SXSW Artist Spotlight – Campfire Social
Tom & Carrie Hyndman are the mum & dad of the Welsh indie-rock collective Campfire Social. Tom plays guitar and Carrie’s on keyboards. They both sing, and they’re bringing the band, and their deep and splashy brand of indie rock, to SXSW 2025. Like many of the best things in life, I encountered Campfire Social on my way to somewhere else that seemed very important. Once I heard their irresistible tunes, I forgot where I was going and hung out listening to their first full-length release They Sound The Same Underwater. Their lyrics are often achingly introspective, but their sound is a full-on celebration of groove, melody, and inventive musicianship. I’m assuming they’ve tried, and discovered that these songs do, indeed, sound the same underwater.
This interview has been edited for length & clarity. Find our video of the full interview at the end of the article, and on our YouTube channel, @360degreesound.
Tom: There are recordings of us trying to sing underwater.
Carrie: It did sound a bit more like screams for help.
360°Sound: That’ll be on the box set. So, Campfire Social are a ‘constantly evolving twelve-legged gang of friends,’ so I’m told. Your name conjures an image of friends gathered around a bonfire, grabbing an instrument, and joining in. Tell me a little bit about your music collective.
Tom: A lot of us were in a previous band called Shy & the Fights. We’re not talking about that band today. It ended up being a seven piece.
Carrie: Yeah, it was a monster.
Tom: As we experimented more and more, we forgot about the song. It was more about, ‘How can we make this performance exciting?’ So the whole premise of Campfire Social, we said, ‘Every song we write, we should be able to sit down with an acoustic guitar at a campfire and sing that song, and it will be plausible and enjoyable.’
Carrie: I say that history is almost repeated slightly.
Tom: We’ve expanded; we’re now a six-piece. It was a three-piece when it started.
Carrie: We’ve got some really talented friends, so it’s good.
Tom: And experimenting with your friends is fun, which is a weird thing to say.
I read a description of your sound as encompassing ’80s, UK kitchen-sink indie to midwest emo. I’d like to throw in Sufjan Stevens on a couple of Red Bulls. What do you guys feel are the key ingredients to your sound?
Tom: It is a collaborative. I’ll write a song and bring it to everyone else and they’ll do what they do with it – I don’t have a say in what they do to it. And I made sure the same thing is the case for anyone else that writes a song and brings it to the group. But no matter how it starts, it never ends where it begun. We all have quite varied influences. The one thing is that we’re all in love with emo music, so that shines through.
Carrie: Yeah, early noughties emo, kind of self deprecating. That ties us together, but also the relationships that we have with each other. We are a bit of a weird kind of family.
Tom: Mum and dad. [gestures to Carrie & himself]
Carrie: The influences of each individual member are really varied, but all as relevant as the next one. So it’s a big old part of all sorts of stuff.
I grew up on classic British and American FM rock, punk rock, and new wave. It’s interesting to hear echoes of that stuff in your music, but filtered through a whole generation of sounds that came after that. Do you guys feel that at all?
Carrie: Some bands are really confident about what genre they sit in, what they’re trying to achieve. But I think we do it because of the feeling. So it’s really hard to kind of compartmentalize anything that we’re doing. When someone says, ‘So what’s the craic?’ I’m like, ‘Tom…’
Tom: It would be a lot easier for us to get playlisted on Spotify and stuff like that, if we were easy to pigeonhole. But I’ve always thought if you can think of a theme or write the lyrics and then think of that as a movie, and then turn the music into a score. And I think Sufjan [Stevens], he does that perfectly. That’s my ethos.
Let’s talk about some of the songs on They Sound the Same Underwater. “Swim, Swam, Swum” – I really like the nice English verb declension there. You guys obviously passed your O-levels.
Carrie: People have said, ‘Omigod, that’s such a mouthful and really difficult to get out quickly.’
That song has a really nice ’90s power-pop vibe, and the title suggests to me, wisdom gained. You’ve been through this cycle, and this is what you’ve learned. I am nothing.
Tom: It is a positive message song, despite the fact that it seems like a negative message. Yeah, it’s very much the imagery we use across the album. I feel instantly better if I can see the sea – or swim in the sea would be even better. The idea that you are nothing and therefore you don’t matter could be an incredibly miserable idea, but it’s not. It’s looking at that in a positive manner. It’s almost religious.
Carrie: Things that you feel are all encompassing are actually, in the grand scheme, really quite irrelevant. Big wide world out there. There’s loads of beauty out there. There’s a big, vast ocean that in relation to the car radiator going on the way home today, is not really anything that big.
Tom: Self importance is a very big problem in society right now, but I do think it is eye-opening and peaceful to realize that you are not important. That’s the premise of the song, ‘Be nice,’ because there’s no point in anything else. That’s all you’ve got to give.
“Patsy Decline.” When I saw the title, I was like, ‘OK, I cannot wait to find out what this is about.’ Per the Patsy reset, it’s like, this is what it’s like when I actually fall to pieces. And it’s a great pogoing tune, by the way.
Tom: There’s actually another band from the northwest of England that have also released a single with the same title, and we didn’t know that. And when we released it, they sent us a message saying, ‘Is this a cover of our song, or have you just ripped it off?’ And my response to that was, ‘It’s a pun. Well done for having the same idea.’
Carrie: It’s nice someone else had the same vision, which is brilliant.
“George is a Marine Biologist,” the recurring themes of breathing and trying really resonate with me.
Tom: That’s a Seinfeld reference, by the way. He lies to a girl he went to college with because he’s not got an impressive career, and says that he’s a marine biologist. Then he has to save a whale at the end of the episode.
Tom, you mentioned things don’t end up where they start for you as a rule. “Living” is a perfect example of that. At first I’m thinking, ‘This is a nicely laid back Galaxie 500 sort of vibe.’ Then, ‘Wait a minute. Where are we going now?’ You’re gonna play it at SXSW, right?
Carrie: Normally not. I’m so sorry.
Tom: Only on the basis that it’s 7 minutes long.
Carrie: I’ve struggled to play it live, because I get very emotional. We had a show in Glasgow, and I think we just finished recording it, so it was all quite fresh. All the boys in my absence decided that we’re going to play “Living.” And I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m emotionally ready for playing that live just yet.’ But I got outnumbered. That was a tough show. You might get to witness it, and also my demise, during SXSW.
Some of the most interesting music that I’m hearing these days is coming out of Wales. What’s going on over there?
Tom: The water?
Carrie: It is good water.
Tom: Wales is such a nurturing place for new music, and that is down to people like FOCUS Wales and BBC Wales. We’re playing the FOCUS Wales showcase at New Colossus (in NYC) and at SXSW. We’re incredibly lucky to have that as an infrastructure.
Carrie: Yeah, they want to take us under their wing and it’s really, really encouraging, and does knock a little bit of that self doubt out the window. And [Wales is] the country of song. So we’ll be proud of of where we’re from. The the world’s on fire at the moment, and we’re very lucky in Wales that the arts are still very valued, and that is really important, to have that creative outlet.
Campfire Social will be performing at the New Colossus Festival 2025 in New York. Their SXSW official sets are at Swan Dive on Monday March 10, and then at Creek and Cave on Wednesday for the FOCUS Wales showcase.
Official site: campfiresocial.co.uk
Bandcamp: campfiresocial.bandcamp.com/music
