Andreas Christodoulidis is spending time in Greece with family, surrounded by sun and memory – an appropriate setting, considering the terrain covered on Humour’s debut album ‘Learning Greek’. It’s a record steeped in personal history and big ideas, fusing literary weight with post-punk bite, and sounding all the more alive for it.
The first songs came together a couple of years ago, with the band aiming to craft something more ambitious than their earlier EPs. “The first album feels like a very big deal,” Andreas says. “We wanted it to be great.” They had what seemed like a solid tracklist, but something didn’t sit right. “All of us knew we could do better,” he admits. “We pulled ourselves together and decided to keep writing and get back into the recording studio.”
“I did wonder, is this just a bit pretentious?”
Somewhere in that creative reset, a phrase from an unused song stuck out. “Learning Greek” wasn’t intended to be a title – just a lyric tossed off in passing – but it started to resonate. “I began to think about how a lot of the songs were in some way or another linked to this idea of nostalgia and trying to revive older parts of your life in order to reconnect with it,” Andreas explains. “That was when it started to feel like a very cohesive thing.”
For him, learning Greek wasn’t just about language. It was about getting closer to something intangible: smells, sounds, conversations half-remembered from childhood. “It was interesting to try and catch hold of things that aren’t easily tangible,” he says. “Fragments of memory.” The experience of returning to old songs from his youth changed, too. “Learning the language changes the experience,” he adds. “Especially going back to lyrics I didn’t understand at the time.”
The lyrics throughout the album pull from personal and cultural memory in equal measure. Andreas borrowed lines from Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy while writing, calling the books “pure poetry”. The track ‘Memorial’ reimagines the farewell between Hector and Andromache from the ‘Iliad’, viewed through the lens of Alice Oswald’s poem of the same name. “These moments stand the test of time because they’re relatable,” he says. “What also keeps them alive are the retellings and reinterpretations which bring people back to them again and again, which is what Oswald’s poem did for me.”
“Greek myths were our bedtime stories”
There was a point where the idea of mixing mythology and modern noise gave him pause. “I did wonder, ‘Is this just a bit pretentious?’” he says. “But then I thought, if there’s ever a time to lean into that subject matter, it’s when you’d never suspect a song to be about something like that.”
Humour operate best in those contradictions: intellectual yet snotty, raw but elegant, often shifting from the profound to the absurd within a single verse. One song moves from Oswald-style phrasing into the line “face pressed to the mirror like an asshole.” That juxtaposition is the point. “It could well be a crisp-related banger next,” Andreas jokes. “That kind of push and pull is just how it comes out when we sit down to write.”
Beneath all the noise, there’s a real attention to structure too. Andreas cites ‘Ctrl’ by SZA as an influence on the album’s flow, especially its use of voice notes and conversations. “That’s part of what inspired us to use my dad’s voice throughout,” he says. “We often referenced other albums that we love when thinking about how to structure ours — ideas which recur throughout.”
It’s not clear what his younger self would make of ‘Learning Greek’. “I actually have no idea what I’d think of it,” he says. “I’d love to see my reaction.”
He’s equally relaxed about how others interpret it. “Sometimes people think a song is about something completely different, and it makes you see it in a new way,” he says. “I don’t mind at all how it’s interpreted.”
“It could well be a crisp-related banger next”
Asked which contemporary work might endure as long as the ‘Iliad’, he settles on something without words. “It would have to be something that’s relatable in the same timeless way,” he says. “Or maybe something instrumental, more abstract. There’s a piece called ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ by Max Richter. I’ll go with that.”
To celebrate the release of ‘Learning Greek’, Humour will play a short run of UK shows, some of them in stripped-back setups, before heading out on a full UK tour in the autumn. “Come see us attempt these songs on acoustic guitars,” Andreas says. “It should be interesting.”
Whether it’s mythology, family history or something as stupidly brilliant as a song about crisps, Humour remain committed to making it mean something. ‘Learning Greek’ is proof that noise and nuance don’t have to live in separate rooms: in fact, they sound even better when they collide.
Humour’s album ‘Learning Greek’ is out now.
