For Chartreuse, the remote Icelandic studio Flóki became a place of escape, connection and healing. During their two-week stay in summer 2024, the band created Bless You & Be Well – a special, urgent, and deeply personal album.

Following their 2023 debut Morning Ritual, the Black Country four-piece – brothers Mike and Rory Wagstaff, Rory’s partner Hattie Wilson, and Hattie’s childhood friend Perry Lovering – leaned into their close bond and embraced a freer, more instinctive process with producer Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile). “If it felt good, it stayed,” Mike says.

The album was shaped by personal upheaval: Perry was grieving the recent death of his father, and Hattie had just learned she needed surgery aged 29 after years of pain in her hips. After the recording was finished, she had derotational femoral osteotomy surgery and has since been on crutches and re-learning to walk properly again. “You could feel it in the air,” she says. But the remote setting offered space to escape, create and support one another.

Bless You & Be Well reflects this – raw, emotional, and alive. It’s a record about pain, connection, and the quiet power of being in a band. It also affirms the power of something as seemingly trivial as being in a band, and of music as a way to understand and move through life.

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