Saint Agnes: “From a personal point of view, I had to find lightness within the music making process again.”

With their new album Your God Fearing Days Are About to Begin, Saint Agnes return with a record shaped by both personal experience and the wider world around them. Written across a period marked by political uncertainty, social division, and personal reflection, the album takes its title from the darker atmosphere that surrounded its creation. While not a directly political record, Jon James Tufnell and Kitty A Austen describe it as a snapshot of the time in which it was made, carrying a sense of unease while still searching for moments of hope.

The album also marks a shift in how the band approached songwriting after the raw and difficult experience of making Bloodsuckers. For Kitty, that previous record was tied closely to grief following the death of her mother, while this new album became a way of letting light back into the creative process. Working initially with a producer before ultimately bringing the record back under their own control, Saint Agnes pushed themselves to be more open, more experimental, and less bound by expectation. The result is a record built around contrast: darkness and light, heaviness and melody, grief and renewal.

In our latest Cover Story, V13 talks to Saint Agnes about the making of Your God Fearing Days Are About to Begin, the personal and creative journey behind the album, and how they found hope within darker themes. From the lessons learned during Bloodsuckers to the process of rebuilding their confidence as songwriters, Jon and Kitty reflect on the band’s evolving identity, their long-running creative partnership, and why this record has renewed their love of making music.

Your God Fearing Days Are About to Begin is quite an ominous title. It’s quite attention-grabbing before you’ve even listened to the record. What’s the inspiration behind it?

Jon James Tufnell: “It was the black cloud sitting over the real world during the period of writing this record.”

Kitty A Austen: “It got darker, actually.”

Jon: “It’s got darker. We started writing this record two years ago. We were already seeing the rise of the religious right and everything in the world. Kitty and I are pretty switched on to politics and stuff, even though we don’t necessarily want to go down that route fully musically all the time. Or really at all. There are flashes of it on the record, but it’s still dealt with in a poetic way.

It’s more the fact that you have this little bubble of creativity you’ve created, that you’re trying to make something personal and meaningful to you, but whilst you’re focused on this, you’re aware in your peripheral vision of what’s happening in the rest of the world. It was obvious how dark things were getting and how much darker they kept getting, and I think we wanted to reflect that in the record’s title and show that these songs were written during this period. Almost like a snapshot.

The songs aren’t explicitly always about that, but they are influenced by a sense of ominous foreboding, which is why a lot of the songs, in our own way, we did work quite hard to try and bring little rays of sunshine and hope into. We tried to create the sonic sound of hope on the horizon. Like dawn breaking through the clouds all the time.”

“It was obvious how dark things were getting and how much darker they kept getting, and I think we wanted to reflect that in the record’s title and show that these songs were written during this period.”

In your peripheral vision, you’ve got mostly bleak news on 24/7 wherever you turn. How hard is it to inject a ray of sunshine into such dark themes?

Jon: “It’s hard to explain. When we were actually in the process of writing the record, it’s easy to think the songs are about something all the time. Whilst the way Kitty writes lyrics, the songs are about something in a poetic sense, the main thing that informs the writing is the mood. The sonic mood. The notes, the vibe, the sound.

When we were writing “The Beast,” Kitty had written it as an acoustic guitar song initially, but wanted this to become something more brutal and ugly-sounding sonically, so we were trying to figure out how to do that. It wasn’t until we got to the stage of working on it so much that we brought in these little moments of light and hope that suddenly it made sense. It’s lyrically dark, but the lyrics do have some hope in there.”

Kitty: “You need the light as well. To offset the dark, you do need both. They make each other more important. They make each other more vital.

For me, our last album, Bloodsuckers, we wrote and recorded just after my mum had passed away. It was a very difficult, quite brutal experience to make that record. With this one, from a personal point of view, I had to find lightness within the music-making process again. I had to fall back in love with it, because I really was at a point where it was so difficult and so brutal to do that last record, I wasn’t sure if I wanted do this anymore at all.

We got this opportunity to make an album, but I just couldn’t make another ugly, abrasive, raw record. I had to let the light in. I think you can really hear that hope across the record. I think the hope comes from quite a personal place rather than looking out into the world. It was more to do with my journey of grief and how I’ve been able to let light back into my life and move forward. When you lose somebody really close to you, you really do start to grow in a way where you leave all the nonsense behind, and you realise what actually matters. Feeling hope and joy is really important.”

V13 Cover Story – Issue 123 – Saint Agnes

Jon: “It’s in those bleakest of times that you realise the good things that are there and you realise what they are. It’s the same reason if you’re watching a film that’s a really artfully made film that’s maybe something incredibly sad, like a war film. There might be a beautiful, touching moment in there that moves you in a more joyous way than just a straightforward happy film.

If you put on a comedy, you don’t necessarily come away feeling happier. You’ve laughed, but you’re not necessarily happier. You see something sad and bleak and come away happier and hopeful. This is how we talk when we’re writing, Kitty and I. Saint Agnes is an ongoing conversation interspersed with moments of music making. This is how we talk about stuff all the time.”

When you’re writing, there’s a dark, brutal, raw element to your music. When you see that spark of joy, would you sit there and see how it would fit into a song?

Kitty: “It is like a patchwork. We generally start with Jon, who has loads of ideas all the time. Jon’s brain is constantly coming up with little musical ideas, melodies, a riff, something, and he records them all. Then I’ll sift through it and choose stuff that excites me, and then we just fly from there.

I’ll hear something, and it’ll spark an idea of a visual or a concept of something, and then we will start pulling it in from there. We’ve got years of music we’ve been making together, so we have so much stuff in the bank that we can pick, say, a chorus where, at the time, we couldn’t get it to work in a song, but now, maybe five years later, it suddenly fits in easily. It’s just been there all along, waiting for us to catch up to what we needed to do.”

Jon: “When you hear it with fresh ears, you reinvent it. So it might be like, ‘I loved that lyric, but it didn’t really fit in that previous song.’ But suddenly it’s the exact right lyric, because of the mood of the song, whereas before it was during a really quiet section, it actually works much better in this really loud guitar section.

Kitty: “Because we’ve been working together for so long, it’s really good for two reasons. One is that we have so much work around and nothing’s ever in the bin because we know we’re going to keep writing so much more music. When you’ve worked with someone for a really long time, you have a lot of music.

The other thing is, our process is so fluid now of writing music together. It hasn’t always been. It’s taken years to get to this point where we just fly with ideas. It’s like speaking a language only we understand. If I say something, Jon will understand exactly what I mean because of all the time spent together talking about music.”

Since the last record, and it being quite a dark, brutal record, given what you were going through at the time, how do you feel you changed as a songwriter? Also, by wanting to introduce light into this record, how has that challenged you as a band and as songwriters?

Kitty: “I definitely am so much more confident now with my ideas than I was before. I really struggled to be vulnerable, and was always worried that what I was presenting wouldn’t be good enough, wouldn’t be understood. I was very closed and tight. Going through grief and going through everything, as I said, you leave that stuff behind because you believe it’s silly.

“I really struggled to be vulnerable, and was always worried that what I was presenting wouldn’t be good enough.”

I’m in a band with my best friends. They really love me. We make music together. I’m in the band because they like what I bring to the table. With this record, we went to the studio and started off the album working with a producer, and I went in with the mindset of I’m just going to try everything. Whatever anybody asks me, I’ll sing it. And I’m not normally like that at all. Before, I’d be like, ‘No, this is what I do, so here you go. Here’s some vocals. That’s what it’s going to be.’ I’ve become so much more open-minded and open to trying and failing and being fine with that.”

Jon: “It’s because we realised it just had to be. We didn’t know what we wanted the process to be like. We just knew it had to be different to the previous album. I was under tha illusion liking so much dark art, and a lot of dark art involves people talking about depression or grief or the harder parts of life. It’s often talked about in such a way that it almost feels romantic or wistful.

In reality, when we were making Bloodsuckers, and Kitty was raw with grief, right in the eye of the storm, it was just brutal. There was nothing romantic or beautiful about it. It was pure animal rage and pain, and really hard to witness, and ugly. You want it to end for someone that you care about. You’re not like, ‘Oh, lucky them, they’re going through this beautiful, whimsical experience.’ It’s not that at all. They’re not sat there quietly smoking with a glass of red wine, looking into the distance. It’s raw and brutal and really unpleasant. It’s like looking at someone who’s just been beaten up. They’re in pain.

So we really knew making this record that our minds still had that memory really fresh. We couldn’t really quite remember what it was like to make music without that being there because it was such an enormous experience. We knew we wanted to make music, now we’ve got an opportunity to make an album, let’s just do something different so that it has a chance of not being like making the last record.

That was why we started working with a producer, because the last record we did everything ourselves, so this one, let’s go in with a producer. As Kitty said, she was just going to say yes to everything because if we don’t like it, we can delete something, and I’m just going to try stuff, so that was an immediate mind change. I tried to be less controlling over how things were going to be and just open the door.”

Saint Agnes ‘Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin’

Kitty: “It felt quite free.”

Jon: “It felt really free.”

How hard was it to let someone else into that? Secondly, what do you think they brought to the whole process and the record?

Jon: “There’s a complex answer to this one.”

Kitty: “To begin with, it was really easy, and it was really fun, and it was a guy that we liked a lot and got on really well. We did some test days with him, and they went really well. He’s an excellent musician and a really clever producer. He did give us ideas, and it was very refreshing to have a new person that wasn’t just me and Jon, our two brains locked into how it must be like this. That was really refreshing. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out with that producer, and we ended up taking it back within our control and basically producing it ourselves.”

Jon: “It’s complicated because it sounds mad. We don’t want to go into depth about why things ended up in a certain way, but, for necessary reasons, we had to bring it back. Unfortunately, we’d gone through this experimental phase with him, which was really useful for us to see things differently, almost view ourselves differently, and think, well, as long as we’re making it, then it’s Saint Agnes. There are no rules. It really did make us think there are no rules.

I remember having a conversation with him where he told us he was worried that he was making us so free that you’re not going to make a record that the fans who like Bloodsuckers are going to like. I didn’t care, we just had to make the record that we wanted. Whatever comes out is what it’s going to be. If we start thinking about, ‘Oh, but the people who liked ‘Animal’ on that record, they won’t like this song,’ we would go insane.

If we like it, we like it. That’s the thing we’ve always trusted ourselves to do, and there’s no reason to change now. We’re not Metallica with a huge expectation over a record. We’re a small band who’ve got where we’ve got by being artistically true to ourselves. That was a really important thing. That brought home what we wanted to do. So when we did take the record back, there wasn’t much concrete work done. It was just lots of ideas and dreaming.

We had to make a record from scratch, really, with only about a quarter of the budget left to do it with. It was backs against the wall. But we felt quite good and empowered about it, and we did the process differently from how we’d done Bloodsuckers. We took a view of ‘Let’s take our time with it. Let’s do what we want to do.’ We just made lots of music without any particular focus on how it was going to go.

Then we decided to book a week, the three of us, me, Kitty, and Andy, in an Airbnb down in the West Country, because we all like going surfing. Let’s go and surf and work on music just for one week, because we had all this stuff, and we needed to go through and delete loads of stuff. We need to make decisions. We’ve got four different versions of a song. All of them we like, but which is the one for the record? Or is it a fifth version that’s made from a mix of everything?

We had to go down and listen to everything, the three of us, in the right mindset, in the room together, and go, ‘Cool, we’ve given ourselves thousands of options, but what’s it actually going to be?’ That came about because of the process that we started with this producer, and, as much as it was horrible when it went wrong, and really made us question what we were doing, it’s turned out for the best.”

When the three of you sat down and listened to all these songs and ideas, how do you decide what makes this a Saint Agnes song?

Jon: “It’s a really good question, because we were very aware that there were versions of the songs earlier that would’ve been absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with them. If you take a song like ‘The Father, Son, The Holy Beast,’ that song had a lot of different versions and a lot of different approaches to it, and it’s such a strange song that wasn’t fitting any formula. There was no right or wrong with it, so how do we decide? Why can we not just call it quits on this version?”

Kitty: “It’s entirely personal, so subjective, when something is right, because it’s right to you. It’s perfectly fine, but it didn’t feel right. Ultimately, if I don’t like it, it’s not getting through, basically, because I’m singing it. I’m singing the song, and I have such specific ideas in my head that I just can’t let go of something until it’s what I envisioned. It is entirely subjective.”

Jon: “There’s no objective way to decide. I think if you were to hear the different versions that we went through, you almost can’t even hear the difference or what was wrong. When Kitty’s singing, as she said, she’s got to be the one who’s got to sing it. Sometimes there’ll be a song where I really like it, but say the middle part of the song is just not doing it for Kitty. Then we look at why. When it gets there, what do you feel? Kitty will say I just feel nothing when I get to that point. So, how do we keep that feeling from the previous part through to here? What middle strand is there going to be? Sometimes it’s a very small change, and other times it’s a total reinvention and a rewrite or delete the song. We never know.”

Kitty: “It’s loads of work, really. Never-ending tinkering with stuff. How far do you want to take it? We, as a band, will just take it far. We won’t stop until it’s right, much to the dismay of the people around us, label, and management. There’s so little reward in this industry that you’ve got to love the music you’re making.”

“I’m singing the song, and I have such specific ideas in my head that I just can’t let go of something until it’s what I envisioned.”

Jon: “You’ve got to try and love the process, and we do. When we get it right and we listen back to it, that’s one of the best moments of being in a band. When you know this is it, this sounds like us, this feels right, and you all feel it. That is an indescribable feeling. It’s one of the true joys.

There’s another part of the writing process that does that for me. That’s when I’m writing these hundreds of little songlets that I do all the time, and they’re really small, often just a drumbeat and a bass riff or a guitar part. I’m like a salesman when I play them to Kitty. I’m there playing this humble bit of music, asking her to imagine it.”

Kitty: “And I’m a tough crowd.”

Jon: “I‘m asking her to imagine this on stage. We’re going to open with it, and you come out with a guitar, and this is going to happen. Then just imagine this cool synth doing this, and then the vocals are going to be something like blah, blah, blah. I try to paint the picture. When Kitty sees it, that is amazing, because I know we’re off to the races at that moment.

Before that, it’s always harder work, because I’m aware I’m in love with this idea, but I’m in love with every idea I come up with for about half an hour until the next thing comes along. But, for that half an hour, I believe it’s the best idea I’ve ever had and the last idea I’ll ever have.”

Kitty: “That’s why we can’t listen to anything you say, because you say that about everything.”

Jon: “Exactly. The one song on this record that I had to fight for a bit was ‘The Ghost.’ Kitty had said this line just when she was talking about something, “Can anyone hear me? Am I a fucking ghost?” It was about something personal, and I was quite moved by the way Kitty talked about this particular situation.

I said that could make a really great idea for a song, and came up with the basic melody and chords on piano and played it to everyone a few times. Everyone was quite dismissive of the melody and the picture I was trying to paint, I just wasn’t doing it. I remember saying that I knew I wasn’t selling this to you, but I just knew.

It was one of the few times that I was like, ‘I’m going to make us work on this song for half a day.’ As soon as we started working on it, everyone was like, ‘Oh yeah, I totally get it.’ But I remember that was one of the ones where I almost let it go because everyone was not that interested. But I said ‘No, I really believe in this idea a little more than the other ideas, so I’m going to push it through.’”

When you got the end product and listened to it, what emotions did it stir up?

Kitty: “Immense pride. Making an album is such a lot of work. From actually getting a record deal, getting a label to put the album out, that’s the first thing, which is, if you’re not well-connected like us, or you don’t have famous parents, it’s really fucking difficult. It’s years of graft.

Then, to conceive an album, write the album, record the album, and because we do it all ourselves, it is so much work. However, when you finally get the vinyl, and you hold it in your hands, it is like, ‘Wow, a lot of our life has gone into that. A lot of time has gone into that.’

“When you know this is it, this sounds like us, this feels right, and you all feel it. That is an indescribable feeling.”

Also, what an honour that we got to do another one. It’s such a thrill. We got to make another record, because it’s not guaranteed at all that you’re going to get to do it and do it properly. This is our third one. I feel so proud that we’ve managed to do three albums now. So just pride, really.”

Jon: “For me, we didn’t mix this record, a guy called Jim Pinder mixed it. We sent one song out to be mixed by a few people as a test because I really didn’t want to mix it. I’d mixed Bloodsuckers, and again, it was a painstaking process and one that I didn’t feel up to the task for this one.

We knew we wanted to elevate it beyond what I could do, so we mixed it to a certain point, and then decided to send it off and see what comes back. Jim Pinder was the only person who sent back a mix that felt like exactly what we sent him, just more. He had just brought it all more to life, whereas in the other mixes, there were more significant changes where it didn’t really feel like our song anymore.

So, when we sent the album as a whole to him and finally got to listen to the whole thing through, that for me was a really emotional moment because it felt like there it is, the whole thing. I didn’t intimately know every split second of the mix because I hadn’t done it, so it was nice to almost hear it as a listener. You can never fully do that, but I almost felt like, in that moment, I was listening to it, and I managed to remove myself from the process. We were listening to it together, and with Andy as well, and it felt like we made something really special. For us, it felt really special.”

Kitty: “I think because we did what we set out to, which was to fall back in love with the process after Bloodsuckers. We did do that, and actually, we’ve learnt so much, and we’re writing so much music after this record. We’re so inspired. It’s like lots of new things we’ve learned, lots of new instrumentation, but we are raring to go on from that. It has totally rejuvenated our love of songwriting and producing.”

Given the grief you went through on the last record, I would assume that was quite a cathartic process for you writing that record. What was this record like given there was an element of light and hope in the record?

Kitty: “Do you know what? It wasn’t cathartic at all, making Bloodsuckers. People often talk about that, but because my mum died right when we started recording, weeks later. I needed something to do. It wasn’t cathartic. It was so brutal and raw that it was awful. The whole experience was awful because I was delivering vocal performances, and to do that you have to access emotion, and my emotions were so out of control. To access, it was just bleeding out of me. It was horrible.

So with this one, I’d say it was much more cathartic because Mum passed away, it’ll be five years in October. Making this, I’m much further along in a process of grief that I was able to have a more measured, sane experience, and take the stuff I’d learnt from going through this trauma and use that to make the songwriting better and make it elevated.

It’s just life, isn’t it? The more experiences and stuff you have, I do think the better art you make. I really think that. I know there’s this obsession with youth in music, teenagers, people in their early 20s, who can also have gone through a lot of things by that age, but I think as life batters you and you learn things, your art has more depth to it.”

“Making this, I’m much further along in a process of grief that I was able to have a more measured, sane experience.”

Jon: “There’s more sophistication, definitely. I think the song on this album that’s really important in reference to what you’re talking about is ‘The Beast.’ Because it’s specifically about you making peace, or at least learning to coexist with the beast of grief.

I remember when we were recording it, and you had done your vocal on it, and we were listening back, and then we started experimenting more with some of the hopeful textures sonically. I remember you crying in the studio and saying how that was exactly how you wanted that to feel.

You had this vision of life, like flowers blooming out from death. “You must let death bloom with life is the refrain throughout the end of the song.” We were thinking about calling the album that, actually, because it felt really central to what we were doing. To echo what you said, I could see it from the outside that there was a lot more catharsis at this point than there was on Bloodsuckers. As Kitty said, that was like documenting the scene of a crime. It allowed you to help yourself heal, but in and of itself, at the time, maybe we thought it was more cathartic than it was. It was actually just part of the process.”

The ominous title and the whole inspiration behind the album, and the hope and the darkness and both sides of that, what do you hope a listener takes from listening to the record?

Jon: “We never really think about the listener. We’re always so focused on whether we are making what is in our head and putting it into sonic form that if we started thinking about what the listener might think or want, it would paralyse that process. It’s only now at this stage that maybe we’d allow ourselves to think about what we might hope people get from it.”

Kitty: “It’s always a surprise that people connect to the music, because we’re quite odd people in my opinion. Every time the music comes out, and we meet people at shows or people write messages, it’s always like they’ve seen something in it that they resonate with. That’s always this beautiful surprise to me because I always think that no one is going to feel the same way as I do about that, and then you find out they do, they see more in it, actually. They’ll think a song is about something that originally the lyrics aren’t about, but when they say it, if that’s what it means to you, that’s what it’s about.”

Jon: “I hope that listeners take from it that we are authentically trying to really dig in and express our true selves at that moment in time. It’s as simple as that. I hope that the same as music we love, where I listen to it and can be blown away by getting that access to someone’s soul sonically, and the pictures it conjures up in my mind, if we can get anywhere to doing that for people, then it’s an honour to get to do that.”