Balancing Act: At Home in the Unknown
Balancing Act aren’t looking to find their footing; they’re embracing the sway.
Photo: Indy Brewer
The French countryside isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a Manchester-born band writing and recording their debut album. But for indie-rock quartet Balancing Act, whose sound lies somewhere between rainy northern realism and widescreen cinematic ambition, escaping somewhere quiet made perfect sense.
Tucked away among open fields and endless skies, Studio Alouette – a converted stargazing retreat owned by their friend and live band member Joe Woolf – became their creative sanctuary. A place to hide, to focus, and disappear from the outside world. “No signal, no Wi-Fi. It sounds cliché, but just music,” bassist David Carpenter recalled. “If you walk out at night, you can see the Milky Way. The sky is crystal clear,” guitarist Jackson Couzens added.
But the tranquillity of the location didn’t seep into the songs. Rather than producing sun-soaked serenity or reflective cosmic calm, Balancing Act’s first full-length record, Who’ve You Come As? (Part 1), leans into their signature gothic gloominess, becoming something darker, more curious, and deeply human. “We seem to do the opposite of where we write,” Carpenter explained. “When we were in the sunny France countryside, we wrote dark, moody stuff. And then when we wrote for two weeks in the Alps — when it was really cold and white — we wrote really summery, festival songs.”
That tension – between light and shadow, the familiar and the new – runs throughout the album. Talks A Lot opens with hazy, dreamlike vocals before giving way to a driving, bass-heavy synth pulse that’s propelled by Pat Hanbury’s precise yet fluid drumming. Scar unfolds like a cinematic story, its soaring vocals and sharp hooks hinting at euphoria while darkness hums beneath. Meanwhile, Bonneville Salt Flat Jive takes a more playful, theatrical approach, twisting tension into something off-kilter – yearning and irony wrapped in kinetic energy. Across the album, Balancing Act aren’t chasing perfection; they’re chasing motion.
Yet despite that constant urge to keep moving, what grounds the band isn’t place; it’s people. Physical location matters less than how the band exists together in it. As Couzens said: “The common ground is it’s just the four of us. Five with Joe. It’s just us doing it. That’s the only common thing through all of it. Carpenter agreed: “It’s the little things that influence the music – the conversations you’re having that day, the mood, which everyone dictates, not just yourself. When we go write, we’re bunking, we sleep in dorms, so we don’t really spend that much time far away from each other. That impacts it a lot.”
That kind of closeness doesn’t just shape their process; it echoes in the sound itself. You can hear it in the chemistry, the instinctive shifts from tenderness to tension, the way ideas bounce off each other like live wires. And for Balancing Act, that’s exactly where the real excitement lies. The unpredictability of creation, when it’s just them experimenting.
It’s that same spirit of discovery that defines Who’ve You Come As (Part 1) – an expansive snapshot of the band’s creative growth, rather than a statement of their arrival. “These collections of songs were us basically learning how to develop a song, how to make it feel a little bit more special, and also not sound like another band,” vocalist Kai Jon Roberts explained. “Just because a band’s doing well, I don’t want to dress the same and write a tune like theirs.”
“Obviously we’re a guitar band, but we wanted to explore new elements,” Carpenter continued. “For example, there’s a song on Part 2, where Kai’s playing a plant pot that has a bolt in it. There’s no other band doing that, I’ll tell you.”
Part 2 promises a different sound to anything the band have released before – more live, exploratory, and unconstrained. “Part 1 feels a little bit more studio, Part 2 feels a little bit more live,” Couzens shared. “It’s going over everything that we’ve covered previously, but just throwing everything at the wall and seeing where else we can reach with it.”
Together, the two parts form a body of work that doesn’t claim to have all the answers, only the courage to keep asking, keep exploring. “I think if you find your feet sound-wise, that’s where you stagnate,” Carpenter said. “I don’t think you want to find your feet.”
“Yeah, I think it’s Jack White that says it,” Couzens added, “Once you’re in the unknown, that’s when it’s exciting.”
So, as Balancing Act continue on their tightrope walk between where they’ve been and where they could go next, their restless curiosity pulls them toward the unknown – not for the sake of novelty, but because it’s at the core of who they are. Who’ve You Come As? (Part 1) isn’t a final statement, it’s a portrait in motion: not fixed, not finished, but alive. Balancing Act aren’t chasing solid ground, they’re shaping it as they go, tracing who they are, who they were, and who they might come as next.
Who’ve You Come As? (Part 1) is out now.