As It Is: “There was something really exciting about finding out what we have to say on the other side of the pain”

The seed of the As It Is reunion was a song, created for no other purpose but catharsis. The demo was laid down in May 2024, some months after Patty Walters had confirmed that the band was on ice, and music was not currently at the forefront of his life. He and then-former bandmate Ben Langford-Biss sat down and put their heads and hearts together again, picking up where they left off when Ben departed the band in late 2019. They thought about what in their lives was painful, among those sources of pain being, still, their relationships with themselves. That song was called Lose Your Way & Find Yourself.

To create that demo, the pair imagined that they were starting over. What if it was new again? What if they hadn’t endured the highs and lows of the history they wrote, or the chapters where they were pushed together and then inevitably pulled apart? What if they didn’t have all the work that they share? “We’re very proud of that discography but we’ve all gone through our own journeys and our tastes aren’t the same as we were when we were 19 – we’re all in our mid-30s now,” Ben explains as the sky prepares to darken on an early September evening. “[We asked ourselves] ‘What does As It Is sound like if the four of us met and started a band today?’”

When Ben left that day, Patty sent him a text almost immediately. He’d had fun. He liked the song they’d written. In spite of that, where he was, it was too much too soon. In the end, it was the catalyst for Patty starting therapy. “I needed to really heal from the big stuff in a professional, ongoing, purposeful kind of way,” he reflects, sat in front of an impressive bookshelf at home. Much of that healing was directly concerned with the decade he’d spent in As It Is, spinning through cycles of triumph and despair, clocking up miles on the road for 200 days a year at the expense of his mental health and the concept of having any sort of life outside of the band’s bubble. Inevitably, it burned him out. There was also everything else: “A lot of stuff I’d been struggling with about myself, my childhood, things I’d struggled with that I’d written about in As It Is.” Eventually, things started looking very different. “I’d learned to enjoy who I was and find happiness outside of music for the first time in my life.”

After so much growth, when discussions about reuniting began to become fruitful, Patty approached the idea with some understandable trepidation. “It was something that actually scared the shit out of me,” he admits. “I was like, ‘Is this just going to be regression? Are we going to go back to some things that had stopped making me happy after 10 years of doing it?’ I realised that I could continue to make really good life decisions, but also introduce something back into my life, which was also the healthiest outlet I’ve ever known. I still haven’t found a way to show the world my heart and my soul more effectively than I have with music.”

Launching from zero to 60 is how everything in As It Is’ world seems to happen, according to Ben. Their reunion was no different. In the past year since Patty and Ben reconvened with bassist Ali Testo and drummer Patrick Foley (just Foley to his mates), they’ve released rarities collection A Decade Uneventful, a 10-year reworking of their 2015 debut album Never Happy, Ever After with a special guest on each track, and played it in full at four shows, including Slam Dunk. Later this month, they’re doing it again on a full tour. From the silly moments in the studio on TikTok to the elation beaming from their faces when they’ve stepped back onstage, the joy of their return is obvious. “It feels good to do it on our terms, at our pace, which is faster than expected,” says Ben. “We’re just happy to be around each other all the time. Writing has been really, really good.”

It has been, by no means, a form of regression, not in terms of tumbling back into their old, unhealthier ways, or a futile attempt to step back into the skins of their younger selves. Instead, it’s been progression, the band serving them as opposed to the other way around. For Patty and Ben, it helps that they both have full-time jobs, and by extension, more stability. Both work in the charity sector, with Ben’s place of work now being the Uprawr Foundation.

“I think it’s a lot more inspiring having life experiences outside of [music],” he considers. “I don’t know whether a fan wants to hear a record about how hard it is to be on the road, and there are a lot of good records about that, but we’ve never really wanted to write one of those.” Life outside of a van trundling along the motorway is more interesting to them, and in his job, he witnesses grievous challenges close up. “Obviously, you see a lot of disheartening things and that’s why charities exist,” Ben continues. “In spite of that, you see human kindness, and the selflessness of the people that support charities and the lengths that they go to. That’s been a really wonderful thing for me to see. It adds a lot of value to my life. We’ve always done stuff for mental health, so as a band so it made a lot of sense.”

If this is a healthier way of being, do you wish you’d done it this way before?

“Sometimes you have to make those mistakes for you to learn those lessons,” Patty offers. “Sometimes it does have to happen that way around. This is a lyric in the song – ‘You’re going to chase some dreams and leave them in your 20s.’ I got to be in a band and tour the world and write songs and records and enrich people’s lives. I was making a lot of mistakes – we all were during that time – but that was an amazing way to spend our 20s, touring the world, seeing Tokyo and Sydney and Berlin and Toronto and LA, and the memories we made on tour and away from home and recording records. Without a doubt, it led to us needing to take a break in a really sort of destructive way. The band did take a break, but we laugh about the highs and the lows every single day because of [the time we took away]. It’s bittersweet.”

Time, distance and healing have transformed As It Is as people, and as a project. Now over a year after its creation, the ideal moment has come for Lose Your Way & Find Yourself to be released as a testament to who they are. “I think there was something really exciting about finding out what As It Is have to say on the other side of the pain,” says Patty. “We’ve never gotten to find out what those songs would sound like. We never really got to celebrate the end of a project that meant the world to us, and this was taking back the reins, taking ownership of the narrative and the project, and making it ours again for the first time in a long time.”

Lose Your Way & Find Yourself is out now via FLG. As It Is tour the UK this month – get your tickets now.

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