lover curses an ex, creating a paranoid litany of their imagined new life of rich friends
and hot girl affairs, a place where good bitches turn bad in the end: ‘I know that you’re
somewhere, out there, getting fucked in someone else’s bed.’ This slice of acidic pop is a
future classic, an emerging anthem for the broken hearted.
Unlike their debut, this is a different type of city to 925’s, told through the voices of two
people in their early 20s whose lives have become insular. If there is any soundtrack to the
creeping emotional fog of recent times, it’s this one. The unexpected tangent – of enforced
silence, routine, mental disintegration – was a touchpaper for Anywhere But Here. ‘If our first
version of London in 925 was innocent and fresh-faced, then this is rougher around the
edges. It's a much more haggard place,’ Louis says. For Asha, this period of intensity was
challenging: ‘I just did what everyone else did, I went a bit mad.’
As her romantic relationship disintegrated, slow days were spent reflecting on the recent
past. ‘I felt like everything was just getting so far away from who I was,’ she says. ‘I kept
thinking 'who am I now?' Her mother, a Death Doula, returned home each night from
providing spiritual guidance to patients in the end stages of life, with profound stories that
were impossible not to absorb. From these domestic periods of disquiet and unease, Asha
wrote the closing track ‘Again’, about rebirth and death, with an arrangement responding to
the idea of frequency that transcends the female body: ‘The world shone like a chandelier /
and I was lost for good.’
Having just returned from a US tour with Sleaford Mods, Louis recalls the band’s last aborted
mission to the States. Sorry were due to play in New York just before the pandemic took
hold to celebrate the launch of 925. After the opening show, the tour was cancelled. If New
York was dystopian when they arrived, it became even more so in the days before they
returned home. ‘It's where every end of the world movie is set,’ he says. ‘Overnight, we saw
the streets go from being bustling and intense to walking around a desolate Manhattan. I had
never experienced anything like that, it was completely new.’ It is this newness that sits at
the heart of Sorry’s songs – of what it means to be young and upended in the 2020s, with all
the challenges and ingenuity that life in the metropolis brings.