Lots of Hands

Billy Woodhouse and Elliot Dryden, the core duo behind lots of hands, first connected in a Newcastle school music program at age 16. At that point, Woodhouse had been tinkering with lots of hands as a solo musical outlet, self-releasing music on Soundcloud and quietly beginning work on 2020’s mistake. Shortly before that record’s release, Dryden properly joined lots of hands, an effort which was quickly thwarted by global circumstances outside of anyone’s purview.  Separated by geography and global chaos, Woodhouse and Dryden began work on lots of hands remotely, exchanging demos online to craft what would become 2021’s largely instrumental there’s someone in this room just like you, and 2023’s cult favourite fantasy. into a pretty room marks the duo’s first truly collaborative effort, with Dryden often trekking the vast northern English countryside to write and record in Woodhouse’s bedroom studio.

into a pretty room’s name is lifted from a pair of demos recorded and released in a short span across November of 2023. The earnest tenderness of these tracks — “into a pretty room” and “the rain”, which appear newly re-recorded for the album — served as guiding light while the duo self-engineered the remainder of the record. Dryden’s tracks appear alongside Woodhouse’s own songs, which span from touching instrumentals written for family, meant to help usher them through a chapter of monumental loss, to whispered ballads sung with loved ones. These individually conceived tracks passed back and forth between the duo, as they ventured into their first moments of writing in the same place at the same time. The resulting into a pretty room emerges as lots of hands’ most thoughtful work to-date.

Newly relocated from Leeds to their current base of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, lots of hands is anchored by the duo’s friendship, which emanates across the album’s 14 tracks. While conceived across painful moments of growth and grief, into a pretty room is a decidedly hopeful effort, crafted between two friends who have spent the better part of the last decade supporting each other through life’s challenges.