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I had this plan in my head,” says Hannah Reid, the glass-voiced frontwoman of the twice chart-topping indie-pop trio London Grammar. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m giving birth around this time, and then a few months later, it’ll be fine. Everything will be really easy: we can play Glastonbury, and then release the album, and the boys can do the promo, and I’ll just be loving life.’” But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. Six months into motherhood, Reid, 34, was “still covered in baby sick, swimming through a sea of nappies. You can’t do anything, basically,” she says.
Another three months have passed, and it’s still a dextrous juggling act. Our interview – held over Zoom as Reid sits amid guitars, microphones, paints and canvases in her home studio – represents a second attempt to connect, after a last-minute childcare predicament rendered her a no-show a few days ago. The “boys” she refers to are her bandmates, Dan Rothman and Dominic “Dot” Major. The “album” is their new release The Greatest Love, a slick and absorbing 10-song record “about self-love and self-discovery”. Both of London Grammar’s previous two albums – Truth Is a Beautiful Thing (2017) and Californian Soil (2021) – charted at No 1 in the UK (their debut, 2013’s If You Wait, peaked at No 2); this new record is poised for big things.
The Greatest Love is also the first London Grammar album since Reid had son Joshua Cillian with her partner Sean O’Connor. She was, she says, “worried” when she was pregnant that having a child would “change me as an artist. Actually, I feel more creative now than ever. It’s just so cliché, but it’s given me a new perspective on life and what I do for a living. I used to tie myself up in knots over the art that I would make. Now I don’t.”
The logistical complications, however – balancing the demands of a career in pop music with the responsibilities of motherhood – are nothing to be scoffed at. And, argues Reid, they are still part of a significant gender imbalance. “There’s almost an internal glass ceiling when you become a mother, in the first few years, because [it takes] so much of your time and energy, and that hasn’t changed at all. It still falls heavily on the woman. And if you want that, that’s absolutely great. But I think for a lot of women in the creative industries – and across the board – there still isn’t really that support there.”
Reid has been outspoken on matters of gender inequality; Californian Soil was a punchy musical rebuke to some of the pervasive sexism she had endured down the years – the men, for instance, who would ignore and marginalise her in the studio, deferring instead to her male bandmates. “You just have to get rid of them,” she says today. “That is my solution now. Any sign of that kind of thing, and no – you’re gone.” (It’s significant, perhaps, that the band have served as their own producers for much of the new record – a first for them.)
The Greatest Love does touch on gender dynamics – for instance, in the groovy and playful “Kind of Man”, inflected with shades of The xx. (“You’re the kind of man to fall in love with me/ You’re the kind of man to take me not seriously,” sings Reid in the refrain.) But mostly, it’s an affirming and inward-looking set of songs, culminating in the ambitious, cathartic title track.
It’s a catharsis that hasn’t always come easy for Reid. London Grammar formed while the trio were studying at the University of Nottingham (Reid and Rothman hail from the capital, Major from Northampton). They were still in their infancy when they had their first brush with success: 2013 single “Wasting My Young Years”, an anthem of generational burnout, was a minor hit in the UK, and a major one abroad, reaching the No 2 spot in France. “Whenever we go to France, it’s all they talk about,” Reid says. “They’re always like, ‘Is [your new song] going to be as good as “Wasting My Young Years”?’ I’m never going to write that song again. You just have to make your peace with that.
“That can also become your downfall,” she adds. “You definitely hear stories of people that have had hit songs, who have driven themselves mad trying to replicate it.”
However, the success of the band’s early singles – and their buzzy debut album – brought a litany of problems, not least an aggressive touring schedule that rattled Reid’s vocal capabilities. “It’s probably been one of the hardest things about my career, my relationship with my voice,” she says. “I lost a lot of confidence in it many times – after our first album where we just toured relentlessly to an unethical degree. I went through a kind of physiological battle with it, where I was often in a lot of pain.”
Another issue was, to put it a little reductively, stage fright: the wracking anxiety that would accompany their increasingly scaled-up live performances. “I’m a lot better than I was at dealing with it,” she says. “But some of them, I do find really intimidating. Big indoor arena spaces are particularly hard, because I feel really small. I have absolutely no idea how artists like Taylor Swift and Coldplay sell out these enormous arenas and just do it night after night.”
As such, London Grammar have always seemed like slightly dubious candidates for pop success, even as their music insisted upon it. “I just don’t have any interest really in the fame side of things,” Reid claims, noting the band’s ineptitude with social media. “There are people [for whom] the social media game is a really important part of their career – and we’re just absolutely terrible at it,” she says.
“I don’t think we have a brand – and I think that’s our problem. Behind the scenes, we are just three musicians who are really nerdy.”
Such is the group’s aversion to the spotlight that Reid recently declared that she and her bandmates would avoid appearing in any future music videos. “I’m not sure we have the time any more, to invest in that side of things,” she says. “I do find music videos in particular an absolute crapshoot. You can put so much time into them and they go horribly wrong, then it gets scrapped and everyone gets really upset. It’s just another side of the music industry that I don’t understand at all.”
Reid may be an imperfect wielder of social media clout, but she regularly uses Instagram to share her paintings – a hobby and creative outlet that she says dovetails with her songwriting. “In the same way that I feel like my songs are an ongoing reflection of my life, and I can’t stop them from coming out, I can’t really stop the painting thing,” she says.
“The difference is, once a painting is on the canvas, no one can tell me to change anything,” she adds. “No one can come in behind my back and secretly add in some red paint overnight. These are things that can happen in music all the time. Painting? That’s just for me.”
‘The Greatest Love’ is out now
