Post-industrial malaise and French-language sprechgesang, by Luke Cartledge. Photography by Will Shields
Gary, Indiana Between 1960 and 2010, the population of Gary, Indiana shrank by half. Today, despite the housing crisis 40km away in Chicago, it’s strewn with abandoned buildings, unwanted, untouched. Few groups are capturing the sound of such deterioration and malaise quite like a band from Manchester called Gary, Indiana. At the time of writing, they’ve only got three singles out (the self-released ‘Berlin’ and ‘Pashto’, and ‘Nike of Samothrace’, with which they announced their signing to Brooklyn’s Fire Talk Records) but they’ve made an impact. Combining caustic noise with thunderous percussion and flickering sprechgesang vocals, the trio’s music doesn’t simply capture the surface aesthetics of post-industrial decay but expresses how it feels to live in a society that feeds, vulture-like, on that decay. This stuff is pressurised, disorientated, battered, occasionally beautiful, often gruelling. And really good. We speak just before Christmas 2020, the UK still deep in its Covid-19 crisis. Gary, Indiana’s Parisian singer Valentine Caulfield is facing up to spending the holidays in Manchester. “I’m not going home for Christmas for the first time in my
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entire life,” she says, sadly. “It’s been really stressful and quite weird. But [lockdown] has been quite productive for us.” Caulfield first met her bandmate Scott Fair in 2016, when they were both playing in other bands. They were impressed with one another; slowly, what would become Gary, Indiana began to formulate. “It started out just as me and Val writing together,” says Fair. “And we were lying in wait, until we were happy that we’d arrived at a place musically that we were excited to share with people. A lot of the early stuff was just figuring out a way to get to that place. We met at a gig in a place called Aatma, just off Stevenson Square in the Northern Quarter.” “We kept in touch,” says Caulfield, “and when Scott was starting what is now Gary, Indiana he messaged me saying that he wanted a female vocalist who could speak French. I happen to be a female vocalist, and I speak French. We then spent quite a while refining what our songs actually are. It’s been a slow, interesting sonic journey.” It sometimes feels like Manchester itself has been on a slow, interesting sonic journey in recent years. For many of the
