Ellis joins the Zoom call from the band’s studio in Bollington, which is “just full of old people”. His boyish candidness shines through - it becomes apparent how little he performs the role of frontman off stage. There's no pretentiousness, no practised cool, no careful media-training. That opening spark of authenticity sets the tone for the whole conversation, and reveals what really lies at the heart of the band.  

Ellis doesn’t romanticise the early origins of cassia: “If I'm being completely honest, there wasn’t a whole heap of things to do,” he admits. Macclesfield offered two options:  “Trudge along in the rain or make some music”. So Ellis teamed up with Lou Cotterill (bassist) and Jacob Leff (drummer) and started to jam together. As Ellis reflects, he voices his persisting disbelief: “It wasn't really on my agenda to be in a band. I didn't think I'd have the confidence to do it. It was kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy thinking back on it.” For Rob, his most vivid memory of this era was first hearing their music on BBC Radio 1: “I realised that the songs that you'd written in school were being played on the radio for a week solid. Insane.”

This touching down-to-earthness continues as he speaks about the band’s 2025 world tour for the album ‘everyone, outside’. He enthusiastically remembers how “amazing” the experience was: “I was like, what the hell? We're in bloody Mexico City. This is crazy.” But though performing internationally is undeniably exhilarating,  the shows closer to home are the most intense for Ellis: “I actually feel like the most nerve-wracking shows are actually in Manchester. You see a lot of familiar faces, and you're like, oh, great. I'm laid bare here... you know, emotionally vulnerable”. 

Ellis cracks open a Sprite. “It’s that time of day,” he jokes. The conversation moves on to how the band’s approach to making music has changed over the years: “We've definitely gotten a bit more organised with how we make things.” The trio “do a lot more” themselves now - they recorded ‘lemon gelato’ “all the way through to mixing” and felt “more in touch with the process of making things”. But despite a “more uniform approach to writing music”, Ellis is honest about the innate struggle of creating: “We still go in every day thinking, I hope we get something good. People in music make it sound really artsy and shit.” He laughs with a touch of self-deprecation:  “Actually, half the time I'm just like, please don't suck.”

When asked where the ideas for songs come from, Ellis' response is characteristically self-aware: “A lot of it is introspective. Unpicking yourself,” he muses. The process of music-making helps him unlock things he didn’t know about himself: “With every tune you write, you learn a little bit more about yourself. It sounds corny, but you appreciate yourself a little bit more.”

Speaking on the inspiration behind ‘lemon gelato’, he says the album came flowing out straight after the world tour. Harnessing the high, the trio got "straight in the studio, straight stuck in” and unlocked the “most raw ideas”. Talking about the timeline, he marvels at the speed at which it came together: “The album just took about two or three months to get, which I'm really happy about because I actually feel like this is what we dreamt of making when we first started the band.” A flash of self-consciousness clouds his face. “I find this stuff really hard to explain,” he says apologetically. When asked how he’d sum up the album in a sentence. Rob grins. “Pretty bloody good,” he laughs, back to his sunny self. Trying to be a bit more serious, he adds: “Hopefully a little bit unexpected from us.” 

He then dives deeper into how he thinks the band has developed as artists. “We've always wanted to push ourselves creatively,” he explains. To him, maturing musically has meant realising that sometimes the best approach is to keep things simple: “You start realising that you don't need to make things as complicated for them to sound better. The less you put in something, the more impact it has.” He continues: “With lyrics as well… you can often overcomplicate things. When actually I feel the best lyrics are the ones that are just almost talk.” 

In fact, if cassia were starting out today, Ellis would tell their teenage selves to be “a bit less self-aware,” and “just be confident even if it fails and sucks”. He explains how the band was thrust into doing festivals quite early on: “I remember thinking, this is moving way too fast. I can't actually keep up with it.” Smiling, he says: “I wish someone would have tapped us on the shoulder and just said, just enjoy it. Don't really care too much. And I think that that's something that, you know, I always try and remember now as we go into tours…I just want to enjoy playing our music to people and hopefully people like it.”

The conversation inevitably turns to technology. Ellis can see both the pros and cons: he hates the “pressure on bands and artists nowadays to compete against this whole algorithm-type technological rubbish” but acknowledges how it has opened doors and cut out the “gatekeepers” in the music industry to some extent. “It's allowed people to make a tune in their bedroom and put it out, which I think is pretty cool,” he weighs in. 

But Ellis is far less willing to accept AI in the music world: “This whole AI stuff is freaking me out a little bit,” he confesses. He says he downloaded Suno AI - an artificial intelligence music generation platform - out of a morbid “interest”. “It just spits tunes out at you. It's mental,” he says, shaking his head. But Rob believes technology like this will actually just push people back towards the more human: “I actually think people want to watch musicians and artists. People actually just want to see things being made by a human. I think everyone quickly forgets - making the music is supposed to be the fun bit; making things is supposed to be fun.” He finishes with a damning verdict: “AI is just a fun sponge.” 

Ultimately, it's people that fuel the band. Ellis is very aware of the "absence of human connection in this day and age”. It’s why live shows are so important to him: “When you go out and you play shows, you're like, holy sh*t, like these are real people singing our tunes. It just feels pretty crazy. So yeah, coming back, it's just fuel, essentially.” This is the crux of the band’s ethos: music made for real people by real people. It is full of energy, emotion and heart - something that can never be replicated by anything else. More than ever, cassia are exactly what the world needs, and thankfully they're here to stay.