From Completely Lost, To Unbearable Loss: How Scarred Lip Made “The Threshold”
Lead singer and guitarist Matthew looks back on the inception of the band and the journey to getting the debut album produced
What do you do at 43, when you find yourself suddenly band-less and utterly devoid of faith in any musical abilities you might have once had?
That was the big question on my mind in December 2022, when the seven-year project that was Half Formed Things finally ended, hastened along by lock-down and members moving to the other side of the world.
This wasn’t the first (or even fifth) time I’d found myself in this position, but now I felt like I might not have the stamina to pick myself up and start again. Not that the end was a surprise either; Morgan had told us she was leaving and Edwin and I resolved to keep our musical relationship going, just not in the same bands – but something felt very off.
I’d arrived the idea of a “solo” project called Scarred Lip earlier that year and had started to pull together material, new and old, for an EP that Edwin and I would record. I’d release it with little fanfare and hope that I could convince some musicians to form another band that would inevitably implode.
In November we had our first recording session, and it became immediately apparent that I had lost whatever semblance of tone and timing (that was always a little… unorthodox) I may have once had. Edwin has never been one to mince his words when it comes to a bad vocal take, but after an hour he gently suggested that we end the session and try coming back when I’d had some “practice”. To be clear, I didn’t take this personally, but it cemented the reality that I just wasn’t in the right place to do this.
Fast forward to Christmas eve and Ciara Webb had come to my flat for a traditional drink and retrospective. She had had an utterly shit year so any of my problems just felt inconsequential in comparison, and once we’d covered all the main beats, I suggested that she join Scarred Lip and come in for the recording sessions we had scheduled in the new year. Ciara had provided all the strings for HFT’s debut album and was also a pianist, so it seemed like a no brainer to me. I was completely prepared for an immediate “no”, but Ciara agreed, on the condition that she only ever had to play piano and “nothing else”. And then we were two.
“Fair Head” was recorded over 2023 with intermittent full band practices in between and somehow, I found myself back to being a musician who was comfortable and confident in their abilities. It felt like that part of me had been pushed into a windowless cellar for years, then suddenly and unexpectedly been carried back into the sun. The EP was released in March 2024, and I know there are at least ten people who love it.
What was even more surprising and rewarding was that Ciara had almost immediately abandoned the whole “piano only” condition and was now adding viola and singing harmonies. Ciara started sending me voice notes of piano melodies that she’d come up with which I found effortless to write songs around. The core of the songs Wasteland and Narcopolis landed in my inbox at randoms times of the day, and I suddenly found myself furiously crafting vocal melodies and structures for them.
Then she wrote a song called “Killing Time”. She hadn’t ever written a song before, but it appears that Ciara is one of those wonderfully annoying people who pick up a bow and arrow for the first time, land the bullseye and are genuinely surprised. It is an astounding and devastating piece of music, easily one of the best songs on The Threshold.
That May, we rented a house in the middle of nowhere in Ayrshire, packed our gear and headed for a writing retreat. To this day, I’m still surprised by how disciplined we were over those 4 days, with practice and writing sessions kicking off at 10am, breaks for food and finishing around 11pm. And after all that, we had almost an entire album of songs all recorded and multitracked, ready for Edwin to give his producer’s once over and let us know how much more work we needed to do. It turned out there was a lot more work to do, but he agreed we did indeed have the bones of an album. Ciara set about applying for Creative Scotland funding for recording, and we spent the next 11 weeks or so crossing our fingers that it would be granted, so we could avoid emptying whatever savings we had. In July, I had a four-day bout of compulsive toxic thoughts and suddenly wrote Monolith – I can’t say that it’s one of my favourite writing processes, but the results speak for themselves.
__
That autumn I lost my dad, my heart broke and I wrote the title track for the album in his name.
__
In early December, we piled into our beautiful but very small recording/practice studio to track live drums, with Edwin wearing both producer and drummer hats effortlessly. In normal circumstances the drummer would be in some kind of isolation booth, with the rest of the band in another room playing along, but Edwin had made his intent very clear: the album needed to feel as live and alive as possible, so everyone needed to be in the same room. He wasn’t wrong. You can feel the air shift when you listen to it, with breaths and the occasional cough slipping into the mix. It’s a wonderful example of that accidental, rough perfection that I can always count on him to produce. It was essentially us playing 10 gigs in a row over the course of one day, so our middle-aged bones ached for the following week.
My love/hate relationship with recording is both cliched and exhausting. For some reason I always end up being the very last to record their parts and I dread having to sit in a room while other musicians do take after take after take of the same part while I try to look interested. Thankfully, this wasn’t my experience with recording The Threshold and I’m an altogether happier and healthier man now as a result.
I headed back to Belfast over Christmas with Ciara and Donal scheduled in to complete their parts while I was away, thus helping me avoid the crushing boredom of having to sit through the process. Arriving back before new year, Edwin sat me down to hear what he ironically described as Ciara’s “string parts” for songs like Evelyn and Secret Life. I’d heard these solo parts when we played live, but I honestly had no idea how they’d gotten from that to what amounted to an orchestral wall of soaring, heart rending harmonies. And I don’t really want to know, because hearing a finished product like that would be utterly ruined for me if someone showed me the recipe. That way it’s actual magic, in a world that doesn’t see it that often.
It sounds like I’m lying, but I don’t really remember the process of getting my guitars and vocals done. I’m dimly aware that it was layer after layer with different guitars, but I likely disassociated and was very happy to just trust process. I took some videos of me recording the vocals, but overall, it was a pretty tantrum and meltdown free experience for everyone, so I’m (and I’m sure Edwin is) eternally grateful for that.
With rough stems on a cloud drive, I headed back to Belfast to record my niece Eve’s vocals for Evelyn, and then promptly sent those stems to Nici Hosking (another HFT alumni and Scarred Lip collaborator) in Australia to record her parts, sitting in a van in the middle of the outback. In an alternate universe this didn’t happen and that song ends up being cut from the album. I thank all gods that we live in this universe, because that recording is sublime.
It had been decided pretty early on that the title track should be a one take, entirely live recording with only minimal production. It seems entirely appropriate that it was scheduled during a red-warning level storm, but thankfully the sound proofed walls of the studio kept the worst out. After a few false starts, with Ciara promising to “keep me right” emotionally, we did several takes. And then it was done.
The rest of the process ran pretty much as standard for these things. Edwin knuckled down to edit, produce and mix the sessions, and we would get 3am drops into a google drive with the latest drafts. Again, I don’t really remember much about this period either, except that every time he sent something I’d immediately go “that’s the fucking ONE, don’t touch it!”, and then Edwin would keep touching it, and making it infinitely better (I really can’t be trusted to make decisions about mixes, okay).
Then there was mastering (thank you, Ed), and photoshoots (thank you Ryan), and artwork (thank you, Daniel) and vinyl (thank you, Seabass), and music videos (thank you, John), and release parties (thank you, countless people) and ALL the other things you forget are part and parcel of releasing an entirely DIY album, but you have to just get on with anyway, because otherwise it won’t be as special.
So there it is, the story of a whining, middle aged Irish man’s redemption arc, which is (and always has been) reliant on the love and support of unfathomably talented, patient, loving friends and contemporaries.
I reckon I’ve probably got another five of these in me before I croak. What a fucking trip.
Matthew Bakewell, May 2026