Welcome to our Cult

We are Sleeps Under Beams: a transatlantic, bicontinental recording project with a homebase at our own studio space here at Subscotia Sound in the Netherlands.

Our music comes out of what we love: the basslines of late Factory Records, the dark spaces of ‘Disintegration’, and Robin Guthrie’s chorus-heavy guitar clouds on early 4AD releases. In the studio, our focus is on textural depth, vintage colours and tape cohesion rather than modern digital sheen. We build arrangements around friction and a feeling of push-and-pull – driven by Drew’s ambient clouds of multi-layered baritone guitars, Lisa’s wordcraft and string machine synthesisers, and Anna’s vocals which veer from the dreamlike whisper to the dynamics of human emotion.

Our project brings together our three distinct perspectives.

Drew grew up in a small mining town in England, surrounded by his parents’ record collection—the smell of cheap plastic sleeves and vinyl by ABBA, Kraftwerk, and David Bowie. The cover of Aladdin Sane and the insistent, detached rhythm of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ became early creative touchstones, alongside classical roots in Rachmaninov and the walls of sound built by Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. For Drew, songwriting relies on holding still in the silence—letting chords and fragments simmer until a piece feels discovered rather than forced.

“Genre is a starting point, not a boundary. The music that truly moves me often feels like it originates from somewhere just beyond my grasp. There lies that magic place.”

– Drew

Lisa was raised in Ohio, U.S.A., with recent chapters in California and now North Carolina. Her writing began entirely by accident at twenty, when an attempt to write a letter to a friend unexpectedly turned into a lyric called “Scarred.” Decades later, that same piece finally found its home with Drew and Anna for the album ‘Glossed Souls’. Lisa treats words as things that arrive unannounced—in the shower, before sleep, or outside staring at the moon—jotted down with a pen rather than typed on a screen. Her musical anchors lie in the dark, melodic balance of The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, and Wolfsheim.

“I’ve never considered myself a lyricist in the traditional sense. It’s more about catching a line when it appears and making sure the heart of the story doesn’t get lost in the noise.”

– Lisa

Anna brings her Dutch-Scots heritage to the sound, alongside a vocal lineage shaped by Elizabeth Fraser, Billie Holiday, and Beth Gibbons. Grounded in a love for Northern Soul and the directness of classic singers, she works in the space where post-punk propulsion meets dreampop atmosphere.

“If you’re going to sing about hurt or longing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a horn or a wall of feedback behind you. The voice just has to tell the truth, even if it feels like a ghost lingering inside all that noise.”

– Anna

We don’t write to formulaic song templates or forced blueprints. We try to let chord movements, lyrical fragments and melodies settle in silence, and only then build them up brick by brick. We’re obsessed by music. Its what drives us forward. Maybe Sleeps Under Beams is a cult?