Keep Running

Stand Atlantic are on course to release the best album of their career so far, but it’s arriving at the end of a period where they had to question everything. This is how they combatted their world crumbling around them, and made something truly remarkable.

- By Jack Rogers. Photographs by Jordan Kelsey Knight

What the fuck are we going to do?” Stand Atlantic’s Bonnie Fraser laughs as the question leaves her mouth, but it’s not one of joy or happiness.

It’s the sort of laugh you that comes out of sheer disbelief at having to ask yourself such a question in the first place. It’s also the sort of question we’re sure you will have asked yourself at least once over the last two years, deep amid the confusion, uncertainty and total fucking darkness that the world was plunged into. Where sometimes, all you had to cling onto was that little bit of laughter, stopping you from forcing that last bit of sanity you had into the shredder. Bonnie found herself asking that question shortly after Stand Atlantic had released their last album, ‘Pink Elephant’ in the summer of 2020. An album campaign that started and ended all at the height of the first global lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a record that the band were immensely proud of, pushing their sound into more arena-ready waters and expressing themselves in a more on-thenose way than the metaphor-laced offerings of their past work. But as it got closer and closer to release day, they realised that this pandemic wasn’t shifting. So, what the fuck were they going to do? “It’s scary to think about how much I put into ‘Pink Elephant’ on a personal level, because there were so many moments in the lead up to its release when I thought, ‘What was the point in making this?’” Bonnie explains.