A CONVERSATION WITH... MORN
At The Great Escape, sets of siblings band MORN took full advantage of every set and question to divulge the realities behind the band.
Photo Credit: MORN
Hey, we’re Morn. We have Mae, our bassist, Rob, the guitarist, Noah, the drummer, and Oliver, who’s the guitarist and vocalist. We’re a band of two sets of siblings. Noah and Mae are siblings and Rob and Ollie are brothers.
For people getting into your music this week, what’s something you’d want people to know about you?
We used to describe our sound as ‘doom over beautiful chords.’ That was the goal at the start of the band. And I think now we're a little bit more mature sounding lyrically and sonically. We've just released a song called ‘The Standard Model’, which is the end of our ‘going crazy’ vibe, but it’s a lot more refined, I'd say. Although we'll see how refined the gigs at The Great Escape are. This is some of the first times we’ve played these songs live, so it’s very new.
You're saying that's the end of that style and era. What's coming next then?
The first two years of starting being in a band, we had so much fun, played so many shows, and really found ourselves as performers. We all had this almost unspoken idea of what we would want to sound like. And we knew that if we wanted to sound like that, we needed to write some music. The songs that we had at the start were written before we really started. So we took a bunch of time off this year just to write and we’re getting a lot closer to what we've been meaning to sound like this whole time.
We're getting a bit symphonic and we're going a bit mad with the songs. Everything that we do now is now more exaggerated and more refined. It’s not a wall of sound.
Are there any topics or themes you guys want to cover in the new era?
We’re in the process of writing an album that’s going to be recorded this year. And though who knows when it’ll come out, the themes are already written.
We cover the ideas of leaving your past behind in order to move forward for the crazy things that you're about to do. There’s also a lot of space imagery, too. A lot of the feeling of being on the edge of a cliff - that balancing act of going forwards and backwards, where sometimes you fall but you come back again. Mae is also a lot more on this album, more than we’ve done before. That’s really exciting and having a female singer adds to the dynamic, which was definitely really needed for us. We had a lot of backing before, but now it’s more spread out which will be sick.
So besides recording the album, is there anything else for 2026 plans that you can talk about?
Hopefully there'll be a couple more singles by the end of the year, that might not even go on the album. We love them and they can really stand on their own. One that we recorded we only played live twice before, and it’s really sick. It features a lot of Mae’s vocals too. She’s the next Kim Gordon, which is also a clue about the name.
So the reason why we’re all here, Great Escape. You guys performed three times this week already, right?
It's our first time playing in Brighton, and we’re playing a total of six times. It’s going to be so much fun. We love Brighton, it’s really such a good spot for us. We really want to see Tooth, especially as some of us live with Tom, the vocalist. They’re really lovely lads and we love their music. Bed, too, they’re a great band who we’ve played with before at a So Young gig last year. Probably the best band we’ve played with live.
You all have been booked and busy these last couple years, between making music, performing, and selling out places like The Windmill in Brixton. What's been a moment that you've been really proud of yourselves for?
TOne of my favourite shows and what I was most proud of was last year when we did Green Man Rising. That’s a festival that's really close to our homes in Wales, and we've all been going to the festival for the last five or six years. So it was crazy special to play, especially since we played the closing set on the Rising stage. We saw all our friends that we'd made along the way in the first row and we saw our biggest audience yet there. Plus, there was a massive moshpit, which always makes you feel good. We went into that set without a lot of expectations other than knowing that we knew our music. But seeing everyone turn up, it was a really special moment. We had made a risky move by playing a new song then, ‘Mind Slipped’ for the first time, but it was a great place to test it out.