There is a particular kind of record that only gets made when somebody walks out of a band. All We Can E.P is one of them. Before 2013, Ruby Taylor was the singer of Tin Roots, a six-piece Brighton outfit that had been gigging since 2009 and had worked its way onto the Glastonbury and Green Man bills with a mix of reggae, dub, soul and hip-hop. A band that size leaves little room for a songwriter to change her mind, so Taylor changed her name instead.
The three original tracks on the EP were written, recorded, produced, mixed and performed by Taylor at what she called Yumislavia Studios, which is to say her own space in Brighton. The credits are telling: Mark Dobson, who had produced the Tin Roots EP in 2010, assisted on the mix; Will Rathbone put saxophone on Not Again; Chris Kirkham, the band's percussionist onstage, supplied the drum samples on Must I Wait. Everything else is her, and it sounds like it. The guitars interlock in tight, dry figures rather than sprawl, the beats are programmed with a dancefloor's sense of pressure, and her voice sits in a wash of reverb that never quite lets you pin down the room.
Where the EP becomes more than a bedroom curio is in its second half. Instead of B-sides, Taylor handed the three songs to Kiwi, to Earlybird of the Brighton duo Kudu Blue, and to Vondelpark, whose six-minute rework of the title track slows its pulse to a submerged crawl and shows how much bass the song was hiding. Remix EPs were common currency in 2013; this one reads as method rather than marketing. Taylor has said that having other people's ideas to bounce off was a way out of working alone all the time, and the reworks are the first evidence of a habit that would define her.
XVI Records put the EP out on 21 October 2013, with a limited vinyl run in hand-designed, signed sleeves; Taylor had been sitting on the songs for more than a year by then. A self-titled debut album did not arrive until September 2018, produced with Rob Flynn in a studio above a sandwich shop in Worthing and released on her own MIOHMI imprint, where the EP now also lives. One of its tracks, No Such Thing, ended up in the BBC adaptation of Normal People. Since then have come the Some Days EP on Small Pond in 2020, the album It's All In My Head in 2022, Feed The Wanting in 2023.
Listen back to All We Can with that catalogue in mind and it stops sounding like a debut. The psych-pop shimmer, the garage-rock grit and the electronic undertow that reviewers now list as her signature are all present in draft form. She needed to leave a band to find them.
