Ben Mifsud Joslin from the band Eyes to Argus speaks to Lara Zammit about their latest single, Habitual, and their highly-anticipated album in habit. 

How would you characterise your recently released single Habitual? What themes and moods does the track explore and how would you say the music and lyrics convey them?  

Habitual is a song about comfort zones and familiarity. There are points in our life where we need to either face our comfort zones or come to terms with them. In that sense, the lyrics are very much a reflection of how we felt when we were writing our new album and where we wanted to go musically but, of course, the lyrics are open and resonate with various aspects of our own lives.

And we’re not necessarily stopping at one point of view in the song. As a band, we kind of embrace this idea of our music being emotively ambiguous, for lack of a better term. You might find the music melancholic or uplifting, depending on who you are as a person. We’re not writing music with an aim to be happy or sad – and we don’t really write lyrics to resolve topics in our head.

Habitual is one of those songs where we were really able to explore that duality. The themes are relevant to all of us, but we all have a different relationship with our comfort zones. And the push-and-pull nature of the music and lyrics reflects that.

Habitual is a prelude to your upcoming album in habit, the titles of which seem to point at the idea of ‘habitation’. Could you elaborate on this?

Habitation and domestic spaces are the basis of the whole album. The ethos behind it is that we experience the same spaces differently. Every song represents a different part of a house and a different experience within it. For example, we associate Habitual with the study, although you might call that your studio or creative space.

The album discusses topics such as routines within certain rooms, buildings that no longer exist, struggling with the need to move on from your home, and so on.

The cover artwork for the single Habitual by Sam Falzon (‘Bainmarie’)

We didn’t want to dive head first into a project about domestic spaces without having the right guidance and information. We have been collaborating with YMCA Malta and their input has been essential to the project. This is what they live and work with every day, and they knew exactly how to help us better represent these concepts. We can’t thank them enough.

True to post-rock form, Habitual meanders through mellow moments to more intense bursts, weaving each note with evocative, unsubdued lyrics. What musical influences did you make recourse to in the making of this single and upcoming album as a whole?

People who know us will know that we are obviously linked with styles like post-rock, shoegaze and ambient. But we’ve always aimed to be more than a standard post-rock band. We like to say we have a different sound that feels familiar.

We mostly wrote this music in 2018 and 2019, so we were listening to Yves Tumor, Thundercat, Tyler, The Creator, JPEGMAFIA and lots of similar acts. Of course, we always have more atmospheric bands like Radiohead, Fishmans and Tortoise in heavy rotation.

You might not hear it in the music directly, and we can talk about how we’re inspired by different beats, vocal lines or effects – but what we really care about and what really sticks is how these artists make us feel.

Habitation and domestic spaces are the basis of the whole album

This will be the second album by Eyes to Argus. How does this differ from your 2017 album VEER and what connections with it does in habit retain?

VEER was an experimental phase for us where we were trying out different sounds and just figuring out who we were as a band. Tracks like Jean Jacques Rousseau and Orpheus paved the way for the direction we would eventually go in.

We also developed an aesthetic approach during our VEER days that is still an integral part of us. There are clear connection points between the visuals we created during that time and the visuals we worked on for in habit.

We built a lot on the sound we developed during our VEER era. We still combine textural, atmospheric music with rhythmic grooves. We still play around with vocal elements. We still get heavy at points; we just evolved on how we do it. Sonically, we can connect in habit much more closely to VEER than our interim single Microcosm, which was very much its own thing.

The artwork for the single is also very compelling. What would you say the artwork is trying to evoke in terms of the single and how does it add to the experience of listening to it?

The album is about representing different experiences within the same spaces. We wanted to capture this idea through the visuals on the album, and to do this, we collaborated with a different artist on each song. We asked each artist to represent their own narrative through the artwork they created. That way, these spaces become shared – we inhabit them together but represent separate experiences through the music and visuals.

The artwork for Habitual was made by Sam Falzon (‘Bainmarie’), and we thought he would be able to give better context for his work. So, we deferred to him for the answer:

“As a 27-year-old who regrettably wastes an unhealthy amount of time in one room, I definitely had a lot to say, and was dying to say it. Thankfully, through the lyrics, I quickly realised that we actually share much of the same emotions.

“It was ridiculously easy, conceptually at least, to get down the basic ideas. I was also very conscious of the song’s arc and progression and did my best so that, visually speaking, different parts of the artwork work with different sections of the song.

“A love/hate relationship, the line between familiarity and dependability, maps, winds, roads, time, order, disorder are all elements I chose to visualise, the spectrum of experiences and emotions connected to the space as highlighted to me by the music.”

Habitual and the album in habit are produced by POST. Recordings (Indianapolis, Indiana, US). Listen to the single through eyestoargus.com.