“My List of Enemies Grows Longer”: How Real Lies Doom-Scrolled Their Way to a New Album

In the Safdie brothers’ 2019 magnum opus Uncut Gems, there’s a scene in which Adam Sandler’s character believes that he’s won a high-stakes bet. Sitting in the backseat of a cab, his newfound fortune dawns on him as dire straits turn into dollar signs in a matter of seconds. The film as a whole, and that scene in particular, resonated with vocalist Kev Kharas, one-half of the UK electronic duo Real Lies. “It’s anxiety being alchemized into euphoria,” Kharas told me over Zoom. “That scene, to me, feels like the ultimate and most accurate representation of the modern world that I’ve seen in any kind of art form.”

Like Uncut Gems, We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, the band’s third album, revels in intensity. Seldom does it let up on the gas pedal, save for a couple of laid-back interludes that inevitably yield to a thumping, four-on-the-floor kick drum with a throttling bassline and steely synths. It’s the type of record that’s always in motion, crystallizing its ruminations on the absurdities of the everyday into blissed-out dance anthems. To put it another way, it’s a romantic album deeply entrenched in the present. Ahead of the LP’s release, I spoke with Kharas and his bandmate, producer Patrick King, about their vigorous sound, the album’s provocative title, recruiting Jessica Barden for the closing track, and the woes of contemporary existence.

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GRANT SHARPLES: The new album is incredible. I’ve been spending a lot of time with it recently.

KEV KHARAS: Thanks. I think it’s fair to say that we’re proud of it.

SHARPLES: So this is just three years after your last one, and before that there was a seven-year gap. How were you able to make this one so much more quickly?

KHARAS: It actually came together even quicker than that. It was kind of all written in the space of a year. We spent two years touring Lad Ash and sort of half-heartedly writing songs, but we didn’t really start properly until Winter 2023. But Lad Ash was a weird one because we had a couple of years within that seven years of just complete inertia, really. We had a lot of things that went wrong, and things that would’ve really transformed our lives snatched away at the last moment. That kind of took its toll, certainly on my confidence. I don’t want to dwell on it too long, but I had some issues as well with my brain and also substances, but I’m better now.

SHARPLES: I’m glad to hear you’re better. 

PATRICK KING: I was about to make a joke and say you’ve still got issues with your brain, Kev, but–

KHARAS: Yeah, I definitely do. I found a way to–what’s the word? Mollify them.

SHARPLES: Well, I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. Something that stands out to me, and I think to many people, is the album title: We Will Annihilate Our Enemies. I saw the cheeky Instagram post where you list out your enemies. What does it mean to you guys, that title?

KHARAS: Initially, the working title for the album was “Sinking City,” which is taken from the lyrics of a song from the previous album. But then, I started to think about it. Basically, a lot of the album’s lyrics come from just spending way too much time doom-scrolling on my phone, where you are just so engrossed in this connection that you have with a machine to the point where it feels like it’s changing your brain chemistry. And I realized that a name like “Sinking City” wasn’t going to really cut through or grab anyone’s attention. I started to think of the ultra-provocative things that I was seeing on X a lot, like these kind of like failed state narratives and thirst traps and absolute misogynist creeps or war footage or bus punch-ups. And I realized that, for artists now, if you want to get any kind of attention, you have to be ultra-provocative. We Will Annihilate Our Enemies was just the most aggressive and provocative thing that I could think of, and I just wrote it down. Then I wanted to bring it into our world with the cover art, which is the more traditional Real Lies image of beauty and romance. I felt the two work really well together.

SHARPLES: There’s definitely an interesting juxtaposition going on there. And who doesn’t love an album title that’s also a complete sentence?

KHARAS: Absolutely. I wanted it to be defiant as well. I find as the years pass, my list of enemies grows longer and longer, so it felt like a good moment to release this album.

SHARPLES: Mm-hmm. You mentioned that this record is kind of about the here and now, that there are more songs in the present tense than there ever have been. Why did that sense of urgency come at this time rather than, say, in the past?

KHARAS: I think with Lad Ash, because it was written over seven years, it was like a real excavation of old memories. It’s a very romantic album, it’s a very sweet album, but I realized, just as I finished writing the last song, that all of these sentimental things were all in the past-tense, and I felt that was kind of demoralizing. For all that I criticize it, what I wanted to do was to find a way to love the modern world, even with all of its horrors and futility. I didn’t want to live inside my memories anymore; I wanted to be able to lead a romantic life in the present day. So, the album is really me trying to do that. I say this in one of the lyrics, that I don’t think life has ever felt as exhilarating or as awful as it is today. It’s new emotional terrain. I don’t know if there is a word to describe it, how it feels to feel those two things at once. I think there are a lot of other artists trying to communicate the same thing. Like, I see the Safdie brothers, I love them so much. But in Uncut Gems, there’s this moment where Adam Sandler’s character thinks he’s won a bet in the backseat of a taxi. And you see him having this intense physical reaction. It’s like anxiety being alchemized into euphoria. That scene to me feels like the ultimate and most accurate representation of the modern world that I’ve seen in any kind of art form. Anxiety is the most abundant natural resource that we have in this strange world that we’ve created, so if you can alchemize that into euphoria, then you’re a winner, really, because there’s so fucking much of it.

SHARPLES: So, what is it that you guys find both exhilarating and stress-inducing about the modern world?

KHARAS: There’s a song called “LOVERWORLD,” which is a rundown of some things I love. Like there’s this literary magazine called Heavy Traffic, which is based in New York that a friend of mine, Dean Kissick, is heavily involved in, and that’s in the song. But I guess the things that I find awful are… I think there’s a huge schism between the online and the real world. And I feel that we have passed a threshold where, even when you’re out in the street, it feels that people are living more in the digital world than they are in the physical world. The way that people move through the street, there’s a kind of zombification of the public space, where it feels like everyone is wired into the cloud. I think a lot of the social issues we have with mistrust and mental illness are really just about the internet changing the world and society and the way our brains work in a way that no one will understand until 200 years in the future. 

SHARPLES: Mm-hmm. You guys are an electronic band, so how do these songs configure against a backdrop of heavily technologic music that’s also really euphoric and danceable? Where do those things intersect for you, like the topic with the instrumentals?

KHARAS: I mean, the best thing about making music is when you create a song out of the air and it’s the very first time you work on it. Most of this album was made in that way, with Pat and I sat in his basement studio in Zone 3, South London. I would often use the excitement of hearing what Pat was making as fuel to get the song off the ground. Then, my notes app is where all my lyrics are basically. And then when I’m hearing Pat make it I’ll go through and be like, “That sounds like it would be interesting or a good fit with this.” So yeah, there’s an alchemy as well, and it feels euphoric. I wouldn’t say I feel anxious when we’re making music, but I think it’s just a kind of natural, default state now.

KING: Yeah, and when you’re bringing something into the world that didn’t exist a few hours ago, that’s a very magical state of mind to be in. 

SHARPLES: How do you go about preserving that magical element?

KHARAS: You just can’t fuck around with it too much. You need to trust what happens. It took me a long time to learn that, far too long for Pat’s liking, especially when we were trying to finish the second album. I’ll actually say that the writing process for Lad Ash was way more anxiety-inducing because I would obsess over every little detail. 

SHARPLES: How do you feel like your songwriting and your production have evolved across your careers, even predating Real Lies?

KING: This album is about 10 or 15 BPM quicker than the last one. I think with the last album, it was slightly more contemplative at times, and we tried to make this a bit more upbeat and more “doofy,” as they say these days.

KHARAS: In terms of my own lyric writing, the only band I was in before Real Lies was a teenage punk band when I was like, 14. Back then, it was really slap-banging, like [Francis] Fukuyama’s End of History. It was listening to American facsimiles of British punk bands from the 1970s, and nothing was happening. I remember being so bored and I wanted to be this angry punk kid. I just remember Googling things like, “US military atrocities abroad,” just trying to find things to write songs about. So I would say my lyrics are definitely much, much better than they were then.

SHARPLES: You can actually draw from your own experiences now.

KHARAS: Definitely. And history started again, so it’s quite easy to write songs now to be honest. There’s so much to say.

SHARPLES: You guys said you made this in Zone 3, and I feel like London has such a vibrant history of dance music. How do you see yourselves within that scene, if you do?

KHARAS: I think we’ve always kind of sat outside of it, to be honest. To use a very clumsy metaphor, if you mapped the London electronic scene onto the concentric zones of London, Zone 1 would be like peak time club hours, like DJs banging stuff, and then, Zone 3 is a very apt place for us to sit because we’re not the kind of thing that would be on at peak time in clubs. But we grew up going to clubs, so we will always carry that influence and the stories of those nights into our music. But I think our music kind of inhabits more of a liminal place. It’s electronic music about what happens when you listen to electronic music often.

SHARPLES: So it’s self-referential in that regard?

KHARAS: Yeah. I guess with the lyrics, I always wanted to tell stories. I grew up listening to bands like The Jam or Squeeze, and I kind of consider myself a songwriter in that vein. There’s this big tradition in British pop music of finding the magic in the mundane, and I think that I do that. It’s just that now, the mundane isn’t watching a game of cricket on the Village green and drinking an ale and then meeting a girl after she finishes her Saturday shift at Boots and going out for a nice meal together. The mundane now is like, fucking going on your phone and seeing people wandering around shopping centers with machetes or being told that your body is made of tiny pieces of plastic or wondering if the Chinese government has a dossier on you. I guess you just don’t really need to work as hard anymore to find the magic because everything is fucking crazy.

SHARPLES: The mundane has become catastrophic in its own confusing way. 

KHARAS: Yeah. The way that chaos has become routine is maybe a real defining mechanism of the times we live in.

SHARPLES: I know you mentioned the Safdie brothers and Uncut Gems. Were there other touchstones that you guys had while you were making this?

KING: For previous albums, I would’ve said old house and techno 12 inches, but recently a lot of my listening is just going on Bandcamp and endlessly going through people’s wish lists and things they bought until you find some interesting stuff from another side of the world that you had no idea existed.

KHARAS: For me, I got really into Hal Hartley and his films. I found that subconsciously, a lot of the lyrics were basically like the monologues that you might find in one of his movies. Like “Finding Money,” the last track on the album, is the duet with Jessica Barden that I think subconsciously is influenced by him, just these two people on this imaginary film set delivering monologues. They’re just kind of saying their thoughts out loud and they’re not really engaging in a conversation as such. 

SHARPLES: How did you end up linking with Jessica Barden for that track?

KHARAS: One of our old videos for a song called “One Club Town” was directed by Jonathan Entwistle, and he wrote The End of The Fucking World, which is a really good Netflix series. It always kind of stuck with me, especially Jessica’s performance. She has such a sardonic, dry way of delivering lines, and I guess when I was writing “Finding Money,” I wrote it with her voice already there in my mind. So as a long shot, I asked John if he could ask her just on the off chance if she would be up for doing it, and she was. And it was a real pleasure working with her. It came out sounding exactly how I wanted it to sound.

SHARPLES: I was wondering, do you guys each have a favorite track on this record? Or just based on how you’re feeling today, which track do you feel like you gravitate most toward?

KING: Seeing as it’s Friday P.M., probably “loverdrink.”

KHARAS: Really? The 40-second interlude?

KING: Maybe the track on the last album is “Thameslink Tryst,” which is the two-minute–

KHARAS: The only one without my voice in it, basically.

KING: I need to remind myself of the tracklist now.

KHARAS: Really? You can’t pick one?

KING: I can’t. Probably “I Could Join the Birds” because there’s a big sample in that from a song I had previously found in my aforementioned Bandcamp sessions by a Canadian techno DJ called Rennie Foster. It has beautiful strings and piano sounds. It sounds very Real Lies already. 

SHARPLES: I wanted to ask you both one more thing: What are you most proud of with this record?

KING: I’m proud of the intensity of the individual tunes and the whole concept. I think these days, it’s very easy, especially for electronic music, to lack some kind of reason for existing or intensity. I hope that we’ve conveyed some real emotion and Kevin’s amazing lyrics and identity through that. 

KHARAS: I would say, probably, the heart that it has. I don’t think it’s really present in a lot of music these days. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time now, and I think the fuel for it is really that romance and that sense almost of hedonistic defiance and a belief that that is really something that can drive a life. And I think that for a group like us, who’ve taken quite a lot of knocks along the way, to still be here after 12 to 13 years now and still to have that heart and that belief burning so strong is what I’d say I’m most proud of.

SHARPLES: Well, thank you both so much for taking the time to talk about this record. And again, congrats. It’s really excellent work.

KHARAS: Thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.