Skylab

Skylab are a British alternative band, formed in 2014, and consisting of bassist and main songwriter Hamish Kennedy, lead guitarist Rumi Kirasabe, rhythm guitarist Matthias Fischer, and drummer Marigold Harper. The band grew from the part-time project of childhood friends Kennedy and Fischer after the breakup of their previous band, Turtlebite- who released a single EP on Cookies & Biscuits Records in early 2014 before collapsing during the recording sessions for their planned debut full-length- to a full-time band with three albums under their belt and co-headlining the Hystory & Skylab Tour across America only a year later. The band received the Best Alternative Artist award at the 2014 PPA Awards, along with the Best Collaborator Award, in a tie with Conscientia. Skylab have been on hiatus since the end of the Hystory & Skylab Tour in March 2015, though have repeatedly stated that this is temporary and the band are not finished.

History
Hamish Kennedy and Matthias Fischer founded Skylab after the breakup of Turtlebite while recording their debut LP. Since their record contract with Cookies & Biscuits Records no longer applied, the album- since completed; according to Kennedy, Loneliness Is Relative will most likely never be released as "it is both a snapshot of a dark time for all of us and not very good in the first place"- couldn't be released, and the two of them retreated to playing music together as a part-time hobby again. With the arrival of drummer Marigold Harper, who found them playing music in the basement of the tower block the three lived in at that time, they began to play gigs again- originally as Turtlebite, because no-one would book them otherwise. After one of these, Rumi Kirasabe, who was working as a bartender when she saw one of their performances, tracked them down and refused to leave until they took her on.

With her arrival, Skylab began to write and play seriously. Their breakthrough came with Payback, a collaboration with Forever The Young that charted in several countries and was featured on the Dutch band's sophomore album, Lessons In Tragedy. The notoriety that this and several other collabs with bands such as Dragonkin (Red America) and There And Back Again (Time Dilation) brought the band got them a contract for a single album with Sweet Silence Records, and, after the release of a demo album, debut The Lights And The Sound was released in May 2014. The album became something of a cult hit, with opener At The Edge Of The World, a second Skylab/Forever The Young collab, and Drive Into The Ocean providing lighter, more melodic entry points to what was at times a dark and confusing record. However, it was ignored by critics and much of the general public, and the band have since been critical of the album: Kirasabe has said that "the majority of [the album] was written in a week or so, and there wasn't really any point where we stopped to think about whether we were writing good songs or not". Nevertheless, the band played songs from the record on the Hystory & Skylab Tour in early 2015, and closer Hanna's Lullaby in particular has become something of a fan favourite.

For their second album, Music For The Modern Age, the band signed to New Records, and the increased budget of the label allowed them both to spend longer on making the record and to travel to Bleach Festival in Florida to perform early single and near-title track Decline Of The Modern Age. In an early interview, Kennedy described the upcoming release as "ultimately more of an optimistic album. There's darkness, but this time there's light to balance it. It's an album that we'd be quite happy to have define us if we were to break up now." ...Modern Age, to many, proved the band's place on the notoriously-exclusive record label, and sold well over the summer. The crowning glory of the summer was intended to be a place on the Wasteland Tour, hosted by Katana and billed as a journey across America with fourteen bands, Skylab among them. The tour, however, was cancelled almost immediately after the band's arrival in Boston, and New Records simultaneously went on hiatus, leaving them stuck in America with no-one to bail them out. "We were quite angry," Kirasabe wrote on the band's site after their eventual return. "And we weren't the only ones."

That period of time, however, did inspire and contribute much towards the third Skylab album, titled Past Lives Forever and released on Crumble Records in October. It featured collaborations with bands such as Conscientia, Hystory and Forever The Young, all written when the groups were stuck in Boston after the cancellation of the Wasteland Tour, and this, on their return, expanded to include bands such as (what remained of) The Random Factor, on closer Keep The Darkness Back, and Anchor Of My Presence, with hit Visions Of The Past. The album was the band's most successful of 2014, and was praised as being a huge step up from the preceding two records.