caroline’s founding members Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn and Mike O’Malley first started playing together in 2017. Llewellyn and Hughes met at university in Manchester, and on moving to London invited Llewellyn’s old friend Mike O’Malley to form a group, rehearsing in the upstairs room of a South London pub. Yet as they kept on playing together, it became clear that something altogether deeper was emerging. “As soon as the songs started to more structured, we thought some swoony violin would be good,” says O’Malley. To provide it, they recruited Oliver Hamilton, who had also had a stint on bass in their early days before moving to violin.

As the band’s sound kept expanding, so too did their line-up, eventually becoming an eight-piece completed by trumpeter and bassist Freddy Wordsworth, another violinist Magdalena McLean, percussionist Hugh Aynsley and flute, clarinet and saxophone player Alex McKenzie. By the time the cast settled towards the end of 2019, the songs too were expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and Appalachian folk.

Their debut self-titled album was released by Rough Trade Records in 2022 and mixed by John ‘Spud’ Murphy (black midi, Lankum). Drawing near universal acclaim, it was recognized as one of the best albums of 2022 by NPR Music, NME, Pitchfork, Loud And Quiet, and Quietus, among numerous other accolades. On it, songs can cascade like an avalanche with the full force of so many instruments, squalling and rumbling on the edge of all-out collapse. At other times they slip back into impossibly fragile moments of quiet – a simple bassline or a rattle of snare the only sound amid a dark sea of silence. caroline know exactly the right balance between restraint and release.