Photo: Fleas Feast EP Cover. Credit: Lottie Lewis-Morton.
Elizabeth Ingrey speaks to Cuckoo Spit’s Lottie Lewis-Morton ahead of the release of debut EP, Flea’s Feast.
Fleas Feast straddles a quaint kind of horror, nestled between the haunting beauty of the Yorkshire Dales and the intestinal mess of a girl’s rotting bedroom. The debut EP of newcomer Lottie Lewis-Morton displays a cohesive, sonically detailed vision rarely seen in early works, melding disparate entities together to create what she terms English pastoral grunge. Inspired by a desire for self knowledge and closure, Fleas Feast emerges as a deeply personal project born from overindulgence and the betrayal of self.
“The whole EP is about me exploring this thing of like, I should not be in this situation,” says Lottie, referring to a particularly depleting relationship, “but it’s easier to just go with it because of the comforting feelings that come along with having a partner.” For someone whose very being and self-understanding is situated within music, the loss of self was such that Lottie didn’t pick up a guitar for two and a half years. It was not until a brief trip back to her father’s in Yorkshire that she regained access to that part of herself, writing The Cuckoo’s Nest Breaks Under Your Heavy Step in the midst of a mushroom-induced delirium. “I was feeling very very intensely,” she says of that evening, “and I picked up my guitar and managed to write something and I was crying while I wrote it because it was like, I cannot believe that I can still do this.” Describing it as a moment in which a part of herself was returned to her from without, this fateful night kickstarted a turret of musical exploration and psychological inspection that became Fleas Feast.
The Cuckoo’s Nest Breaks Under Your Heavy Step, the fourth track on the EP, is a strange song, balancing hypnotic strings with tweeting birds and vocals that reverberate around from way up high. ‘And he brings out the mites, fleas feast covered in bites, the yolk dries out, jackals howl.’ Towards the end of the track, her ethereal vocals contort into a malevolent bellow, insisting upon a pain that remains unseen. The dreamlike pulsation of the strings and Lottie’s lilting refrains are at every turn underwritten by something slightly off, askew, slipping between the strings. It has the effect of luring the listener into an endless lull while betraying its true intentions quietly, constantly. The danger is always there, and one’s indulgence becomes a conscious, self-effacing act.
And this sense of overindulgence permeates the entire EP, pitter-pattered across various tracks in images of food souring, of breaking bread and cracked eggs. In Malted Milk, the second track on the EP, Lottie weaves together culinary metaphors to produce a mournful lullaby to bedrotting. “I like the connotations of milk and mothers…and for some reason, malted sounded like it’s something that’s gone a bit sour,” she says recalling the inspiration behind the title. “So there was this comforting thing that had turned a bit sour.” A characteristically feminine motif, the spoiling of food on Fleas Feast connotes an internal domestic horror, transforming objects of nourishment into abject castaways. “So much of my artwork is actually revolved around food and this grossness of it, this decay.”
Played on a lute and recorded at a studio in Peckham, Malted Milk stands out for the wooded warmth of its production. The vocals melodically peep out like a forgotten child from within a cupboard. “It’s a very bedroom focussed song, because it was inspired by a very specific realisation I had in my bedroom,” she says recalling a time of deep isolation. “It’s about picking up the mess that was surrounding [my room] and addressing the chaos which had caused this filth.” Although it is a plaintive track, there is a melodic cushion to the song’s chorus and a hopeful apprehension of the future that ultimately beckons one outside. ‘And I’ll pick the pieces rotting round my bed, ‘cause the moths are feeding on detritus there.’ There is a sense in which the bedroom has become a neglected garden, a fantastical cage of twine and rivulets. As Lottie notes, this cage is of her own making.
“I definitely overindulge in fantasy so much that it kind of replaces the real life tangible,” she explains, “you can have control over your fantasies so much so to the point where I’m like, oh, I don’t have to have a real experience.” Tracing this mechanism to her isolated childhood surroundings, a dichotomous relation to nature rears its head across the EP. “[Nature] was very much an oppressive force for me growing up,” she says of her home in the Yorkshire Dales, “I didn’t understand the beauty of it because I never needed it…it was only after adolescence, moving to a city, that I started to actually feel inspired by my natural surroundings and I realized how much it affects the way I think.” In fact, the vast majority of Flea’s Feast was written in the Dales, a place of solace for Lottie during times of emotional derailment.
On Cat’s Cradle, inspired by a specific tree under which Lottie would sit and write, the Dales offer both solace and the danger of entanglement. Grungy guitars and bedraggled violas dredge through fantastical images of the woods in all their darkness. ‘The wooded wizard is watching me…you can take your time, but I’ll get mine.’ Beyond allusions to comfort and entrapment, the track is a rumbling assertion of one’s place in nature, with the pastoral reframed as some secretive lair beyond categories of good and evil. On Padlock, best understood as Cat’s Cradles’ other half, the band take a similar approach, weaving hypnotic riddles and dissonant guitars into a final crashing epitaph of banshee screams and thudding drums. ‘The leaves will whisper, they will conspire – a plan to injure, a plan for fire.’ “It’s one of these songs that took us ages to finish,” says drummer Szymon Zdunek who has been with the band since their debut in 2023, “it has evolved from a funky-jazzy song we dumped after some time into this weird noisy sound collage that sounds way more unique and interesting than anything else I’ve heard in a while.”
Speaking of working with a band, Lottie’s tendency towards secrecy and the preservation of her inner world have had to give way to opening up. “It’s always difficult [collaborating] because you have such a strong idea of what you envision,” she says speaking of Szymon and guitarist Kamil Gacikowski, “but I think that’s a very beautiful thing when you take a piece of artwork which you’ve created to other people and they do manage to completely see what you’re doing and add to that.” Although she admits to feeling protective every now and then, the musical care and understanding of her fellow bandmates have perhaps eased this transition. “Lottie is an extremely talented songwriter,” says Szymon, “there’s something so mesmerising in how she structures her songs and how she creates her little intimate sonic worlds.” And this collaborative approach towards delivering a primary vision allows the tracks to diverge, pulling in different influences from each member. “When we exchange our ideas on how different songs should sound,” continues Szymon, “we rarely think of them in terms of musical genres, but rather how we could implement small elements from different stuff we are inspired by.”
Ameliorate, the final track on Flea’s Feast, is perhaps the strangest song on the EP. Improvised on her late mother’s guitar and recorded to an iPhone, the song is an eerie close that feels unfinished, open/agape at the end. The vocals, barely audible, come as lullabic whispers over discordant nylon strings: ‘Don’t step backwards. No – it won’t…make it…happen.’ “I was changing the strings for the first time ever,” says Lottie recalling that moment, “so I don’t even know, maybe [my mum] played with those strings too, and then there were three strings on the guitar halfway through and I just started playing.” Taken by the sound of her out of tune, three-stringed, cheap acoustic guitar, Lottie decided to record the track then and there and stick it on the EP with little editing. A truly singular moment in an overly technologised day, the song carries the sorrowful charm of being, to some degree, irreplicable. “I don’t know what tuning it was playing in…and it’s just – you cannot recreate that. I don’t think I can recreate it, it’s so sad.” Like many of the tracks, Ameliorate, which means to become better, flitters between beauty and the disturbed, not exactly valuing one over the other, but insisting on their convergence.
Closing my conversation with Lottie, there is a sense in which writing these songs and giving them up to her fellow band mates (and indeed the public) has enabled her to move on. “Music has been the most incredible tool for me to understand my emotions because writing is such an automatic, intuitive process,” she says, musing on the past three years, “being able to put unexplainable feelings into somewhat of a tangible form, it’s just an incredibly important process.” The expulsion of Lottie’s inner world through music, while challenging a natural bend towards secrecy, has also created an object that can be separated from. “I think it’s just a very special thing about collaboration that it shows you that obviously art is something that is separate to you…and I guess I have to realize that I’m just maybe a mechanism for channeling that.” With two follow-up EPs set to be released in 2026, No Flies on Me and the self-titled re-release Cuckoo Spit, Lottie’s drive for self and spiritual understanding continues to beckon her forwards. Now in the midst of a novel state of peace and yearning, the new tracks are sure to cast a different kind of view, another chapter perhaps, not masked by the woods, but moving towards some arcane kind of borderland. And this is a good thing, for we all must, at some point, let feasting fleas lie.
