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Lazy Habits – Vermillion Sands

The long awaited third album by Lazy Habits “Vermillion Sands” is scheduled for release in April 2022, in anticipation of the launch we caught up with James Collins, lead vocalist from the band to discuss pandemic life, motivation for the new music and the upcoming tour. When asked about how he has spent his time during the last couple of years he answered, “I moved and stayed in Taiwan from Feb 2020 after we had completed the songs for the new album, I ended up working on quite a few other projects, myself and Fi of Fjokra work under the name Crush Keys on film soundtracks and other artist work, so while we have been waiting on things to get back to whatever normal means nowadays, we have stayed busy. Also, I never stopped writing Lazy Habits stuff, so we used the time as well as we could”. So what is the new album all about? Vermillion Sands was actually the name of a fictional holiday resort taken from a collection of stories by J. G. Ballard, an English novelist who grew up in Shanghai during the 1930’s whilst it was under Japanese occupation. Some of his experiences were portrayed by Christian Bale when he played a young J.G. Ballard in the coming-of-age war biopic Empire of the Sun (1987). The holiday resort was originally built as a playground for the rich and famous (possibly modelled on Palm Springs) but the story is set way after it’s peak and we are introduced to it whilst in major decline and in a current state of disrepair, which could possibly be interpreted as a metaphor for the reality of a dream, someone who buys into an idea but then realises “the contents of the box seldom looks like the box art itself, it’s like looking behind the facade of all of that”. This dystopian aesthetic has been cleverly conveyed on the video for the first single off the album ‘CTRL‘, a beautifully shot, almost theatrical piece filmed in Wanli, Taiwan, directed by Jenny Lu ( Sochi International Film Festival Award Winner). “It’s kind of a full circle thing in a way, on the first album there are at least two or three J.G. Ballard song titles on it, the second album is actually named after a collection of stories by J.G. Ballard ‘The Atrocity Exhibition‘, and including the new release, this wraps up the trilogy”. James recalls reading this author a lot when growing up and although technically science fiction his stories are ones forged in a world that you can imagine living within, in some not-so-distant future. “Visions of the future based on memories of the past, the way he built worlds seemed so close to what was possible and looking closely at what he read set twenty or thirty years ago, you will start seeing patterns, things that can and have happened. It’s really relatable and a great palette to write on and use the metaphors of some of his work in our work”. Continue reading