Max Kinghorn-Mills on Wish Road South, finding power in understatement, making music as a trio and turning the everyday into songs.

There’s a beautiful contradiction at the heart of Hollow Hand’s new album, Wish Road South. Its melodies feel gentle and restrained, yet beneath them is something much bigger: songs that quietly open up and stay with you. There are words with meaning, observations that become stories, and moments that make the ordinary feel anything but ordinary.

We spoke with Max Kinghorn-Mills about making the record, letting Hollow Hand become a collective endeavour, the seemingly disconnected images of “Heavy Metal T-Shirt”, and what happens when an album finally leaves your hands and heads out on the road.

There is something almost contradictory about the songs on Wish Road South: the melodies are often beautifully restrained and intimate, yet so many of them seem to contain a huge anthem trying to get out. I sometimes hear something in them that reminds me of the emotional lift of “The Whole of the Moon”. How do you manage to keep those melodies so small when they seem to have such enormous potential?

I don’t really have any plans when I’m writing, other than to follow what feels most inspiring. I suppose generally speaking I prefer ‘small’ music to anthem bands. The only exceptions are really in the world of heavy metal; I love being in the audience when everyone sings Metallica solos. I think less is generally more. I think I felt I had a fairly understated personality early on as a kid, whether I wanted that or not.

How did Wish Road South actually come together? Did the songs already feel like they belonged together when you started, or did the album gradually reveal itself as a record while you were making it?

Every time I make an album things feel different. This time I had many songs to choose from, I made demos for them, whittled them down, dropped a song if it wasn’t exciting me enough. That’s just the way things are, most people will tell you the same. It wasn’t until we started recording as a trio that we realised where the path was taking us. On other records I’ve sat and worked away on tracks for much longer, so I’d say Wish Road South was a much more dynamic experience.

You’ve described this as a different way of making an album, with Oliver Newton and Leo Clarke involved from the beginning and the three of you recording together as a band. What changed for you when Hollow Hand became more of a collective process rather than something you largely built yourself?

I started this band by myself in my basement flat at university. I spent 2 years hidden away ignoring phone calls, siphoning my dad’s record collection, discovering obscurities and recording demos. I’m a pretty solitary person most of the time; life just works better that way for me. I collaborated with 2 close friends on the album Star Chamber, but the others were very much on my own clock. Wish Road South is the result of a tight-knit trio who’ve spent a few years on the road together touring & backing other artists. Being in a band is hard, I just try to work out what I can do with the situation at hand, it’s always changing.

“Heavy Metal T-Shirt” has such an intriguing lyric, moving through seemingly disconnected images, memories and observations. There is something almost mysterious about the way the different pieces come together. What drew you to write the song in that way, and what do you feel holds it all together?

I never think about how I should write the song, it either happens or it doesn’t. I think if you’re being honest with yourself as a writer then the best songs will surface. When I was younger I used to focus on books I was reading, films, take other people’s much grander ideas and reinterpret them. More recently (and with this album), I’ve been much more interested in the day to day, the observations that you might call mundane. I was watching Kenneth Branagh with Judi Dench last night and he mentioned that “the ordinary is always the extraordinary”. I agree!

The album is out now, which means that for the first time these songs are no longer just yours. Other people are listening to them, interpreting them and forming opinions about them. Does that change the way you hear Wish Road South yourself, now that it has left your hands?

I’m pleased to have the album out there. In some ways it’s a relief but people forget that the next step is playing this music out in front of an audience, that’s very important & the decisions you made previously will stay with you for years. Many times I’ve found myself preparing to play an album live & finding it difficult to reinterpret the music. Just because a song worked well on a recording doesn’t mean it’ll be exciting on a stage, sometimes these can be very different crafts. Wish Road South is the first time where I’ve been able to really ‘road test’ some of the music (on various tours) leading up to the studio time. We’re leaving to tour the album for the first time in a couple of weeks, I’m in the studio today planning the set list and I’m really excited to get out!