The solo project of Leeds-based songwriter and producer Rob Slater, Carpet have been one of my favourite new acts of recent years. Across two previous EPs, Rob’s brand of distinctly English slow-core has always felt like a love letter to creativity, music made in stolen moments for himself in a busy life producing other people’s records and raising his young son, alongside his partner and Crake bandmate Rowan. For his next move, Rob decided to subtly expand the Carpet sound, seeking to find a middle ground behind the lo-fi bedroom intimacy he’s always loved and the expansive sheen of high-quality studio records. The result is his most ambitious release today, a third EP, Fruit, released earlier this month via Launchpad+.

Across the four tracks on offer, Rob seems to confront ideas of past and present, reflecting both the person he was before he was father. The past is particularly evident on the excellent, “bit of an overshare”, Chaste, a brutally honest song about the dark times, mistakes made, the guilt that follows and self-recrimination, set to a backing of baritone guitars and haunting, entwined backing vocals courtesy of live bandmate Sop Satchwell. That sense of looking back, seeing who you were and who you are, is there too in the closing track, Soft And Hidden, a song Rob considers the first ever Carpet song, and one that set out a blueprint for everything the project would become an exploration of the personal, the intimate, and the beautifully mundane.

If the songs are past and present colliding, the music is only ever looking to the future, looking at where Carpet’s sound is and where it could go next. Fruit feels like a distillation of everything I loved about Carpet’s earlier material, the choppy slapback guitars, and the understated, questioning vocals, that ask what success is and what it is worth, “is it a case of if it’s real or if it works?”. There’s even room for a deliriously good blast of blink-and-you-‘ll-miss-it harmonica towards the end, a sign perhaps of Rob’s newfound confidence to trust his production instincts in his own music as well as in the work of others. Elsewhere, Ok For Now perhaps goes the other way, showcasing something we’ve not really seen from Carpet before, there’s a distinct brightness here in the languid Big Thief-like guitar lines and a distant crescendo of brass The National would be proud of. It feels almost upbeat, even if Rob describes this reflection on, “the helplessness and unresolved feelings” of living through lockdown Britain as the song on the record that, “makes me feel the saddest”.

Marking the release, today Rob is taking us through the record track-by-track, sharing a glimpse of the inspirations, recording techniques and lyrical mindset of this most remarkable of new releases.

Chaste

The Fruit EP began as the perhaps confusingly titled cassette, ‘Carpet 2’. This name made sense to me however – despite being the 3rd EP it was the first batch of songs written and recorded purely with the project in mind, and with a clearer sense of where it should end up. I’ve always remembered Soft and Hidden as the first flag in the ground song of this vision, and perhaps it was, but I think Chaste might have actually come first. When I wrote it I thought I’d probably show it to anyone. I’d been pretty unwell and this seemed like an overshare. But it flowed out easily and honestly one afternoon, which is something I try to trust over any self-aware pretence of what your conscious thinks it should be saying. It’s also felt especially strange releasing this song having just had my first child – as if written by prior version of myself. As if parents shouldn’t be having such feelings. Eventually the song becomes its own entity, abstracted from whatever feelings it describes. There’s a lot to overthink since that first afternoon and it felt important to try to both honour that initial sentiment and trust in what we’d made.

I love how haunting Sop sounds at the end.

Fruit

Hopefully it’s reasonable enough to say that I feel like Fruit has been the first ‘live favourite’ of the full band set, in the relatively short public life of the project.

In the meantime a cassette demo was slowly morphing into the recording that exists today. I borrowed a Strymon Deco pedal from my friend James for the guitar slapback. The old band he used it in, Cruel World were doing less and he wasn’t playing guitar in his new band so he said he wouldn’t miss it. That pedal has since been on nearly every record I’ve worked on in the last 3 years. I asked my friend Russell (The Research/Crake) if he had a harmonica and fancied a crack at doing something and he sent me either a few ideas through or maybe even just that that you can hear on the record. The end coda is taken from the original 4-track demo, with Morg playing piano over the top. I’m not sure it’s been played since that early capture.

Ok For Now

Perhaps surprisingly, for me this song feels the saddest on the record – or makes me feel the saddest at least. Helpless and hopeless and maybe still unresolved in my head. I still feel the nauseous ick. Any glimmer of hope that does exist does so in the middle 8, which is where my hope usually seems to exist – a good place for hope I think. This is a lockdown song, which for whatever reason I feel are supposedly seen as uncool or cliched – this seems odd to me for such a huge thing we all went through. Was ace getting Emma and Aaron in to play horns for this – up there with the string arrangement with Anj and my mum on Atrophy in terms of exciting treats I don’t get chance to do often enough but would love to do more of. I owe a lot to Billy (of the amazing Blacklisters) and especially my partner Rowan for their guidance on this one.

Soft And Hidden

So yeah in way, for me, this is actually the first Carpet song. I was playing a lot of Zelda at the time, so obviously thinking a lot about time, light, sanctuary. A friend and I were messaging about what I would hypothetically get as a first tattoo – a snail, under the arm, somewhere soft and hidden. Then I sat on the stoop in the sun and this song came. Fun fact: – this also actually was the first Carpet song ever released, as part of Crake’s joyous Four Tracks EP released on bandcamp back in 2021, in which each member of Crake offered a home recorded song. I mastered it (and cried through Russell’s), whilst Rowan was at home painting the artwork. By the time I got home it had been released I think. Still one of my fondest associations with any release I’ve done probably, which was the point.

I really like how the non-linear timeline of this song’s existence is fitting with the Zelda that inspired it.  

Fruit is out now via Launchpad+. For more information on Carpet visit https://linktr.ee/carpetsongs