Middle Kids’ third album is all about the “search for something good on the other side of confusion or pain,” Tim Fitz tells Apple Music. The band doesn’t shy away from asking the big questions about life on Faith Crisis Pt 1, connecting personal experiences to universal themes of spirituality, faith and, yes, crisis. Such themes are nothing new for the trio, with multi-instrumentalist Fitz laughingly suggesting that Faith Crisis Pt 1 could also have been the title of their previous albums: 2018’s Lost Friends and 2021’s Today We’re The Greatest. Once the LP was complete and the band stepped back to consider what they’d created, however, so clear were its lyrical themes that the record practically named itself. “If you read all the lyrics in a row it’s like one song,” offers Fitz. “It feels like it spans decades and all these different experiences and perspectives. But a huge part of it was those moments of faith and moments of crisis. We’re very interested in the moment of everything falling apart, and how people move through that.” Decamping to London for five weeks to work with producer Jonathan Gilmore (The 1975), the trio (completed by vocalist/guitarist Hannah Joy) had a simple goal: “Execute all the songs and the sounds really well, and for everything to be considered a sonic step forward,” says Fitz. “We wanted to feel like we’re taking new ground, but not shapeshifting.” Here, Fitz and drummer Harry Day take us through the themes and experiences that inform Faith Crisis Pt 1. “Petition” Tim Fitz: “It’s very personal to Hannah. She starts with the phrase ‘My butterfly/I would do anything to see you smile.’ Sometimes, I think that’s about her hope, or her faith; it’s personifying this very fragile, vulnerable thing. Sometimes, I think it’s from God’s perspective talking to us. Or sometimes, I think it’s Hannah talking to her child. I don’t really know exactly what it’s about, but it has this very caring energy, but then also all these unanswered questions. I think that sets up the tension of the album.” “Dramamine” TF: “It is a song about love. That’s one that Hannah and I wrote together early on. It’s not that complicated. We just wanted to fill it with all these images. We didn’t want to describe a situation like so many songs do—we’re in the car, you’re holding my hand. We were like, ‘let’s do all images that equal that feeling of stomach-dropping-out love.’ We just wanted it to be very exciting.” “The Blessings” TF: “This song is a person who is kind of questioning if they’ve made the right decisions in the past. They’re looking back, they’re sort of fantasising about different realities that could have happened. Hannah recorded it in LA in a writing room, and the piano at the beginning is from her iPhone demo. We kept some of that original sound, which was cool.” “The Blessings Interlude” TF: “We wanted this album to feel like an album, not just a collection of songs one after the other; to have some musical moments and some quiet moments. Both of the [record’s] interludes were recorded in Sydney. They were improvised. Hannah recorded the vocal [to this one] standing really far away from the microphone, and then at the end you hear her leaving the studio. We just love that feeling of intimacy, like you’re in the room with Hannah.” “Bootleg Firecracker” TF: “The song was [originally] quite angsty and dance-y. And I remember slowing it down and recording some new acoustic. When it comes in, it just feels fresh. I think it’s because there’s not a lot of bass, so it’s all floating. There’s slide and there’s acoustic, then there’s these drums, and there’s nothing in the middle. So everything’s sort of floating in the air. It’s just a really beautiful, tender love song.” Harry Day: “The love songs seem to stand through in the face of the various questions and uncertainties that the rest of the album devolves into. Sonically, it kind of reflects that as well. It’s a bit of a breather.” “Highlands” TF: “Wanting to get out is a [recurring] theme for Hannah; wanting to escape. We were talking about this image of a kid leaving their house at night, just trying to find something out there. The [Scottish] Highlands represent for Hannah this free place. There’s an ancestral connection there. So every now and then, Hannah feels like it’s this space where you could go and feel spiritually free and take a breath, just like the antidote to suburban gloom.” “Bend” TF: “This is the last song that was written before we recorded. Hannah wrote it when she was in a hotel room. She was filming a movie for a couple of weeks by herself. I think when she finds that alone space, she can really access some deep emotional parts of herself. She just tells it like it is. On this recent tour in the States, it got such a huge response every time. They’d never heard it before, but people would be crying.” “Go to Sleep on Me” TF: “I think it’s Hannah’s critique of the middle class. Like everyone with their perfect life, they’re just barely hanging on. And something is wrong here. It’s like, the more you look into what’s actually holding people’s lives together, the weirder the deals are that people have made. I remember in the studio there wasn’t a final section. And I was like, ‘can the last refrain be something very tender to sort of answer that scepticism and critique?’. And ‘go to sleep on me’ is the thing she came up with, which is so inviting and comforting.” “Terrible News” TF: “It’s this idea of everyone talking all the time and saying how everything is terrible, and it’s exhausting. No one really wants to be a part of that, but somehow we end up drawn into it. Maybe it’s an internet song. I think it’s Hannah getting up and having a yell, saying, ‘I don’t really like this and I don’t respect this cycle of negativity and everyone talking all the time.’ A lot of people talk a lot about how things should be and spend a lot of time projecting these ideals from their platforms, and I think she’s quite sceptical of that. She thinks a lot of our integrity is built in our personal lives and [in] what we actually do that isn’t seen.” “Philosophy” HD: “It’s probably born from a similar space to ‘Terrible News’, in terms of the self that we can project out on the internet versus what’s really going on behind closed doors and who you really are.” TF: “There’s this line, which is very Hannah, but it’s a side that you don’t see much. She says, ‘She’s got a platform, what the fuck is that for?’ It’s this idea that everyone’s always talking about their platform, and how to responsibly use their platform. Then the chorus is like, ‘She plays her part, and she plays it well.’ I feel like part of the song is saying [that] people are told they have a platform, but this is who we need you to be. It’s an interesting bait and switch, because women are told they can be a certain few things as their public image, and that’s your platform. You can choose one.” “Your Side, Forever” TF: “It’s a song about friendship, and just sticking it out and going the distance with each other. We wanted it to feel really warm and it also has a really beautiful groove. The sentiment is quite ‘heart on your sleeve’. It’s not edgy, but it’s sincere.” “Your Side Interlude” TF: “The interlude is similarly quite emotional and ‘heart on our sleeve’. And that one was particularly improvised and quite abstract. We were all in different rooms and we couldn’t see each other while we were playing. We were all very separate, but in a way we just had to listen for what we could hear. Then a friend of ours in the States plays some strings on it, which was beautiful.” “All in My Head” (feat. Dave Le’aupepe) TF: “This is one of those songs where I thought, this is a faith crisis moment. It’s a particular moment in Hannah’s life where she was in a lot of pain. In a strange way, it’s maybe the most personal song on the album. Then it’s funny, because Dave [Le’aupepe, Gang of Youths vocalist] is singing those lyrics which Hannah wrote. I think she was nervous about how it would feel for him to sing her words. But then it creates this wonderful new dimension to it.”