Meet green star, the Spanish-American band inspired by the gloom of London

In a 21^st century update of the age-old story of bands forming via newspaper ads, Spanish-born, London-based musicians Pedro Soler and Albert De Torre found Lilah Bobak, the LA-born singer for their band green star, on a website called joinmyband.com.

“My friend told me about it and I was like, ‘Wow, that seems really sketchy’,” Bobak laughs. “She was like, ‘It’s usually bad, but sometimes it works’. I stopped checking the profile, but months later, Pedro found me on Instagram and it all went from there.”

Together, the trio make music defined by the juxtaposition of gloomy textures and bright melodies. They point to their previous lives in Mallorca, Madrid and Los Angeles – places bathed in sunlight – and the harsh London winters.

This beautiful dual sound is shown on debut EP bleeding swirls, released last week. Watch the video for new single ‘spiders without eyes’ below and read our Play Next interview with green star. They also appear on our Play Next playlist, which you can hear below, and play London’s The Social tomorrow (May 7).

What drew you all to London initially?

Pedro: We all come from different backgrounds. Lilah does contemporary dance. Alberto is more into production, and he and I came to do graphic and media design at University. We had the same urge to start a band. We come from very sunny places, so it’s quite funny that have ended up in London.

What did the two of you bond over when you first met?

Alberto: We met in one class, realised we liked the same references and then didn’t pay attention [to the class] at all – we just met later that week and started playing music together.

All three of you sing in the band – why was that important?

Pedro: It shows different visions and different approaches lyric-wise like. Alberto and I have different ideas about how to interpret language and lyrics. Before Lilah joined the band, it was like  two deeper, masculine vocals, and then Lilah brought a different range to it. We always write lyrics independently, and often Alberto does the verse and the chorus and I’ll do another part of the song.

Alberto: We really like the idea of putting three stories together to make one, and they usually align well.

What were the defining characteristics you wanted to give green star when you started out?

Pedro: Our music always has this gloomy, dreamy, romantic world. Everything seems like it’s collapsing, but at the same time, there’s, some certain light always there. Sonically, we use a lot of elements of noise that makes it quite rough, but at the same time very tender. It’s a dichotomy of contrasts, but all living in this kind of like Grace. It’s a reaction of coming like from these very sunny, vivid places to London, where the winters are very long, very deep, very gloomy.

Lilah, how does your dance background feed into your work with the band and vice versa?

Lilah: I have such an intense dance schedule because I’m still in uni. I’m in my last year right now, which is crazy, but that’s also especially why I wanted to come to London. It felt like the easiest place to be able to explore that other artistic side, and work on music and songwriting. But I was waiting, and I didn’t do anything else until I met these two. They found me. And then when I met them and we jammed and stuff, I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect. This is exactly what I wanted’. It definitely had to do with them as individuals and green star. It fit effortlessly.

There’s so many connections within these two artistic avenues that you get to collaborate with these people and that naturally informs who you’re working with, where you’re working, what you’re doing. We also use this as a platform for ourselves to, like, experiment with our other artistic avenues – we had some dancers in the last music video.

And where do you see the music going in the future?

Alberto: We’ve already started working on new demos, maybe to put an EP out at the end of the year. We’re excited to work on new material and also introduce new elements to the sound. We are working with more synthesisers, electronics, sequencers and learning how to introduce that into our style. We’re very excited!