Sons of Sevilla chart their own musical geography with Street Light Moon. It's an album for endless summers and retro-futurist reveries, inspired by an entire world's worth of influences: the family-owned British pub where brothers Henry and Reuben Smith grew up, watching their parents sling drinks as songs by John Prine and J.J. Cale played over the speakers; the marina in Gibraltar where they spent three weeks aboard an old fishing trawler, writing the album's songs as waves splashed against the dock; the recording studio in Austin, Texas, where they recorded Street Light Moon with Grammy-winning producer Adrian Quesada and a small group of multi-instrumentalists. Those landscapes come together on Street Light Moon, forming a sound entirely of the band's own making, nodding to modern-day alt-pop one minute and '70s psychedelia the next.
When the world first met Henry and Reuben, they were touring behind Lullabies for a Wildcat, the sun-scorched debut album they'd recorded during the pandemic in their father's workshop. Woozy, transportive, and defiantly lo-fi, Lullabies for a Wildcat wore its homemade origins proudly, with a drum machine supplying most of the record's percussion. Street Light Moon finds the duo turning a new page and chasing down a warmer, wider sound. Gone are the programmed beats and bedroom-recording vibes. In their place are tropical grooves, vintage keyboards, indie textures, and contributions from the album's rhythm section: drummer and flutist Geoff Mann (son of the world music legend Herbie Mann) and Afrobeat guitarist/bassist Marcos Garcia (aka Chico Mann). At the center of that sound are the Smith siblings themselves, rooting every song in melodies that drift skyward like slow-moving humidity, making sure there's a beating heart beneath all that atmospheric haze.
"We made our first record in a shed, but we never wanted to be a lo-fi band," says Reuben, a former footballer who left the pitch to launch a solo career with Soundway Records before teaming up with his brother. "We wanted a vintage album that sounded as real as possible, and that's Adrian Quesada's magic. He was the perfect fit."
For five days, Sons of Sevilla tracked Street Light Moon at Electric Deluxe Recorders, the same Austin-area studio where Quesada's acclaimed duo Black Pumas recorded their self-titled album. The place was a gear-head's paradise, and the musicians made use of all that analog equipment, layering their recordings with tremolo guitar, swooning pedal steel, upright piano, gauzy synths, and billowing clouds of reverb. Snippets of the brothers' homemade demos made their way into the final recordings, too, including Henry's slide guitar on the loping title track. "I didn't have a slide when we were on the boat," he remembers, "so I had to use an old glass bottle. There was a twang to it, thanks to the bumps on the bottle. We couldn't replicate that in the studio, so we kept it."
"We don't sing about where we're from," says Henry. "The music escapes it. We're trying very hard not to be an English indie rock band, because the world already has a lot of those. Instead, we're trying to step into something else… and somewhere else."
For Henry and Reuben, the musical exploration began during childhood. Raised on the outskirts of Leeds, they spent countless hours in their parents' taproom as pre-teens. "We were in the pub every day, working and socializing, listening to 12 hours of music at a time," Henry recalls. All that time indoors felt like a musical education, introducing the young boys to songs by Buena Vista Social Club, Bob Dylan, Terry Reid, Neil Young, and Gene Clark. The summer months offered a different sort of education, with the family leaving their hometown of Featherstone and heading to the Spanish city of Sevilla. The area's Mediterranean climate felt downright exotic after a long, chilly British winter, and the new city helped broaden Henry and Reuben's appreciation for different cultures. Years later, when they began recording their debut album during the Covid-19 lockdown, the brothers nodded to those summertime vacations abroad by naming the project "Sons of Sevilla."
Street Light Moon marks both an expansion and an evolution of their sound. Lullabies for a Wildcat found the brothers working in isolation as the outside world screeched to a halt, producing every song themselves, creating high art out of lo-fi ingredients. Its follow-up, on the other hand, is every bit as colorful as the orange trees that line Sevilla's streets. Here, we're reintroduced to Henry and Reuben not as do-it-yourself purveyors of escapist pop music, but as sharp songwriters and musical mood-setters who're every bit as compelling as their world-renowned producer. Their toolkit has expanded. Their list of collaborators has grown. Their musical reach has widened. With Street Light Moon, Sons of Sevilla set sail for new waters, creating a sound that exists out of time and off the map.
