ladylike is on the rise

They’re on tour with The Orielles and currently find themselves in the liminal space that is a hotel lobby in Coventry. Though still awaiting their first coffee of the day, there’s an indescribable buzz amongst the quartet. It’s likely the anticipation of their debut EP, It’s a Pleasure of Mine, to Know You’re Fine. The title, taken from the final repeated lines of closing track “Sour Carol, I”, seamlessly encapsulates the tender quality found throughout ladylike’s music.

Lead singer Georgia Butler, drummer James Ely, and bassist Archie Sagers met in Guildford, and subsequently all moved to Brighton around the same time. “Me and Archie started uni there together. We actually lived opposite each other in halls,” Ely explains. “And then we started jamming, and then we needed a bass player, then we needed a guitar player, and… The rest is history.” Moving between different practice spaces on campus ultimately got the band involved in the Brighton scene. “We definitely started playing Brighton before we found our sound and just worked it out as we went along.”

Fine-tuning that sound required a fair share of trial and error. “It took quite a while. Thinking back then our sound was very different to how it is now,” says Spencer Withey (vocals, guitar, synth). Brighton acted as a blank canvas, a supportive space to experiment and be exposed to a diverse range of artists. “It’s more of a community than a scene,” Butler suggests. The band became more than used to gigging songs before they were even finished, unafraid of mixed crowd reactions. “We used to have this tendency… if we wrote a song, we would play it the next day live.”

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The recording process for It’s a Pleasure of Mine… was intense, but imbued with encouragement thanks to producer Ali Chant. None of them had worked with a producer before, explains Withey, who self-produced ladylike’s previous singles. It came as a surprise that Chant wanted to work with the band, Butler says. “Ali very much took the approach of, ‘You guys sound how you sound and I don’t want to change anything about that really’. There was one point when we were recording the last track on the EP where he just turned off all the lights, put on some disco lights and put us all in sunglasses… He was like, ‘Okay, now play it.’ It alleviated the pressure a bit.”

ladylike is captured in their purest form across the EP, avoiding the temptation to overpolish their intrinsically textural and atmospheric sound. “We only had a few days really to do it all. We were doing it all live and all in one room as well… We kind of had to embrace the mistakes.” That being said, Butler highlights a moment when the band nearly veered into overthinking. “There were points in the studio where we were like, ‘Can we have the sound of a dripping tap?’ And Chant was like, ‘No, you can’t. You shouldn’t do that.’”

Compelling ebbs and flows, the restructuring and exploration of tiny imperfections, are what constitute ladylike’s stream-of-consciousness approach to songwriting. “Fresh Linen” is the clearest manifestation of their “sit down and just play” method; a constantly evolving track that sprawls across nearly seven minutes, it’s a band favourite.

This same open-minded, meandering approach applies to the band’s lyrics, principally written by Butler. “I’ll come up with a phrase and then repeat that phrase and just sing through that until more comes out. It’s quite organic.” Many of ladylike’s songs gravitate towards idioms, from “Rome wasn’t built in a day” to “making a mountain out of a molehill.” “If we could find a perfect idiom to sum it up…” Ely laughs when asked why their songs revolve around these surreal colloquialisms. “I remember after we released ‘Horse’s Mouth’, our last single, we went to Paris and played a show. We did an interview there and the interviewer was like, ‘What does straight from the horse’s mouth mean?’ I hadn’t really thought that outside of the English language, and actually English culture, they don’t really make sense. But I kind of like that,” Butler explains.

At a time when post-punk, as well as more synth-heavy dream pop, appears to be dominating the music industry, ladylike moves in the opposite direction. The band’s music focuses on subtlety, from gradually shifting six-string basslines to the low rumblings of a synth. “The little details really mean a lot in our songwriting… particularly [Sagers’] bass parts because they don’t necessarily sit behind like a normal bassline does.” Sagers reminds the others of an early practice session when he just played around with “fading and delay, and loads of effects, then you guys didn’t seem to notice.” “And then we did notice and we were like, get rid of the chorus,” Butler pipes in with a smile.

ladylike enjoys subverting structural expectations, something that’s taken time to translate to a live stage. Tracks feel overexposed, with sudden quiet creating an indescribable sense of clarity. “There’s a lot of parts in the songs where drums drop out.” One song crescendos and then the drums abruptly stop. “They thought it was going to go, so they put spotlights on James and then James stops playing and he’s just sat there, but they didn’t want to bring the spotlight off. So he was just sat there in the spotlight,” Butler chuckles.

The band has tried to avoid being pigeonholed into a sound, despite the blend of folk and post-rock elements they are naturally drawn to. “We often get compared to Big Thief, so for New Year’s Eve, we did a Big Thief covers set at The Oak. And then people came up to us afterwards, sort of like, ‘Now that you’ve played Big Thief, you sound nothing like Big Thief,’” Butler recalls.

The same night as drums-spotlight-gate, the venue’s sound engineer quickly realised that ladylike didn’t need the reverb that so many other groups rely on live. While some tracks play around with aspects of shoegaze, the group normally avoids an overly-affected sound. “We quite like space in songs,” Ely explains. He goes on to add that when the band first formed, their initial compositions were faster, “more rookie stuff.” Time spent playing together has built their confidence, allowing them to explore structure and develop a journey for listeners to get lost in. “We know how to play to each other now.”

Having grown-up alongside computers’ increasing influence across music production, it’s evident that the band’s organic process is part of a broader attempt to pull away from a fully-digital soundscape. It’s (ironically) not news to anyone on social media that 2026 is the year of shifting back to analogue. Accordingly, It’s a Pleasure of Mine… was all recorded live to tape. “You can sort of hear the tape hiss on the whole EP. It has this warmth to it that we wouldn’t have got another way. We also film everything we do on our little camcorder,” Butler says.

When asked about the ideal listening environment for their music, Butler remembers a show one early afternoon in Rotterdam. “We played in this really cool café that was this guy’s house and he was making quiche in a little oven and he just had this cosy little corner where we were playing and loads of locals came down. It was like an unofficial show. And I feel like that was the perfect environment for us to play in.” “Wholesome European café,” Ely laughs.

Though there isn’t a quiche-cooking café on the venue list for their upcoming headline tour, ladylike is excited to be taking new music on the road, from London’s George Tavern all the way up to Glasgow’s 1990. “It just feels like it’s going to be a really nice celebration,” Butler says. The care and control across ladylike’s music shines on stage. They’re unafraid to take time and use space, to repeat until they’ve fully developed an idea, to truly listen to one another and face imperfection head-on.