Sorry aren’t faking it

The story of Sorry’s third album, Cosplay, begins, in part, with Adam Curtis. Or, as Asha Lorenz, singer and guitarist in the beloved London band puts it: ​“What’s the name of that guy who does Hypernormalisation?”

The 28-year-old – who forms the songwriting partnership at the core of the band, alongside her schoolmate and best friend Louis O’Bryen – is perched on a piano in Sorry’s cramped North London writing room. She’s wrapped up in sweats and a puffer jacket, chaining cigarettes as she recalls the ​“orchestra thing” where she actually met Curtis. She and her friend ​“ended up going backstage and he was there and we had pints with him.

​“We were having nice talks, and I said: ​‘What are you doing next?’” she says. ​“And he’s like, ​‘it’s all about cosplaying’ – about how cosplay started with like, gay voguing, and now he thinks we’re all cosplaying everything. And it was tapped in with what I had been thinking about.”

The album’s Curtis-adjacent concept – warping and reinterpreting extremely familiar sounds and ideas until they’re totally Sorry-fied – was inspired by Lorenz’s feeling that everyone is just ​“baitly” copying things these days. As in, using references for the sake of referencing, rather than because of any deeper meaning.

In its kaleidoscope of influences, Cosplay is Curtis-like in other ways, too. Although it’s a continuation of Sorry’s seamy, sullen take on indie-rock, the whole thing feels like a postmodern house of horrors, seeding references to Mishima, Toni Basil’s Mickey and Watch The Throne among lyrics that touch on relationship breakdowns and the fraught politics that come with being part of London’s buzzy young post-punk scene.

​“I’ve been in the music world for a long time, and I just feel a bit disenchanted by it,” admits Lorenz. ​“I see girls that wear Avril Lavigne outfits or something, but they don’t really know what that means. People are taking lots of different things, but they don’t feel a real connection. The original idea of lots of pop, or style, or music – [we’re] so far away from what it was that you can now recontextualise it.”

Sorry lean inventively into that trend across Cosplay​’s 11 tracks. On Echoes, they lift lines from classic soul songs (​“I say a little prayer/​Just one more chance”). Jetplane samples Hot Freaks by Guided by Voices, turning it into something approximating a rock band’s take on a UKG heater. It’s dizzying, intense music that’s even more uneasily sinister than Anywhere But Here, Sorry’s acclaimed 2022 album.

That album, the band’s second after signing to Domino a few months before the pandemic, was a breakthrough, with a period of intense touring leading to a run supporting Fontaines D.C. last year. But behind the scenes, things were beginning to crack.

Lorenz and O’Bryen ​“kind of fell out a bit, after the last one”. Lorenz smiles sheepishly, tripping over her words as she glosses over the specifics of the beef. ​“I can’t – ” she begins, before declaring: ​“We just fell out. It was not good. I got really sick as well, and I was, like, ​‘I can’t do this….’ I think we’d harboured so much bad energy…”

As often happens with long relationships, there were tensions the pair had pushed aside for too long. ​“Me and Louis were not speaking, and we were playing the shows, and they were so emotional. Then we went to America and after the first day I got the most sick I’ve ever been,” she says. At the opening show, in Philadelphia, Lorenz had been drinking her usual tequila soda onstage, not realising ​“they free-pour tequila in America.” She drank the whole glass. Afterwards, bass player Campbell Baum challenged her: ​“What the fuck? You’re not even singing properly.” she recalls. ​“I was like, ​‘I’m sorry,’” she recalls now, ​“and then I projectile vomited. I never get that angry or push stuff. Then the next day, I must have just got ill from that and I had to play the [rest of the] shows. It was a dark time for me.”

Back in London after the tour, Lorenz and O’Bryen eventually got back on the same page. They both realised that way they have is too special to forfeit in the name of pride. ​“You can’t have something [like our relationship] and then not have the hard things. And I believe in forgiving people and getting on with shit as well… We make songs out of these things. It’s like: just get on with it.

“We’re both difficult people,” she admits, lighting up another cig. “[But] Sorry, as a thing – this sounds lame – it’s about friendship.”