Tee Tolmar
Budapest born, Edinburgh based. Cultural journalist & photographer, with a passion for music and fashion.
With their debut EP out now, we chat to Oxford Comma to discuss self-producing, creative autonomy and making music on their own terms
Oxford Comma‘s debut EP, ‘Tether’ is out today, but its songs have already have lived several lives.
Written and rewritten between university lectures, tested in front of live audiences and picked apart during countless late-night recording sessions, they’ve spent months evolving before ever reaching listeners. It’s a process that has demanded patience as much as creativity, with every decision filtered through five different musicians determined to make a record that belongs equally to all of them.
Looking back, vocalist/guitarist Matilda Clothier laughs about the “arguments” and even “some tears sometimes”, but she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“It’s been a lot of work, especially doing it all independently and producing it all ourselves,” Matilda Clothier says. “But it’s meant that I think the level of pride we feel towards it is even higher.”
For Oxford Comma, self-producing gave them the freedom to spend as long as they needed with the songs, refining ideas that might otherwise have been rushed and shaping every detail themselves. That freedom came with its own pressures. While balancing recording sessions with degrees at Leeds Conservatoire, evenings disappeared into the studio as tiny production decisions became lengthy conversations. Every member arrived with different instincts and influences, meaning every song became an exercise in compromise as much as creativity.
“We’ve always been so focused on attention to detail and getting every little thing right,” Clothier explains. “There was a lot of back and forth. We’ve kept complete creative autonomy over it,” she says. “That’s so rare these days. It just means we could have it sound exactly how we want.”
This sense of shared ownership begins long before the recording process. Sometimes songs arrive as little more than a riff or melody. Other times, Clothier brings in something that’s almost fully written before the rest of the band reshape it together. Either way, every member leaves their mark on the finished version.
Rather than making her protective over her writing, Clothier says handing those ideas to the rest of the band has become one of her favourite parts of the process.:“There’s a lot of power in literally giving essentially a piece of you to four other people and trusting that they’re going to serve the song how you wanted.”
She believes writing as part of a band has made her more honest rather than less. Having four other people around her creates enough distance to explore ideas she might never have released as a solo artist, allowing personal themes surrounding relationships, family and growing older to run naturally through the EP.
That relationship between emotion and arrangement became particularly important while writing ‘Habitual’. Built around the feeling of finally letting go of something that had been weighing heavily, the song gradually opens from restrained verses into an expansive chorus. Looking back, Clothier thinks that connection between lyric and sound emerged almost instinctively. “I actually think it came quite naturally,” she says. “Looking at the lyrics afterwards, it made complete sense that the song progresses dynamically the way that it does.”
If songwriting continues to evolve in rehearsal, Oxford Comma believe it changes just as much on stage. Before recording anything permanently, the band want to know how songs feel in front of an audience, something Clothier now sees as an essential part of the writing process.
One track originally featured a two-minute psychedelic guitar solo before repeated live performances convinced them it simply wasn’t working. “Not even we were enjoying it,” she laughs. “We were just like, ‘Come on, let’s get the solo over with.'” The section disappeared, reinforcing the band’s belief that songs shouldn’t stop changing simply because they’re nearly finished. “I don’t think we’ll record anything without gigging it first,” she says. “You don’t want to be stuck with a song that you’ve recorded and then have to play it live and think, ‘I wish we’d done this differently.'”
That willingness to keep questioning their own work extends beyond songwriting itself. Although studying at Leeds Conservatoire meant discussing streaming algorithms, radio edits and commercial songwriting, Oxford Comma have become increasingly comfortable ignoring advice that doesn’t feel true to them.
Longer songs stay longer, even if they’re less likely to be played on the radio, because shortening them would mean sacrificing something they value more. “We’ve started to lean into the fact that we shouldn’t change the music just for the sake of it being more popular,” Clothier says. “It comes down to what feels right rather than what we’ve been told.”
That philosophy has already brought early encouragement through support from BBC Introducing and Radio X’s John Kennedy, but listening to Clothier speak, it’s clear those milestones aren’t what define success for the band. Instead, success seems to lie in preserving the process that created ‘Tether’ in the first place: trusting one another enough to disagree, questioning every decision and giving songs the time they need to become exactly what the band want them to be.
Now that ‘Tether’ is released, listeners will only hear the finished versions. The months of rewriting, debating and refining will be invisible, but they’re embedded in every song on the record.
“If we just keep going how we are,” Clothier says. “I think I’ll view that as a success. We just want to keep making things that we’re proud of.”
Oxford Comma’s debut EP ‘Tether’ is out today. Listen here: