Louder AAA
Charlie Rolfe has never fancied herself a marksman. She’s left a steady string of accidental casualties in her wake this afternoon, her trigger-happy approach amounting to a woefully high pixelated body count. However, that all changes when she’s faced with a herd of moose in a hunting game.
With a plastic rifle in her hand, the As Everything Unfolds frontwoman’s sheepish demeanour shifts to laser-focused vigilance. With each blast, she sinks further into a flow state – and that’s when she shoots a moose in the dick. It’s a massive win for the amateur sniper.
As the Game Over screen recaps each fatal hit, Charlie turns to us, eyes wide, pointing at her high score with shock. Though she’s tallied up countless hours on games such as Elden Ring, complete with Electric Callboy’s Nico Sallach laughing and barking advice at her through her headphones, high-stakes, combat-focused games have always left her feeling a little frazzled. But today, under the neon glow of Soho’s NQ64 bar/arcade, she’s finally locked in.
Typically, Charlie likes to lose herself in cosier roleplaying games and fantasy worlds. Whenever reality gets a little too hard, she finds comfort in the escapism of the post-apocalyptic mysteries of the Fallout series universe, or a calming sense of control when embodying the role of an omniscient god caring for a Sims family.
As Everything Unfolds’ third album, Did You Ask To Be Set Free?, centres around these kinds of worlds – and questions how healthy they actually are. Following the sudden death of her partner, As Everything Unfolds drummer Jamie Gowers, in 2024, real life became too difficult for Charlie to handle. She found solace elsewhere.
“I was maladaptively daydreaming a lot, creating universes in my head,” she explains. “My brain couldn’t cope with the fact my life had changed so drastically overnight, so dream worlds felt safer. They were something I could control.”
Unfortunately, that sense of control soon soured, with her reliance on dreams turning into something “excessive and obsessive”. Rather than trying to rebuild her life, she found herself in bed hours before sunset, floating off into another realm.
As Everything Unfolds’ story began in a Co-Op car park in Buckinghamshire in 2013. Initially making contact with the band members via Joinmyband.co.uk, Charlie met them in public to make sure “these boys weren’t going to kill me”.
We went from playing to 30 people in High Wycombe, straight to Download Pilot. Talk about a baptism of fire!
Charlie Rolfe
Eventually, they settled on a sound that combined riotous metalcore and buoyant alt rock, with their debut album, 2021’s Within Each Lies The Other, earning them an invite to play for 10,000 punters at the historic Download Pilot festival that year.
“We went from playing to 30 people in High Wycombe, straight to that… talk about a baptism of fire!” Charlie jokes.
Two years later, they released Ultraviolet, breaking out from their home town for their first headline tour across the UK and Europe, and continuing to play shows into 2024. The future was looking bright. Then, only a few weeks after they performed at Wacken, Jamie died, and their lives were thrown into chaos. Due to support Bury Tomorrow in just three months’ time, they had a decision to make: continue As Everything Unfolds without him, or call it quits. They pushed on.
“If you step away for too long, the easier it is to just walk away,” Charlie explains of their decision to get back on the road so soon. “We lost so much, so we knew that we couldn’t lose this band too.”
Bury Tomorrow toured with Architects after guitarist Tom Searle died from cancer, and knew how hard it was for a band to lose someone.
“The whole touring party was so supportive,” Charlie recalls. “We were given space, but they also didn’t treat us like we were ‘wounded’. They were still making jokes, winding us up… it was hard, but it was what we needed.”
Setting Sun is about the universal experience of mourning.
Charlie Rolfe
Meanwhile, As Everything Unfolds were halfway through writing their third album, and opted to stick with it, rather than burying Jamie’s creative efforts with him. Charlie struggled to write under such difficult circumstances, but immersing herself in her first love, music, was a blessing. As a child, she’d perform to imagined crowds from her room, singing Busted into a hairbrush, and that excitement has never gone away.
She praises master-producer Rick Rubin’s ‘bible’, The Creative Act: A Way Of Being, for teaching her how to find direction even in times she felt lost – his focus on “unconscious” creativity was her saving grace.
“He teaches you to write as a secondary action, while you’re doing another primary action,” she explains. “I wrote Edge Of Forever on a 25- minute drive, just singing into my phone! It was a blessing to take the pressure off, and realise how creative I could be without much thought.”
Despite being written in two parts, Did You Ask To Be Set Free? is remarkably cohesive. A multi-layered journey through grief that switches between escapism and sorrow, it features thumping, rave-appropriate tracks such as Set In Flow (‘Screens around me seem to show only fantasies / Existing in despair alive and unaware’) and metalcore bangers like What You Wanted (featuring Bury Tomorrow’s Dani Winter-Bates). Then there are the woozy, sombre Edge Of Forever and heart-wrenching Setting Sun (‘Cycle through the feelings, know that it won’t help with the healing’).
“I needed to write those more serious tracks, but I wasn’t really ready to talk about me specifically,” Charlie says. “Setting Sun in particular is more about the universal experience of mourning. It captures that cycle of waking up, crying, watching the clock waiting for the end of the day, only to wake up and do it all over again.”
On the cover art, Charlie lies in a daze, flung from a car after a crash, a TV screen glowing with static in the background. The message is clear: if you continue to numb yourself, be it with TV, film or videogames, you can’t feel your feelings or move on. Yet in moderation, fantasy can be helpful, and the record proudly embraces a multitude of fiction and sci-fi references – the video for Gasoline, which sees the band in gothic clothing and surrounded by candles, nods to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“Throughout history, we always conjure up fantasy worlds to address human fears,” she explains. “Vampires are a terror management system for human mortality – because, if you’re a vampire, you can’t die.
“Then, if you consider Blade Runner, that questions what makes us human, and whether we’re born or created…”
A big inspiration was Donnie Darko, the cult classic film that questions whether we can change our fate. Previously inclined to believe “everything happens for a reason”, Charlie found herself wishing things could have been different.
“It helped me realise that you can’t fight against reality, you’ve got to live in it… or you never move forward in yourself,” she concludes. “You can’t live in denial forever.”
A year ago, Charlie would’ve turned down a day out at an arcade. Today, she’s excitedly discussing how she’s trying to teach herself bass and guitar as we jam The Used’s Pretty Handsome Awkward on Guitar Hero. She’s laughing as she spins out in Mario Kart, and yelping as she whizzes away from ghosts in Pac-Man. It’s taken a lot of therapy, but it’s easier for Charlie to smile nowadays.
While sadness permeates Did You Ask To Be Set Free?, it’s a time capsule of grief and perseverance that she’s glad she has to look back on. Glimmers of Jamie are present in tracks like the propulsive Point Of View – his favourite. She knows the next record – their first without any of his input at all – will be even harder, but she’s not going to shy away from it.
“What I’m about to say makes me want to be sick into my own hand, but trust me,” she laughs. “When you’ve been through what I’ve been through, you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last.”
So, what does the future hold for the band? Well, if guitarist Adam Kerr had his way, they’d go geezercore, writing laddy pub singalongs while wearing football shirts. While that’s never going to happen, Charlie isn’t sure what’s next – and she’s absolutely fine with that.
“To me, every day is a lesson,” she explains. “It’s more grounding than escaping to a daydream, and now I don’t dread waking up. I wake up thinking, ‘What will I learn today?’ A year ago, I was so terrified of becoming stagnant, becoming so engulfed in my own grief that I’d never be able to truly live again. But life is about living, and we intend to.”
Did You Ask To Be Set Free? is out now via Century Media. As Everything Unfolds play 2000 Trees in July and tour the UK in February 2027.
