The point at which The Lathums frontman Alex Moore realised his band’s songs were really connecting was when they were playing gigs and the crowd were singing the tracks back to him louder than the PA. “That’s when I knew it’s really struck a chord with people,” Moore tells Apple Music. The Wigan indie-rock quartet’s tales of everyday life were built to be hollered along to, their acoustic-tinged anthems about growing up in a small town tapping into universal themes of escapism and chasing your dreams. Produced by The Coral’s James Skelly, their debut album How Beautiful Life Can Be is a document of everything the band have done since forming in 2019, after meeting at college, right through to playing sell-out shows across the UK. These are tracks inspired by Moore’s family life and teenage years, soap-opera songwriting in the vein of Paul Heaton and Courteeners but for a new generation. “It’s about what I’ve learned, values my mum and dad taught me,” says Moore. “It’s like therapy for me, writing about what’s happening with me at that time.” It’s a wedding of everyday storytelling to pin-sharp melodies that is rooted firmly in UK pop tradition. “The Smiths, The Beatles, The Kinks, British bands from way back when,” says guitarist Scott Concepcion of his formative inspirations. Let Moore and Concepcion guide you through the soundtrack to their lives, track by track. “Circles of Faith” Alex Moore: “A couple on the album have that process where Scott would play me a progression musically and then I’d lyricise over it. What usually happens is we play something and then forget about it and it gets lost in the realm forever. But luckily, we remembered this one. We were at the point where we thought we really could make a career out of music and it was spurring me on: I wanted to do everything we could, experience everything we could, take this as far as it can possibly go.” “I’ll Get By” AM: “It’s just a happy-go-lucky song. I don’t need much, I’m a pretty simple guy—I just get by on the little things. I wrote it in my bedroom. I could hear the melody and it got stuck in my head and then I just started messing about and the lyrics just started flowing out. I find it hard to describe a lot of the songs because of how quickly they just appear. And then as quick as they’ve come, they’ve gone. I have to write it down and remember the feel of the tune. That’s why I’ve lost some. I’ve got a better phone now so I can start recording them.” “Fight On” AM: “We’d started doing a few bigger gigs. We supported Gerry Cinnamon and we were on a roll before lockdown. I remember reading an article about the French Resistance in World War II. It was kind of a lover's tale, and I started to relate it back to our lives at that moment. There was loads of stuff going on in the world at that time; I just felt like the positive meaning behind it could rally people, have something to spur people on.” “How Beautiful Life Can Be” AM: “Me and my mum were having a conversation and she gave me a few things that made me think. I was on a bit of a downer at that point and my mum was putting light on things and it got me thinking. We were just sat on the couch and I started working it out.” “The Great Escape” AM: “I was really happy with the songs we were writing, and I thought, ‘We do have a chance of getting out of here, we have a shot to do something really amazing,’ like it was our great escape. The band doing well gave me more confidence with my lyrics as well—I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind and express to people how I’m actually feeling, whereas before I’d word things in a way where I wasn't showing too much. We remastered it for the album because we’d recorded it in college, in a studio with [Wigan-based producer] John Kettle, who’s kind of our musical mentor. We just felt it had more life left in it.” “I Won’t Lie” Scott Concepcion: “I wanted to use a diminished seventh chord in a way that wasn’t how I was shown. I fluked it on the first try.” AM: “A lot of the time, I don’t particularly have an idea of what I’m going to sing about, especially if Scott brings me music, because I don’t have to think about where we can take it structurally, it’s already there. So I usually improvise, singing out what comes out, and write it down. It’s only later on where I’ve thought, ‘Bloody hell, I understand what I was thinking at that point now.’” “I See Your Ghost” AM: “I had the verses to this for ages. I never really knew where to go with it, so I just left it. There were no songs on the album where there was a bit of grit, no real energy. We needed a fast song, and James Skelly said, ‘If you get a chorus tonight for that, we’ll come in and do it the next day.’ I didn’t need the night, I just did it in the studio on that day and we recorded it. James was quite cool and collected about it. I hope he was impressed.” “Oh My Love” AM: “I had this one for ages as well, maybe even before the band. It was a conversation between two people, that’s how it presented itself to me, maybe somebody who’s lost someone and was coming to terms with that. It unravels itself through the song. Sometimes I write songs for myself, sometimes I write because of what I’m getting off other people. I know it sounds mad, but I really believe in people’s energies and I pick up on it and it affects me in different ways. Sometimes it makes me write a song.” “I’ll Never Forget the Time I Spent With You” AM: “We were in London for our first headline show when I started writing this. I was a bit blown away, because the crowd was insane, and they had been all the way through the tour. I was thinking, ‘What have we got here? What is actually happening?’ We’d just come from little Wigan, playing pubs and stuff. To be playing massive venues with people singing the songs back and that, it was just really overwhelming. I was thinking, ‘Where could this life take us? What could we actually be doing in a year’s time, two, three, ten years’ time?’” “I Know That Much” AM: “This was another one when we were getting steam and people started hearing about us. I was in college at that time and I remember walking the same street I’d been walking all my life pretty much, going up and seeing the same people at night. Although I love that and I don’t want to lose that because that’s nostalgia for me, I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be here all my life. I want to really give life a go and experience things. I don’t want to miss out on anything.’” “Artificial Screens” AM: “It’s our favourite to play live, because we can just tan it, basically. If we’ve got any extra time at the end, we just keep playing it until someone tells us to shut up. This was the first song I wrote for the band; it was the first one we recorded as well. That was the first time I was like, ‘Ooh, this is all right, this, being in a band and that! If I can keep writing these songs and that, it’ll be a good time.’ Before, I was just on my own in my room writing these songs, and now there were other people that wanted to play these songs with me and have their own things that they like to play.” “The Redemption of Sonic Beauty” SC: “I’d watched the Queen film, Bohemian Rhapsody. And I was like, ‘I need to start playing piano after watching that.’ So I managed to get a piano, and this was the first sort of piece that I wrote on it. We used it for a college project, and then a while further down the line, we revived it for the band.” AM: “It just had to be the closing track. Because me and Scott felt a certain way about it, I think it was good to end on it, because it makes people think, ‘What are they going to do next, how are they going to top this?’ Because it’s so different to all the other songs that we’ve done. And then we’ll blow them out the water with album two.”