Dork, May 2024 (WILLOW cover)

** PLUS **

ST. VINCENT

LYNKS

PORIJ

TOMORROW X TOGETHER

KAMAL.

KENYA GRACE

DOWN WITH BORING.

GOOD NEIGHBOURS

ISSUE 87 · MAY 2024 · READDORK.COM

A. G. Cook SNAP, AND

CRACKLE BRITPOP

Djo THE THE

END OF BEGINNING

English Teacher A

CLASS

ACT

Luke Hemmings

Willow

BOY

+ LOADS MORE

DIVISION

B

I

G

FEELINGS

English Teacher ThisEnglish CouldTeacher Be Texas The New Album This Could Be Texas Out Now

DIY

9/10

Loud and Quiet

NME

9/10

Uncut

Record Collector

Rolling Stone UK

Rough Trade “Album Of The Month”

Sunday Times “Album Of The Week”

Jo Whiley BBC Radio 2 “The fantastic and the everyday collide on this landmark debut - an adventure in sound and words”

INDEX.

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Get ‘online’ and head on over to shop.readdork.com and find our complete back catalogue, available while they last.

Issue 87 | May 2024 | readdork.com | Down With Boring

Hiya, Dear Reader.

As the seasons shift and the vibrant hues of spring emerge, so too does this May’s issue of Dork, bringing a fresh collection of musical mavericks to our cover.

A.G. Cook stands at the forefront of musical innovation, crafting sounds that blur the lines between the digital and the human, reshaping pop music with his production mastery. He’s not just about pushing boundaries though — they are being erased altogether.

So why, exactly, is his latest project called ‘Britpop’ - a cultural movement and relic of the past? As you’d expect, there’s more to it than some Dodgy tunes (ask your dad, etc).

Djo, the creative persona of Joe Keery, infuses our cover with a dose of his uniquely psychedelic vision.

His work weaves nostalgia and futurism into a tapestry that feels both familiar and utterly new. With ‘End Of Beginning’ going viral to the point where we cannot really remember any other TikTok sounds now, Djo is certainly way more than an actor’s side project.

English Teacher have not only burst onto the scene but done so with a debut album that’s already being hailed as one of the year’s best. Their music combines incisive lyrics with robust, engaging soundscapes. Not only are they making a compelling case for the enduring power and relevance of indie-rock, they do it while scribbling outside the lines with a fearsome purpose.

5SOS ledge Luke Hemmings shares his journey of musical exploration on this month’s cover, stepping into a solo spotlight that illuminates his depth and versatility as an artist. His contributions delve into personal growth and artistic courage, challenging listeners to consider the paths less travelled.

WILLOW, meanwhile, continues to capture the essence of artistic evolution, seamlessly integrating alternative pop with introspective lyrics to explore new realms of expression. Her commitment to evolving encourages us all to embrace our own transformations.

This issue is a celebration of artists who are not just participating in the music industry but actively shaping its future. Dive in and get ready to be challenged, inspired and celebrate their true originality.

readdork.com Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler Contributing Editors Jake Hawkes, Jamie Muir, Martyn Young Scribblers Abigail Firth, Alex Ingle, Alexander Bradley, Ciaran Picker, Dan Harrison, Finlay Holden, Kelsey McClure, Linsey Teggert, Neive McCarthy, Rebecca Kesteven, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin

Top Ten.

Features.

4.

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KAMAL. ONE STEP CLOSER HOPE TALA

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TOMORROW X TOGETHER PILLOW QUEENS STONE TEENAGE KICKS: KATE NASH A DAY IN THE LIFE OF... HOME COUNTIES

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ENGLISH TEACHER DJO ST. VINCENT A. G. COOK WILLOW LYNKS LUKE HEMMINGS PORIJ

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ENGLISH TEACHER MAGGIE ROGERS RACHEL CHINOURIRI NIA ARCHIVES

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RENÉE RAPP PANIC SHACK LAUFEY DECLAN MCKENNA BLEACHERS

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NELL MESCAL

Intro.

Festivals.

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DOT TO DOT LIVE AT LEEDS THE GREAT ESCAPE

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LIZZIE ESAU BLUE BENDY GGLUM MEG ELSIER OVERPASS

Hype.

Stephen Ackroyd ‘Editor’ @stephenackroyd

Incoming.

Get Out.

Backpage.

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All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of The Bunker Publishing Ltd. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which The Bunker Publishing Ltd holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Dork or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.

THE BEST HAPPENING

STUFF N O W.

Words: Martyn Young.

→ Ever since he emerged as a

Five years into his journey and still every inch the pop prodigy, writer, producer and performer Kamal. is blooming into a creative powerhouse.

With new single, ‘hurt people’, focusing on the music is clearly paying off.

4. DORK

EVERYBODY

precocious 16-year-old with a stunning voice, exquisite songs and an innate ability to forge a truly resonant connection with his raw and intimate songs, Kamal. has been a prodigy. The multitalented producer, writer, singer, and performer from Harlesden in North West London has packed a lot into the last five years, including landmark collaborations with Dave and Central Cee, an Ivor Novello nomination, and two gorgeous EPs, including the evocative and dreamy R&B soundscapes of last year’s ‘so here you are, drowning’.

As he gears up for a year full of new music and bold ambition with a striking new single, Kamal. ponders from his garden shed converted home studio just where the time has gone since his breakout arrival.

“It feels sometimes as if I’ve only been doing it for a year or two years. I started when I was 16, and now I’m 21, so that’s five years, which is crazy,” he reflects.

“Honestly, I’m not sure if this will ever change, but I still feel like I’m in the same position, always treating myself as a satellite for whatever art I’m consuming. I want to soak it up like a sponge and recycle it. I don’t want to overthink my position numerically or what my objective trajectory has been from the outside. I’m more thinking step by step, me as a creative individual, and how I can satisfy that need and drive I have to be making new and exciting things and things that satisfy me. Because that’s the way I look at it, I don’t get too bogged down about the other stuff connected to it. I really try to keep it music-centric still.”

There’s an inescapable sense that Kamal. is an artist wise beyond his years, enlightened and perfectly attuned to his creative instincts and with a voracious appetite to challenge himself. “As I’m growing, I’m becoming more confident in myself and my ability as an artist to put my emotional expression into form,” he explains. “I’m enjoying it as I evolve. I’m taking it however it comes and not trying to restrict that process to any one lane.”

An illustration of his desire to challenge his artistry and put all of himself out there is the run of solo piano shows he performed in January, including two headline shows at the Tabernacle in London,

ANIMAL MAGIC TOP TEN

“I’M FINDING A WAY TO TALK ABOUT THE SHIT THAT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT” KAMAL.

a perfect showcase for his tender and delicate yet rich and rousing music.

“It’s about combining sounds I’ve gotten to know in the past and making an amalgamation of those that feel like the purest and most me,” he says of his developing creative process.

“I’m definitely getting there now. I’m loosely talking about working towards an album now; I’m getting some themes and different sonic pallets. I’m thinking about the way that I create songs because some of the songs have more of a studio vibe, and some will be more at home, just me and the keys. I’m almost trying to combine all of those and see which bits I align with most, describe me or epitomise me the most, and lean into that so I can get the crux of the emotion that I want to get out. That’s where we’re at now. I’m definitely getting there with a few of the songs I have coming up. I’m finally getting into that stride and finding a real place to sit in.”

For Kamal., expression and creativity are central to his songs as he continues to explore and develop his voice both musically and lyrically.

“The best artists are ever-evolving,” he says. “You don’t ever want to let yourself become stagnant or too comfortable sitting in a certain sonic or lyrical space. It’s important to remember that what we’re engaging in is a more embellished form of expression that we lean into from day to day.

“I treat music as trying to encapsulate the emotions that a conversation might not be able to.

There are other ways to talk than just words, and some of those are through chords or different sounds. If I look at it that way and remember what I came into it for, it’s very difficult for me to feel like I’m getting too stuck or just sit still in a sound. It’s definitely always about staying completely open as an artist and just being captive and allowing the ideas to flow through you rather than feeling that you’re having to think about how you have to dictate the emotions.”

His new single ‘Hurt People’ is an encapsulation of all those undulating powerful emotions that drive his music. “It’s a play on the idiom that hurt people, hurt people. It’s using that as a way to paint a picture and a story of a relationship, which is the same relationship that I’ve spoken about in the previous song I released called ‘Still A Little Something’,” he explains as he illustrates the connective tissue that links his music together. “It’s a philosophy that I carry with me in the way that I look at the world. It’s often difficult to lay full blame on someone for their actions because

so many things are reactions rather than original actions, and I thought that was a really interesting concept to try and write about. Even when you’ve been damaged by someone, it can be difficult to fully reject them as a person because you’re aware that the reason they did that to you is because they’ve experienced their own share of pains and tribulations.”

The single’s release is part of a plan to drop more exciting new music throughout the year that finds Kamal. exploring different ways to harness the rich emotion and feeling in his music. “I’ve got a few songs that I’m sitting on that I’m really excited to drop that I just need to make sure I’m dropping in the right way so they can be received as I’d like them to,” he says excitedly. “I’m finding a way to talk about the shit that I want to talk about in the most succinct and effective way that I can.”

“I’ve got some material coming that’s more honest in lots of ways and more raw than the stuff I’ve spoken about before,” he continues. “I’m a bit nervous but also excited to see how the audience receives that because it’s even more vulnerable than previous. Who’d have thought it?” he laughs. ■

→ After spending much of the last couple of years riding ‘Heat Waves’ on the way to becoming one of the biggest bands on the planet, Glass Animals have returned with news of their fourth album, ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’. Set to arrive on 19th July via Polydor Records, it’s the follow up to 2020’s smash ‘Dreamland’, and comes alongside a brand new single, ‘Creatures In Heaven’.

“Life can change dramatically, but sometimes you aren’t able to change as quickly on a personal level,” frontman Dave Bayley explains, confronting the reality of suddenly being a global star. “You end up feeling like a spectator. And then you are asked and expected to be a certain type of person, a different person. But…I wasn’t

SUPER STAR

→ Former Dork cover star Lava La Rue has announced their debut album, ‘STARFACE’.

The full-length is teased by the London artist’s new single ‘Push N Shuv’, with the full record following on 21st June.

Lava explains: “I wrote Push N Shuv 5 years ago before Covid (the vocals you hear on the song are still my 21 year old voice) and I knew when I wrote it 2019 that if I made an album that’s what I wanted it to sound like. It’s literally been years in the making and honing in on that sound and it only feels fitting that this is the song that I announce the album with.”

sure how. It confused me to the point of not knowing who I was or if anything was real.”

Realising that “human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex than anything else”, ‘Creatures In Heaven’ focuses down on the concept of being in the moment.

“It’s about a moment in time,” Dave explains, “be it a split second or a year or whatever, having the capacity to be enormously formative and life-changing.

Even if it is over. Or if it doesn’t go as planned. Or if it dies too soon. It is still fucking beautiful. The love and care and the feeling in that moment lives forever. It never really dies. If that’s how you choose to see it.”

GO HARD

→ Billie Eilish has announced her third studio album, ‘HIT ME HARD AND SOFT’. The album, co-written and produced by her brother FINNEAS, is set to arrive on May 17th, but there’ll be no singles released in the build-up. “I wanna give it to you all at once,” Billie wrote on Instagram. “Finneas and I truly could not be more proud of this album and we absolutely can’t wait for you to hear it.”

READDORK.COM 5.

BIG IDEAS

→ Dork’s fave agent of chaos, Remi Wolf has announced her second album, ‘Big Ideas’. The follow-up to 2021’s ‘Juno’, the former Dork cover star will release ‘Big Ideas’ on 12th July, following her UK support tour with Olivia Rodrigo. She’s also teasing it with a new single, ‘Cinderella’.

She explains: “‘Cinderella’ is a lyrical collage of the ups and downs and mood swings and transient lifestyle I was experiencing while writing this album. Constant travel and rapid changes led me to feel such a rollercoaster of emotion – moving from feeling really insecure to feeling really good to feeling manic and depressed and then feeling OK again, while desperately craving a grounding figure to tell me I was doing a good job.

“So, this song was me stepping in as my own fairy godmother telling myself that I was in control. Sonically, I wanted the song to have a sense of 70s nostalgia while still feeling like a record made today. And I wanted to make something where you can’t help but dance and move and feel good while listening. I recorded this at Electric Lady in New York at the beginning of 2023. I initially made the song with just myself and Solomonophonic – and then I was able to bring in some amazing horns players to round out the sauce.”

“It’s going to be a sick year,” claim ONE STEP CLOSER. On the strength of their about to arrive new album ‘All You Embrace’, that seems a pretty safe bet. → Hailing from the steadfast city of Wilkes-

BEST OF LUCK

Words: Stephen Ackroyd.

→ Current contender for the title of World’s Greatest Pop Star, Chappell Roan has released a new single.

‘Good Luck, Babe!’ follows on from her 5* debut album, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’, which came out last year. She’s also set to support Olivia Rodrigo on a bunch of US and Canada dates this summer, and headline in the UK in September.

Chappell shares: “I needed to write a song about a common situationship within queer relationships — where someone is struggling with coming to terms with themselves. It’s a song about wishing well to someone who is avoidant of their true feelings.”

6. DORK

Barre, Pennsylvania, One Step Closer stand as a testament to the enduring spirit of hardcore. They’re a voice echoing through the charged air of packed venues and the solitary spaces where fans seek solace. With their upcoming album, ‘All You Embrace’, set for release in May via Run For Cover Records, they chart a course through the choppy waters of growth and change.

This album marks a defining moment following their lauded releases ‘This Place You Know’ and ‘Songs For The Willow’, which earned them critical acclaim and a devoted following. They’ve expanded their melodic horizons without compromising the fervour of their sound, inviting listeners into a bold, anthemic journey through their most impassioned music to date.

One Step Closer’s trajectory has been anything but conventional. In a short span, they’ve vaulted from the local scenes to international stages, with live dates stretching from the neon buzz of Tokyo to the historic venues of Europe and beyond.

Tour life, naturally, thrums with the pulse of the highway, each city blurring into the next, but for One Step Closer, every stop is a vivid memory in the making.

“Everything is going great,” vocalist Ryan Savitski exclaims. “We are in the middle of our trio tour with Anxious and Koyo right now, currently heading to Cleveland for our show,” he shares, the energy palpable even off-stage. “It’s goin’ good, chillin’ in the van like always,” adds guitarist Ross Thompson.

“I think we’re heading to a coffee shop right now, then to the show.”

The journey to ‘All You Embrace’ was laden with life’s shifting tides, as Ryan recounts, “Since the last record came out, the band has been touring like crazy. We got to tour the States, the UK and Europe a bunch. Made it over to Japan, South East Asia, and Australia for the first time, too.”

“I think being gone as much as I’ve been has created a lot of life changes,” he muses. “Changes with friends, family, and just relationships in general. That’s how the overall theme of the new record came into play.” These shifts in personal landscapes crafted the thematic backbone of their newest album.

“The first LP allowed us to do so many cool things and introduced us to some amazing people. We got to see the world from the music we made, which is all I wanted to do since the beginning of the

“THIS IS THE MOST PROUD I’VE EVER BEEN OF SOMETHING WE CREATED” RYAN

SAVITSKI

band. Have ties with people I’ve never even thought would be possible. Lots of unexpected things for us, but we are insanely grateful.”

The record’s lead single ‘Leap Years’, embodies the album’s emotive heartbeat, born from Ryan’s reflections on absence and belonging, “The song is about being gone and the effect that it’s had on my relationships with people, constantly feeling like I’m missing out on life back home. It’s been a challenging thing to work around, but at the end of the day, we are doing what we love. Sometimes, that requires a sacrifice.”

“I kinda wrote a loose structure of the song on guitar,” he continues. “Originally, it didn’t have a big chorus. Once we started working on it more, we added a chorus, and it ended up making the song so sick.”

Looking ahead, Ryan’s hopes are simple yet profound, “I think I just want the record to allow us to continue what we love to do.”

Ross imagines an energetic future, “I hope it allows us to play shows where people are feeding off the energy of everyone in the room and just losing their minds.”

The rest of the year for One Step Closer is as dynamic as their sound, packed with tours and festival appearances, as Ryan outlines, “We’ll finish up this trio tour and then head to the UK and Europe in mid-May. Got another tour through the summer that will be announced soon, along with a couple festivals. Possibly another tour in the fall and some other things that are not announced yet. It’s going to be a sick year.” ■ Read the full interview on readdork.com. One Step Closer’s album ‘All You Embrace’ is out 17th May.

HOPE IS IMPORTANT Words: Stephen Ackroyd.

It’s eighteen months since Hope Tala dropped her last single, but as she returns with a brand new offering (and a freshly obtained driving licence), ‘I Can’t Even Cry’, she’s lost none of her power.

→ A polymath by any definition, Hope

Tala is back(! Back!! Back!!!) on the musical landscape with her poignant new single ‘I Can’t Even Cry’, a testament to her journey through personal turmoil and creative rebirth. Produced by the talented Anoop D’Souza, known for his collaborations with Umi, Asake, and Unknown T, it showcases Hope’s enchanting vocal delivery and her exceptional skill in weaving compelling narratives through her music. With millions of streams under her belt and widespread critical acclaim, including two nods from Barack Obama, dontachaknow, it’s a return that finds her standing on the start line of what could well be the sort of explosion that takes a talented new artist and creates a brand new superstar.

Following a period of introspection and development in Los Angeles, Hope’s latest offering emerges from a cocoon of creative gestation. ‘I Can’t Even Cry’ captures the essence of numbed sorrow and the quest for emotional resurrection.

A bridge between past and future, it embodies the transformation that comes from confronting and processing deepseated emotions.

“Hi! I’m having a great day!”

Hope begins, her voice echoing the contentment of a well-spent day. “I ran, ate a good lunch, got some work done, and took my flatmate’s dog for a walk in the sun. Two of my friends are coming over for dinner later. I can’t really complain.” It’s a simple yet fulfilling routine, reflecting the balance she seeks amidst the chaotic cadence of a

“I HAVE SO MUCH MUSIC READY TO GO THAT EVERYONE IS GOING TO BE ABSOLUTELY SICK OF ME” HOPE

musician’s life.

It’s been a while since we heard from Hope, her last single ‘Stayed At The Party’ dropping 18 months ago - a lifetime in the fast-moving world of pop.

The silence preceding ‘I Can’t Even Cry’ was not for nought, though. “I’ve been working on music consistently in the time I’ve been quiet, chipping away at various things,” she shares, highlighting the often invisible grind behind the glamour.

“Navigating the pitfalls of the music industry, trying to juggle all of the things in my life that exist outside of music, and focusing on being a better adult.”

Among these adulting milestones was obtaining her driver’s licence, a feat she notes has become a predominant conversation starter. “That’s probably the biggest news,” she enthuses. “Every time I speak to a friend for the first time in a while or meet a new person, it’s all I seem to talk about.”

Hope’s journey from the vibrant streets of West London to the sun-drenched avenues of LA reflects a narrative of exploration and discovery, both geographically and artistically. Her time in Los Angeles - she’s lived there at least part of each year since 2021 has been transformative, allowing her to immerse herself in a contrasting cultural and creative environment that has undoubtedly influenced her musical direction. Despite the distinct differences between London and LA, she finds beauty and inspiration in the dichotomy, weaving the diverse experiences into the tapestry of her music. “I’m so grateful to have been able to build a community in such a beautiful place,” she admits. “It really is my second home.”

Looking ahead, Hope doesn’t look like she’s planning another long gap to new material. “I can’t say too much yet, but it’s looking to be a busy year,” she hints.

One thing’s for sure - when she’s ready to reveal more, all ears should be locked firmly on Hope Tala. ■

TALA

TOP TEN

GOOD POINTS → Mitski is the final headliner to be announced for All Points East. She will top the bill on Sunday 18th August, with support from Beabadoobee, TV Girl, Ethel Cain, Arlo Parks, Sir Chloe, Wasia Project, Infinity Song, Wisp, Towa Bird, Strawberry Guy and bby. The festival will run from 16th-25th August, with outdoor cinema, live music, sports and well-being and more at London’s Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets.

LOVELY HORSE

→ Wunderhorse are back and teasing a new album with a brand new single, ‘Midas’. Speaking on the inspiration for the song, frontman Jacob Slater explains: “The song was written in a bathtub in Paris, and forgotten about until it resurfaced in Minnesota. Midas is the guy who makes you feel like a pencil stub, all used up and nothing to show for it, but it’s always just business as far as he’s concerned.”

READDORK.COM 7.

INTRO. THE BEATING HEART OF POP NONSENSE.

DEJA TOMORROW X TOGETHER return with their

sixth mini-album ‘minisode 3: TOMORROW’.

Both a throwback and a leap forward, It’s an exciting blend of nostalgia and innovation.

by ABIGAIL FIRTH. photography by BIGHIT MUSIC.

8. DORK

INTRO

“IT’S SUPPOSED TO SYMBOLISE THE FUTURE THAT WE ARE GOING TO BUILD TOGETHER” HUENINGKAI

T

o be a fan these days is a long-term investment, and for those who’ve chosen to follow TOMORROW X TOGETHER, the payoff will be immense. Five years after the South Korean five-piece debuted, they’re returning with their sixth mini-album, the almost-eponymous ‘minisode 3: TOMORROW’ and picking up the Easter eggs they’ve dropped in that time.

TXT’s story began in 2019, emerging as the first group to debut from Big Hit Entertainment since BTS (heard of ‘em?), with the peppy electro bop ‘CROWN’ that hides darker lyrics, as its Korean title translates to “One day, a horn grew from my head”. A perfect scene-setter with its balance of light and shade, it laid the foundations for a discography that’d bring very real experiences of adolescence into a fictional world worthy of its own Netflix series.

READDORK.COM 9.

INTRO

It’s the place they’re coming back to on ‘minisode 3: TOMORROW’, their sixth mini-album but tenth release overall (if you’re not following, their releases are split into chapters: ‘Dream’, ‘Chaos’ and ‘Name’, with the ‘minisode’s serving as interludes that build on the group’s lore). Teaser images ahead of the drop show the boys wearing crowns once again, while the accompanying videos feature Morse code beeps originally included in that debut single.

“For those of our fans who have been joining us on the journey from the very beginning, I think they are going to find it very fun and exciting since it’s going to be a throwback to the past,” says TAEHYUN, who’s by far the chattiest member of the group alongside youngest HUENINGKAI. “The Morse code translates to ‘tomorrow’,” says the latter, “and it’s supposed to symbolise the future that we are going to build together and also give that hopeful vibe that there’s around growing up, it’s never been going to be an even brighter future, so far from what the TXT boys were we thought that it ties in really well experiencing in their day-to-day lives, with the overarching concept of this despite all the extra frills. This album’s album.” lead single, ‘Déjà Vu, ‘ may expand The lineup is completed by leader on their fictional world, but the other SOOBIN, plus eldest YEONJUN tracks are a little more real. and middle child BEOMGYU, all “I definitely feel like I’m growing five meeting us from a stark white in my personal life as well,” says room somewhere in Seoul at an TAEHYUN. “In particular, I took part eye-watering 7:30am, although no hint in penning some of the lyrics for one of tiredness is given away. of our tracks, ‘Quarter Life’, in this “I think this mini-album fully album, and I felt like as much as we encompasses the albums that we put were telling our personal stories, we out previously, and at the same time, were also representing, you know, I feel like it’s a completely unique the concerns that people in our TXT-style album,” says TAEHYUN. generation might have. So, in that “Since this album is all about being regard, I think I’m becoming more reminded of the promises that we mature.” made in the past, we tried to bring TXT hit the ground running in back those memories, and it’s overall March 2019, arriving as one of the first like a throwback to our past.” fourth-generation groups to debut A rich visual world enhances the as K-pop’s global grip really took elaborate storytelling in the TXT’s hold. Within months, they were on discography. Echoing the plots of 80s an international tour of the US, and coming-of-age flicks like Stand By by the time the year was out, they’d Me and supernatural stories like The picked up numerous Rookie of the Lost Boys, TXT’s music videos follow Year awards at ceremonies across Asia. the boys as they grow up and become Five years on, and they’ve gone increasingly aware of and affected by from strength to strength. Far from the adult world. rookies, 2023 saw TXT headline When watched chronologically, Lolapalooza in Chicago and finish it spits out something akin to the up their second world tour with series inspired by those 80s films too, two nights at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Stranger Things; starting out bright Dome (which apparently clocks in and innocent in debut ‘CROWN’, at around 25,000 ticket holders a before uncovering a darker underbelly night). Their third full-length album, in ‘9 and Three Quarters (Run Away)’.

‘The Name Chapter: FREEFALL’, saw What follows is a flip-flop between them collaborate with boy band the two sides, merging over time royalty Jonas Brothers and Latin until they’re indistinguishable from pop trailblazer Anitta, proving their one another, the devil’s temptation prowess as true global stars. But no piercing the otherwise literal ‘Sugar amount of achievements could fend Rush Ride’ in its chorus and their own off the niggling self-doubt that comes Upside Down revealing itself in the with hitting your twenties. real world on last year’s (also very 80s) “As soon as we heard the theme ‘Chasing That Feeling’. of [‘Quarter Life’] we just went, oh, With a group concept centred that’s such a perfect theme,” says

10. DORK

“WE REALLY WANT TO PERFORM IN THE UK AND MEET THE MOA THERE”

HUENINGKAI

HUENINGKAI, “because it not only hits home for us, but I thought that the song narrates something that everybody practically could resonate with. The song itself has a very youthful vibe, and it’s a very upbeat stadium rock track that bursts with energy. TAEHYUN and SOOBIN wrote some of the lyrics, too.”

TAEHYUN continues, “It’s supposed to mean a crisis people usually face when they’re crossing that one-quarter mark in their life, which is kind of the same scenario for us as well, so we were already feeling it before the song came along, and then we thought that it completely tied in with our vibes and that it gave us the opportunity to genuinely and authentically talk about our personal feelings.”

Now in their mid-twenties, TXT are often regarded as Gen Z leaders, navigating adolescence in tandem with their fans (also known as MOA, which stands for ‘moment of alwaysness’) regardless of how different their lives have been.

“I would have to say that it was our members and MOA that helped me through these challenges and helped me navigate through what I’m coming

across in life,” says HUENINGKAI. “So in moments when something was not working out, I would always rely on them, and it’s through them that I can feel that I’ve become more mature as a person.”

As they prepare for their third world tour, titled ‘Act: Promise’, they’re visiting new territories in the US; although they’re still yet to cross the pond for European shows, the boys are hoping that will change.

“You know, we just want to keep putting out songs and performances that everybody can resonate with and relate to that is uniquely TOMORROW X TOGETHER and that represents our unique identity and colour,” YEONJUN says.

“I really want to go,” adds HUENINGKAI. “We really want to perform in the UK and meet the MOA there; we love the country.”

Although this mini album sees TOMORROW X TOGETHER pulling from their own past, their mindset stays true to their namesake as they push themselves forward once again.

■ Read the full interview on readdork. com.

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ONE FOR INTRO

“THE ALBUM GIVES YOU A TRUE, STRAIGHTFORWARD GLIMPSE OF WHAT LIFE IS” PAMELA CONNOLLY

Irish foursome PILLOW QUEENS explore love, loss, and catharsis with their third album, ‘Name Your Sorrow’.

by LINSEY TEGGERT.

I

n the fickle music industry world, third such a short time. albums are often underrated and “We never got to experience that first overlooked. We make so much of the album cycle properly, as we released ‘In hyped-up debut, and that legendary Waiting’ during the pandemic,” recalls Pamela. ‘difficult second record’, but it’s that “When it came to our second album, it wasn’t third time around, where uncertainties that it was rushed, but it felt like we could are shed and the shackles of expectation have taken more time, but we were trying to loosen, that can really show what an artist ride off that wave and actually tour our first is made of. With their stunning third record, album as well as the second one at the same ‘Name Your Sorrow’, Pillow Queens go from time. This record felt really natural - there was being one of the most acclaimed bands of nothing about it that felt like we needed to recent years to truly cementing their status get an album out as soon as possible.” as an astonishing force to be reckoned with.

Though there was no sense of urgency, “We’ve definitely felt a shift this time the band decided to do things differently around,” explains lead vocalist and bass/ this time around, setting themselves a guitar player Pamela Connolly. “It’s a different strict schedule to begin with, working 9-5 beast every time, but when we released our in a windowless rehearsal space in Dublin first album, the press around it tended to be, to experiment and lay the foundations for ‘Hey, there’s this band of four queer women the record. from Ireland’, whereas once you get to your “We held ourselves accountable, setting third record, that rhetoric has already been done, you need to escape that focus on who working hours,’ says Rachel. “I know that you are and for the focus to be on what the sounds real robotic, but it worked for us. It kind of comes from working full time; when music is actually like.”

“We’ve found a lot of the questions we’re you’re working full time, and your band is your being asked are lyrics-focused,” adds hobby in the evenings, and then you go to drummer and vocalist Rachel Lyons. “They’re not necessarily leaning on buzz words like ‘queer indie band’, it’s been more about the music itself, which is always welcome.”

Considering that ‘Name Your Sorrow’ is their third album in under four years and that they worked on the record itself for over a year and a half, it’s pretty incredible what Pillow Queens have managed to achieve in

12. DORK

having that space where you no longer have a full-time job, you need to fill that space. In Ireland, it’s a very Protestant way of working; it’s that Protestant guilt if you’re not always achieving or doing something.”

“We were actually really excited to do it like that; it was really cathartic,” adds Pamela. “It was almost like a puzzle, putting things together, feeling like stuff was growing organically and figuring ourselves out. Though we were strict with ourselves, we didn’t necessarily have a set timeline for finishing, and I think we came out with more than we usually would because of that.”

The main themes of ‘Name Your Sorrow’ are clearly of love, loss and grief, and there’s a lot of catharsis at play. Take ‘Gone’, for example, a track which Rachel says came from “wine o’clock” during their writing retreat. The song details walking away from a failing relationship, brooding and building upon a thumping drum beat before building to a crescendo with passionate dual vocals, creating a sense of pure release.

“When you listen to it, you hear a big

break-up, then it goes into life outside that, learning to exist again and doing things you’re not familiar with,” explains Pamela.

“Then you fail, and then you grow and learn. It’s not an album that gives you that resolution of a happy ending - that’s not to say there are not parts of the album that have those glimpses of joy – but it gives you a true, straight-forward glimpse of what life is.”

‘Name Your Sorrow’ is an album that is equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting, vulnerable and defiant. When asked if there’s a song that they are particularly proud of, both Pamela and Rachel instantly answer with ‘The Bar’s Closed’. Though they describe it as a “slow-burner, not a crowd-pleaser”, it’s the perfect example of the careful nuances of Pillow Queens’ sound, with every part of the song perfectly placed to ensure the listener feels every word of Pamela’s haunting vocal.

‘Spine-tingling’ is a phrase that’s sometimes thrown about, but as she mournfully states, “You’re not my life anymore, you’re not my wife,” you feel it like a dagger in your heart.

It seems fitting that a touchstone for this extraordinary record is the work of Irish poet Eavan Boland, specifically her poem ‘Atlantis’, from which the album takes its title.

In it, the poet imagines that ‘the old fablemakers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it’. ‘Name Your Sorrow’ conveys this similar sense of searching and longing, of never quite being able to find the right word for the whirlwind of emotions you’re feeling.

“Eavan Boland is very prevalent for Irish people around our age – she comes up in school exams a lot,’ explains Pamela. “After the album was written, we stepped back and looked at what it encompasses. We came across ‘Atlantis’, and it just fits. It’s hard to talk about an album in its whole, so it’s nice to have a little totem to go to for reference: read this poem, and then you’ll get what we mean.” ■ Pillow Queens’ album ‘Name Your Sorrow’ is out 19th April.

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THE INTRO

STONE are about to release their muchanticipated debut album, ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’, but it’s a record they’ve been crafting for years. If it comes to it, they’re even willing to fight an alligator...

by STEVEN LOFTIN.

I

f you’re going to face your fears, what with; the local wildlife also gave STONE better reason than for your debut pause to reflect on how far they’ve come. album’s artwork? STONE frontman Fin Excitedly recalling a list of creatures they’d Power found himself doing this in the see out on their regular walks in the woods, name of ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’. But including bears, porcupines (“They’re before taking the now-immortalised fucking huge!”), and leap, the band had to throw themselves into snakes, “And then I’d making the actual record. go in and sing about Recorded in verdant Vermont while being in Liverpool,” Fin housed in the woods, miles from a city laughs. “So I think if and only a small town for reality (and a anything, I probably college town they’d occasionally visit for a performed more proud night out), STONE discovered a newfound than I performed it with perspective and pride blossoming for nostalgia.”

Having already laid the world they cemented on ‘Fear Life’.

Vignettes of the cold hard truths that foundations with their come with growing (‘Never Gonna Die’, ‘My pair of ‘Punkadonk’ EPs, Thoughts Go’), living (‘Jump Up’), loving this full-length, due out (‘Queen’), losing (‘Love Sick Disaster’), in summer, is a vision and witnessing (‘Train’) in their hometown coming to life. Those EPs were a taster of Liverpool. But being thrust into the menu. Rather than establishing the STONE spotlight as the Brit out-of-towners meant sound, these mini-releases were instead a the four-piece fell in love with the mundane way for other bits and pieces to see the light and inane that, at that moment, felt a world of day. “We had songs that were touching away. on metal, and there was a bit of drum and “We felt our identity stronger than ever,” bass,” recalls drummer Alex Smith. Fin adds, Fin remembers, “because that was the only “It’s different variations of genres and styles, identity within a square 100 miles; that was and we’ve still kept that - STONE doesn’t the only piece of home… All we had was have a box. People keep trying to put us in each other and our own thoughts. So I felt a box, but there is no one box. But with the like when we got in the room, we pushed our album, it definitely feels like the album is a own identity, and being with an American story; there’s a storyline to it and a lot more producer and American crew, they had their emotional depth to it.” ways of doing things I quite liked.”

In the background, they’ve always been It wasn’t just the crew they teamed up focused on the bigger picture this debut

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“STONE DOESN’T HAVE A BOX. PEOPLE KEEP TRYING TO PUT US IN A BOX, BUT THERE IS NO ONE BOX” FIN

POWER

ourselves in the past pushing too hard that we’d rush, but now we’re in a great place.

Even with the album, in the end, we took our time. It’s making sure you find that fine line where you’ve got to still nurture the artist but also try to make the art better.”

STONE is certainly a case for a longcon paying off. For years, they’ve offered up their ambitions to the world while also establishing themselves as a force to be reckoned with live and this debut of theirs plays out with the same ruthlessly driven energy of a band itching to get off the start line. Opening with a short, titular poem, Fin recalls writing it “about five years ago, and I went, ‘It’s our time, we live to get fucked and fear life for a lifetime’.”

He explains further, “Everyone’s out there partying, trying not to worry about life, and with the album cover, that’s where it links in.”

This takes us back to the STONE vocalist plummeting through the air into the cold blue-grey below. Facing his fears - heights, water - was naturally the only option for such a focused album by a band hell-bent on scoring the dream. So, after (finally) getting the all-clear from an understandably concerned record label, and after some dive training assisted by Alex, Fin took the great leap, taking full circle the band’s ambitions, drive, and restlessness into a ready-baked metaphor.

“That was the whole point,” Fin beams, “it doesn’t have to be that way.”

STONE have set the bar for themselves was going to be. “We have been crafting with ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’. The future is this album to the tiniest, tiniest detail. even already in their sights. “We’ve got the We’ve had the name for like four, five years,” second album name; we’ve had it for about reveals Fin. two years,” Fin excitedly grins. Yet, how far Since their inception, STONE have they’ll go next is anyone’s guess - especially been all-or-nothing, Fin’s. “I might jump out of a plane next thing dedicatedly driving and dive into an ocean and fight a shark,” towards an idea that’s he laughs. “How do we push harder? We been burning wildly in just keep doing what we’re doing and be their minds. With Fin honest with ourselves.” first recruiting guitarist That honesty extends to the reality of Eliot Gil, then Alex, and being an up-and-coming band - it could finally bassist Sarah all go their way, or it could not, but as Surridge over a span long as they stay true to themselves, the of years, the four were rewards will eventually come. “If we set an all united under the expectation of how big we’ve got to get or impression that this was what we’ve got to do next, we’re going to be it - STONE is the only desperate,” Fin explains. “And the universe thing that matters - and doesn’t like desperate. So we’ve got to be it’s paid off. They signed with Polydor in relaxed and carry on making our music and 2022, and where previously part-time jobs doing our thing. If it makes sense for me were helping fund the dream, now, it’s all to go and fight an alligator for an album systems go. Being so devoted to the cause, cover one day, then I’ll do it in the name of however, does come with its pitfalls. rock’n’roll!” ■ STONE’s album ‘Fear Life “There are positives and obviously For A Lifetime’ is out 12th July. negatives,” Fin says. “Sometimes we caught

TEENAGE INTRO

THIS MONTH...

Kate Nash EVERYONE HAS THOSE FORMATIVE BANDS AND TRACKS THAT FIRST GOT THEM INTO MUSIC AND HELPED SHAPE THEIR VERY BEING. THIS MONTH, THE ICONIC KATE NASH TAKES US THROUGH SOME OF THE SONGS THAT MEANT THE MOST TO HER DURING HER TEENAGE YEARS.

P!NK

There You Go

→ I had just got my own bedroom.

I shared bunkbeds with my younger sister growing up; I was scared of the dark, whereas she couldn’t sleep if one single ray of light came through a crack in the door. The solution our mum came up with was having a small lamp on one night and off the next. We each complained and slept badly every other night.

When my parents converted our garage into two small bedrooms and a utility room, I was ecstatic to have my own room. I picked the paint for my walls: one dark purple, two lavender and one white. I got a bureau to do homework on and a purple office chair with wheels.

We went to Ikea, and I got a silver heart-shaped pillow for on top of my purple bed covers, and to top it all off, for my 13th birthday, I got a Sony Hifi with a CD player, tape deck and radio.

My love for music began really young and was very much connected to my parents’ records and the gigantic CD and record player that lived in the living room. I’d take their CDs off the rack and plug in big headphones that didn’t fit on my small head yet. I listened to Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without You’ on repeat, to Melanie and The Beatles.

They soon bought my sisters and me a cheap tape recorder and a CD player. We bought singles from Virgin Music at the weekend and spent hours recording our own radio shows.

One of us would host, one called in, and the third pretended to be Mystic Meg. I remember once taping the first Spice Girls album onto a tape for my best friend as she didn’t have it. We all sat in the bedroom, shuffling about, trying to be as quiet as possible and most definitely failing as we recorded maybe the worst quality pirate version of ‘Spice’ in its entirety for her. Getting my own room and my shiny silver pillow and Hifi system

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was almost like falling in love for the first time. I salivated over that Hifi. Sometimes, I would just sit on my purple chair and stare at it in disbelief that my life could be this great; I could sleep with the light on every single night and fill my very own CD rack. I loved the sleek buttons; hitting the eject button or pressing play gave me genuine satisfaction. I felt so grown up, so independent.

I got my first phone, a Siemens S25 and started texting friends and boys in the evenings whilst I listened to music, signing off ‘tb’ (which means ‘text back’ for anyone young enough to have missed this gloriously innocent and slow-paced era of technology).

My own Sony Hifi system in my very own bedroom with purple and lavender walls is where I developed my own personal relationship with listening to music. I vividly remember sitting on my bed, looking through the plastic CD case, flicking through the booklet for lyrics and having P!NK’s first album on repeat.

‘There You Go’ felt new and cool and slightly alt for some reason; I think P!NK has always felt like a pop artist who did her own thing.

I couldn’t believe the audacity of her short, hot pink hair. I went to the hairdressers on half term and got a similar short cut minus the hot pink.

On the first day back at school, Jake O’Mara proclaimed loudly that I looked like a boy, and I cried in assembly. This song came out when I was still very much a girl, but I was being thrown tiny flickers of independence that felt massive to me. And actually, I think they were massive for a 13-year-old from North Harrow in the year 2000.

Ms. Dynamite

Dy-Na-Mi-Tee

→ Having a tape deck and radio in one system meant I could now tape things off the radio. I’d know certain DJs would be doing first plays of things that I knew

would be cool; they’d tease the moment, and you’d anticipate hearing the track for the first time. I’d be at the ready with my finger on the button, ready to hit record so I could hear the track again whilst I waited for a release. Ms. Dynamite was talked about ahead of time in a way that felt different to other mainstream artists. She felt important, respected and like she stood for something a bit more serious than other pop I was listening to. After hearing this track, I wrote my GCSE composition, a song called ‘Black & White’; it was just arpeggios on the piano and vocals, but lyrically, it was highly influenced

by Ms Dynamite, my first political commentary on the world through music, and I performed it in my final school concert.

Stacie Orrico

Stuck

→ Another place my sisters and I would consume music was on TV. We didn’t have SKY; my parents were against it. I wonder if they would have let us have an iPhone or social media in our teenage years if we grew up now. The man selling SKY to homes in our area came to the door and asked

KICK my Dad what he would do if there was nothing to watch on BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5, my Dad proudly told him he’d switch off the TV and do something else!

We were told this story many times by our parents whenever we begged for and complained that we didn’t have SKY. We had a trampoline in the garden, bikes to ride, CD players in our rooms and homework to do.

But in our teenage years, TV changed a little bit; the TV gods shone down on us and gifted millennials without SKY a few extra channels, and a few of those channels showed music videos exclusively. I couldn’t tell you the amount of times I have seen Robbie Williams rip off his own skin or the girls from Tatu make out in the rain.

‘Stuck’ was another music video that got played on repeat. Stacie Orrico was beautiful; she had a cute mole on her cheek, a stripy black and white scarf, ripped jeans, hoop earrings, and perfect eyebrows, which were things I strived for. She also sang about

being stuck on a boy, obsessing over him and I could highly relate to these desperate lyrics. I still think this pop song slaps and stands the test of time.

Shola Ama

Imagine (Asylum Remix)

→ When my older sister brought home the first Pure Garage compilation, my social life changed drastically.

My sister was cool; she picked up trends quickly. I was more of a nerd, so when she did anything, I copied. She listened to Garage music, so I wanted to; she wore white eyeliner, so I learnt how to pencil it thickly onto my eyelids; she had boobs, so I got a Wonderbra; she went to the club at weekends and drank underage… you’re getting my point.

I went from meeting friends for shopping at the Harlequin Centre or swimming and

INTRO

sing on a Garage track with him.

I performed and recorded under the moniker Lady K, and I have no idea where that song ended up, but I do remember being really excited to sing in public and to be on a Garage track.

This Shola Ama remix was my favourite song during my early UK Garage years.

'FYI' THINGS NEED TO

YOU KNOW

The Calling

Wherever You Will Go

KS

slides at Watford Springs to dancing to Garage music at clubs. Area and Destiny were our nearest, and they played UK Garage exclusively on Saturday nights; there were also live performances. I recall swinging from metal bars whilst watching Romeo from So Solid Crew and thinking he had the most beautiful eyes.

This new musical landscape brought with it the desire to grind with strangers and to dance and sweat until my fringe was just two soaking greasy strips that slapped uncomfortably against my spotty forehead. I wore denim, mini pleated skirts with cream loafers and drank alcopops. It also enabled my first musical performance outside of school and a family BBQ. I would tell DJs I was a singer and get handed mixed CDs and phone numbers at clubs, but I had no idea what to do with them and wasn’t confident enough to take the next step.

A friend from school called Lee started MCing and asked me to

→ I flirted with two sides of live music when I was a teenager: UK Garage and metal. The other place I could drink underage and look at boys and punch people in a mosh pit, a desire I didn’t know I had until I got into one for the first time, was Wembley Rugby Club. Metal bands played the Rugby Club on Friday nights, and me and my friends outside of school would congregate here for alcopops and moshing. This is where I first became friends with musicians. Including my friend Jay, who played my first ever solo show with me.

We didn’t know each other at the time, but I saw him around.

He was the guy who, when someone was too drunk to play bass or drums or guitar, Jay would calmly step in and wing it while the original band member pulled a whitey in the corner or puked in a bush outside.

My mate Dave was in one of the metal bands that played Wembley Rugby Club regularly.

He had ginger hair and braces, and I really fancied him. We had just started flirting and hanging out in parks at the weekend in addition to me seeing his band live when his mum signed up to a government immigration something or other at the time that allowed UK nurses to move to and work in New Zealand.

His mum did that, and before our braces could get locked together, he was gone.

My friend Linzi and I printed photos of him out and stuck them onto an A3 piece of cardboard that we made into a goodbye card, and when he was gone, we watched rock and metal music videos on her big TV (she had SKY). I grieved our never-tobe relationship, certain he would have been my first boyfriend to this song.

MR

PORTER

→ Porter Robinson has released a new single, ‘Cheerleader’. The track follows on from his 2014 debut album ‘Worlds’, and 2021’s ‘Nurture’, with a video directed by Hugh Mulhern and creative-directed

by Bradley & Pablo. He explains: “When I got back in the studio for ‘Cheerleader’, I asked: what would be something that people could love with zero context – just instantaneous, universal, explosive connection? ‘Cheerleader’ is my take on bottling that feeling.”

FROM THE HEART → Aurora has announced her fourth studio album, ‘What Happened To The Heart?’ Billed as her “most personal and cathartic album”, the full-length is set for release on 7th June via Decca Records/ Glassnote/Petroleum, preceded by new single ‘Some Type Of Skin’ and accompanied by a tour that includes a night at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

The Beatles

Sun King

→ I grew up listening to The Beatles like most kids whose parents grew up in the 60s. I had a crush on Paul McCartney, and I loved the apple in the centre of the vinyl on ‘Let it Be’; that’s why I put a photo of a lemon on the ‘Foundations’ single vinyl.

I sort of detached from listening to music my parents had listened to in my early teenage years. I had my own CD rack to fill, if you recall. But when I was 16, my music tastes got a bit more serious and diversified.

I strayed from pop, UK Garage and local metal bands, and soon enough, The Beatles and other historically significant bands

STAND ATLANTIC WAS HERE → Stand Atlantic have announced their new album, ‘WAS HERE’. The full-length is set for release on 23rd August, teased by early single ‘GIRL$ (Feat. PVRIS and Bruses)’.

Bonnie Fraser explains: “I wanted to show my appreciation for women and personally, my experience growing up knowing I was attracted to women but still feeling like I had to fit the mould of the male gaze, just based on the way I was influenced by a male dominated society. I hope other queer women and women in general resonate with this track, but also anyone in between.”

were back in rotation.

‘Abbey Road’ became a respected album in my friendship group; we’d discuss why and how the record was so good in a way that felt nerdy and important. These years felt more about proving musical taste. I guess these are more self-conscious years where identity is paramount to every breathing moment. Bedroom walls are covered in images that mean something to you as an individual and music tastes can prove worth, level of cool and intelligence within your social circle.

was in a fairly serious relationship with another girl. I walked past the two of them at lunch one afternoon, and I could just tell from their body language that they were breaking up. I was overjoyed. I’m sure I couldn’t hide my excitement. That night, he and a couple of other mates came over to my house to commiserate, and we listened to ‘Dry Your Eyes’. He was heartbroken, and I was secretly very happy. I smugly awaited my chance at what would become a disastrous, passionate and short-lived relationship.

Janis Joplin

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

Mercedes Benz

→ I have a really nice memory connected to this song. My nan had just taught me how to knit, and I was making my first scarf in the kitchen one night.

My mum was helping me, and we were just hanging out in the kitchen, she started putting on records, and she played ‘Pearl’ for me.

This was the first time I had ever heard Janis Joplin. I was shocked at her voice; it was like nothing I had ever heard before. I couldn’t believe it was a woman singing; it was like gravel, she sounded masculine, I thought; it blew my mind, and so I immediately bought my own Janice Joplin album after that.

I loved her delivery; it was rebellious and cheeky. I loved hearing her laugh at the end of the recording. There was so much personality in it. I think it really informed me as an artist in a fundamental way about what female singers can be, what they can sound like and do, that there was something out there other than pop. It was prediscovering punk and the first truly rebellious, non-conformist female musician I looked up to.

The Streets

Dry Your Eyes

→ The Streets’ first two albums were important during these years as well. My whole friendship group idolised Mike Skinner. I feel like the whole school did, and I still do. He was doing something so unique and original, and whilst deeply tied to the UK Garage scene, he felt like a punk poet, a true storyteller, someone who reflected life in the UK and all of its mundanities in such an honest and somehow spectacular way. He made the mundane matter, and therefore, he made us feel like we were worth something and connected to something bigger.

I fancied one of my mates who

Bob Dylan

→ When I left school, I didn’t get into university. When September rolled around, everyone went off to do more interesting things, while I grilled chicken at Nando’s, daydreamed about being a musician, and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

My best friend Siobhan worked at Superdrug over the road, and when we were both closing up, we’d swap free chips for lip gloss after our shifts.

But the summer before all the soul searching began was bliss; school was over, and the horizon felt exciting, like right before the sun is setting and it’s all glistening on the ocean. I hadn’t had all my rejection letters yet, so I felt optimistic. I was sure I’d get into drama school or, at the very least, university.

I now had a record player as well as my Sony Hifi system in my bedroom, although I didn’t have the space for it, so it lived with two large cheap speakers on my bedroom floor amongst clothes and dirty underwear, books, fake pearls and vintage handbags. I bought records at charity shops and kept them under my bed. I’d wake up hungover with no job, no school and grab a record without having to actually get out of the bed, pop it on and lie there listening to it. This was bliss to me.

There was a new crush in my life, and he was a musician.

I actually met him through my first musician crush, Dave from the metal band, who now sadly lived full-time in New Zealand.

My new crush played acoustic music not metal; he was deep and romantic, and he sent me his original songs over MSN. My heart swooned.

We’d chat about music most nights, we hung out at BBQs, and he even played gigs in people’s gardens. He encouraged me to play as well. The thought made me feel sick with nerves, but I loved that he encouraged me. He loved Bob Dylan, and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan vinyl got regular play on these soon not to be unburdened mornings. ■ Kate Nash’s album ‘9 Sad Symphonies’ is out 21st June.

READDORK.COM 17.

INTRO

'FYI' THINGS NEED TO

APOLLO

YOU KNOW

2

→ Omar Apollo has released a new single, ‘SPITE’. Posted online after teasing “LP2” on social, the track follows on from both his recent EP, and his debut album ‘IVORY’. “‘Spite’ is a song about a long distance relationship and wanting to show the other person that you’re okay without them even though you feel like you need them. It’s an angry song about not being able to have someone all to yourself.”

A

DAY

IN THE LIFE OF...

HOME COUNTIES You know what’s easier than following around your fave pop stars, day in, day out, to see what they’re up to right that minute? Asking them. This month, we nab WILL HARRISON from HOME COUNTIES.

7:30AM → Wake up and disgruntledly wait in line for my five other housemates to get out of the fucking shower.

THERE WILL BE B L U D ( F E S T ) → YUNGBLUD has launched his own festival, BLUDFEST. The all-dayer will take place at Milton Keynes Bowl on 11th August. Headlined by YUNGBLUD, there will also be sets from Lil Yachty, Soft Play, The Damned, Nessa Barrett, Lola Young, and Jazmin Bean.

Dom explains: “Five years ago we imagined a world of our own. In BLUDFEST we have physically built one. It feels like the next logical step for me. I want to create a physical safe space where people can come and celebrate the ideologies of this community – where unity, individuality and love is the main focus and we bring the world of Yungblud to fucking life right before your eyes.

“I wanted to build an experience where anybody can be completely themselves, with their friends, their family or completely on their own.

“BLUDFEST will blur the lines of genre and destroy the limitation of imagination. It will be a festival that cuts the corporate bo****ks and is all about the people.

“My plan is to take it worldwide but this summer is the first one and it’s gonna be something no one has ever seen before in the UK.” In addition to the music, there will also be a ‘Make A Friend’ tent, photobooths, a YUNGBLUD museum, a branded burger (The BludBurger) and more.

18. DORK

8:00AM → Finally shower, only taking like 5 minutes because I’m not an inconsiderate arsehole.

8:45AM → Get out of the shower and get over my daily resentment at my fellow band members. I spend a few minutes looking up at the gaping hole in the downstairs ceiling, below where the shower leaks, and note its impressive growth since last night. Conor [Kearney (guitar/vocals)] Aeropresses the coffee.

8:50AM → Realising that I’m really late, I speed-make two Marmite sandwiches (one normal for breakfast, one with cheese for lunch), pour the coffee into a travel cup and leg it to the overground station.

8:55AM → Arrive at the overground and wait at the platform for three successive trains that never arrive. Teams message my manager saying I’m going to be late due to a water leak or that I had to let a builder in - whatever takes my fancy that day.

9:30AM → When the train arrives, I aggressively jam myself onto the rammed carriage, avoiding eye contact with disgruntled fellow passengers. Putting on a centrist dad podcast, I start simultaneously reading the Guardian, taking in no information from either source but feeling content with a comforting vibe of metropolitan liberalism.

10:00AM → After arriving in Central London, I buy a coffee with the remainder of my overdraft and head to the office.

10:10AM → Exchange pleasantries with colleagues about the state of TFL, with everyone sharing unique exaggerations of their own reasons for lateness. Reluctantly log onto the computer.

10:15AM → Eat the first Marmite sandwich

at my desk, read emails and stare at various spreadsheets. Excessively drink water so that I can regularly leave the office to piss and fill up the water bottle, a cycle taking approximately 30 minutes. Over this time, I feel like I have worked somewhat, but really, I’ve just changed the conditional formatting of the various spreadsheets and categorised the few emails I have received.

12:00PM → I mainly stare at the clock, drink another coffee and resist the temptation to eat the next Marmite sandwich.

1:00PM → Sit on a bench in Regent’s Park and reward myself with the other sandwich, moving shortly after being encircled by geese. I re-listen to the same centrist dad podcast while simultaneously reading the band WhatsApp chat, getting increasingly stressed by the inescapable admin tasks that plague life both inside and outside work. Bill [Griffin (bass/vocals)]’s talking about TikTok, Barn [Peiser Pepin (synth/percussion/guitar/ vocals)]’s asking for train fare to get back from Exeter and Dan [Hearn (drums)] can’t make it to practice tonight as he’s got an assignment due tomorrow. Zoning out of band admin, I refocus on the podcast and catch something about the inevitability of the incoming Labour government, feeling momentarily hopeful about the future. Realising it’s time to get back to the office, all feelings of hope are crushed, and I ponder whether it’s time to get a more fulfilling job.

preemptively shut down my work computer and pack up all of my things ready to leave the office bang on 5.

5:00PM → Feeling elated, I leave work and message the band group chat to suggest that we go to the pub before practice. Swift full agreement achieved and overdraft extended in anticipation; I head home to Homerton listening to ‘You Make My Dreams (Come True)’. The journey somehow taking only half the time, I wonder if I would make it to work on time in the morning if work was a pub.

5:30PM → Arrive at the Adam and Eve to meet the band, chain-smoking and drinking £3.95 Amstels until happy hour ends at 7.

7:00PM → Head home to begin a writing session. Fire up the drum machine and MS-20 to make something that resembles shit house music. Add instrumentation and Lois [Kelly (vocals/keys)]’s vocals to it until it sounds wonky enough to pass as Home Counties, and listen to it repeatedly with an enormous sense of self-achievement 10:00PM → Receive a text from our neighbour reminding us of our obligations under Hackney Council noise regulations, which abruptly ends our session. Defeated, we head back to the Adam and Eve for now-£5 Amstels until last orders.

3:00PM → Clock staring, water bottle filling, pissing cycle restarts, taking me through to 5pm.

11:30AM → Head back home and stare at the hole in the ceiling for a few minutes and file yet another repair request to the landlords.

Heading to bed, the feeling of dread for work the next day starts burgeoning. Stick on a documentary about 70s Britain and fall asleep, to later awake at 3am with the light on and fully clothed. Turn off my laptop, which has auto-played onto Part 4 of ‘Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution’. Fail to return to sleep, worrying about all the subliminal centrist indoctrination I have received. Vowing to myself to be more progressive tomorrow. ■

4:50PM → A sense of joy emerges, and the end of the work day approaches. I

Home Counties’ debut album ‘Exactly As It Seems’ is out 3rd May.

2:00PM → Have a team meeting involving going around saying what we’ve done this week. Panic to think of things other than changing the colours on the various spreadsheets, but manage to waffle something passable about data entry issues that goes over both mine and my manager’s head.

FESTIVALS THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO YOUR FESTIVAL FUN.

DOT TO DOT

“ringleader” Welly (Yes, the band is named after him - Ed), the group is a chaotic blend of personalities. At the time of our chat, our eponymous hero is in guitarist Joe’s Honda Jazz, “joyriding around charity shops”. He’s got some Talk Talk CDs; Joe has a sausage roll.

Good to know.

“Joe, with the curly hair, plays the guitar,” Welly announces, introducing the band mostly by the universal pop language of haircuts.

“Jacob, with the curtains, plays bass; Matt, with the mop, plays the guitars, too; and Hanna, the European, plays synthesisers.”

“Joe, Jacob and I went to school together,” he continues, before verging into what’s either the stuff of pop legend or a bit of TMI. “I met The best bands don’t stick inside the Matt at a sexual health seminar at freshers’ lines, but scribble all over week, and Hanna worked the bar at the top in their own unique FESTIVAL FACTFILE the indie night we all style. Bright wax crayons go to.”

“We have a mutual at the ready, WELLY - who love of Tears For take to Dot To Dot this Fears and Scampi May - are one of the most Fries,” explains Welly, summing up the exciting new acts in ages.

Line up: Jockstrap, Wunderhorse, band’s delightfully The Magic Gang, Antony Szmierek, quirky vibe. Their Abby Sage, Aziya, Bleach Lab,

by STEPHEN ACKROYD. music, however, The Bug Club, Charlotte Plank, Cosmorat, The Dare, Ducks LTD, tackles weightier resh off the release of Florry, Gurriers, Hovvdy, His themes. “The first their single ‘Shopping’, Lordship, Infinity Song, Jianbo, album is going to be Southampton outfit Welly JGRREY, Kaeto, Lizzie Esau, Lucy all about the suburbs,” Tun, Man/Woman/Chainsaw, Mary are gearing up for a riotous he reveals. “Jacob, In The Junkyard, Nate Brazier, summer that includes a Joe and I all grew up Panic Shack, Pastel, Picture Parlour, highly anticipated set at this near Southampton in Rushy, Tim Atlas, Trout, Welly and year’s Dot To Dot Festival. more. yellow brick utopia.

Fronted by the self-proclaimed dottodotfestival.co.uk It’s all so fascinating

DOT TO DOT

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20. DORK

“ONE DAY, I’D LOVE TO DO A PANTOMIME” WELLY

BRISTOL / NOTTINGHAM

VARIOUS VENUES

25TH-26TH MAY 2024

DORK PICKS WUNDERHORSE Wunderhorse are ready to take Dot to Dot by storm with their brand of shoegaze-infused indie rock. Having already garnered acclaim for their swirling soundscapes and frontman Jacob Yates’ captivating vocals, their live show is a must-see.

LUCY TUN With her captivating vocals and introspective lyrics, Lucy Tun is weaving a spell that’s drawing in fans. Her delicately crafted songs pack an emotional punch, and her live performances are known for their intimacy and raw honesty.

THE DARE Known for his sardonic vocals and infectious electro-tinged melodies, The Dare’s live show promises to be a raucous and energetic affair.

Expect dancefloor bangers with a healthy dose of attitude.

to me - when you and your family and your friends all have the same house, the same telly, the same lawnmower, the same car, the same experiences and holidays and stories to tell, then our differences, as small as they could be, become mountains from molehills.”

Their ultimate goal? The masterplan is staying secret for now, but they do have one ambition Welly is willing to reveal. “I’d LOVE to play Shepherd’s Bush Empire one day,” he reveals. “It’s where they used to film the Old Grey Whistle Test and loads of old BBC comedy shows. Then, in the nineties, because all the camera equipment was still lying around, bands would use it at the end of their tours to film concert DVDs. I love old, theatre-y venues.”

“One day, I’d love to do a pantomime,” he suggests, unknowingly setting a new most anticipated project we’ll now be asking about in every interview to follow. “A fully Welly show, with a script, costume changes, and ugly sisters.”

But for now, the band are focused on pop on a budget and bringing their brand of suburban angst to the masses. “I’m glad I’m making music in a band that isn’t mopey and pretentious,” Welly admits. “I hate glum music live. I’ll listen to that in my own free time, thanks. If I’m paying £6 for a pint and £10 for a kebab, I want to laugh, cry, and dance. Not wait for the changeover so I can go out for a rollie. Having people come up to us after a show to tell us it was the most fun they’ve had at a gig is the best.”

With a sound that’s equal parts nostalgia and social commentary, a healthy dose of self-awareness, and a side of vegetable salesmanship, Welly are a band you won’t want to miss.

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FESTIVALS

25TH MAY 2024 TEMPLE NEWSAM, PARK LEEDS

GOOD NEIGHBOURS are back with their second offering, ‘Keep It Up’, proving that first throw of the dice was no fluke.

With an appearance at Live At Leeds: In The Park to come this May, catch up with one of the hottest new bands on the planet

by STEPHEN ACKROYD.

E

ast London dynamic duo Good Neighbours have swiftly carved out a unique space in the indiepop world, bridging the gap between nostalgia and the cutting edge of music’s future.

With their breakthrough single ‘Home’ achieving viral success and racking up streams in the millions (120 of them and counting, if you were wondering - Ed), Scott Verrill and Oli Fox have not only captured the imagination of a global audience but also received critical nods that underscore their burgeoning status in the industry.

Following up on ‘Home’ with their second single ‘Keep It Up’, Good Neighbours continue to build on their momentum, offering another gem that combines uplifting melodies with introspective lyrics. Their sound, a blend of influences that calls off everywhere from MGMT to Passion Pit, might echo back to some of the most anthemic acts of the last two decades, but it also brings something fresh and exciting, even to a culture that reliably echoes around that much discussed twenty-year cycle of unlived nostalgia and retromania. They’re a band who understand the near past, but also sound excitingly like the immediate future in the most exciting way.

Today finds Oli in high spirits, reflective of the duo’s ascent and current preoccupations. “Scott and I have spent the day practising in the studio before we fly to America next week to play for some radio shows,” he shares, underscoring the global reach and immediate future that beckons.

Their partnership, borne out of mutual respect and a shared history of navigating the music industry’s complexities, has evolved into a deeply collaborative venture where roles blur and collective creativity takes centre stage. “We’ve known each other for four years. We don’t really have set roles in the band; we both write and produce everything together,” Oli explains, detailing the fluidity and democratic nature of their creative process. “I guess when we come to performing, I take more of a singing role while Scott holds down the fort on keys and bass.”

DORK PICKS THE CRIBS Wakefield’s indie rock royalty are as good as on home turf for Live At Leeds: In The Park.

Firmly established as one of the UK’s best bands of the last two decades, they’re one of the best festival acts around.

NIEVE ELLA Nieve Ella is quickly storming her way through every checkpoint set up on her journey to ‘the top’. Festival season 2024 could well be the moment things really take flight, and it all starts here.

ORLA GARTLAND Oral Garland’s debut album ‘Woman on the Internet’ was a 5 star triumph on its release in 2021. Since then, she’s smashed it again as part of supergroup Fizz, but we’re gagging for the follow-up.

Hopefully we get some teasers in Temple Newsam Park.

“WE’VE BEEN C O M P L E T E LY BLINDSIDED BY THE REACTION”

The inception of Good Neighbours was less an intentional formation and more a happy consequence of their combined talents and aspirations. Both members had embarked on solo journeys that, while informative, didn’t quite fulfil their artistic desires.

The transition to Good Neighbours felt like a return to their roots, to the camaraderie and dynamic energy of being in a band. This shift was not only a change in direction but a rekindling of their foundational passion for music made in unison. “I don’t think either of us really ever felt like the solo life was a good fit,” Oli reflects. “We both grew up playing in bands, so when the opportunity arose for us to join together OLI FOX and have that camaraderie, we jumped at it.”

What that history does give them is the benefit of experience. “The main thing I think we’ve learnt is that very essence of indie and alternative music, Good we need to trust our gut,” Oli admits. It’s something Neighbours are very much focused on getting that that’s seen them right so far. “There have been a fair live show out there for a packed festival season few knee-jerk decisions we’ve made, like posting (“We’ve got a LOT lined up!”) that promises much. “It’s those TikTok videos, that have the reason we make the music,” Oli led to some of our best results.” admits, “so it’s been so joyful being FESTIVAL FACTFILE able to bring the songs to life.”

Those intuitive decisions certainly have propelled Their journey, marked by them to unexpected heights. genuine friendship, creative agility, The release of ‘Home’ and its and an unyielding commitment subsequent viral success on to their craft, sets the stage for social media underscored the a performance that’s not only power of authentic storytelling anticipated but emblematic Line up: The Kooks, Declan McKenna, The Cribs, Future Islands, and raw, unfiltered emotion. of their meteoric rise and the White Lies, Melanie C, Mystery Jets, “It’s pretty wild! We’ve been promise of what’s yet to come.

The Academic, The Mysterines, completely blindsided by the But still, they’ve time to look back, Vistas, The Slow Readers Club, reaction,” Oli admits, marvelling too. When asked who they’re most Sprints, Nieve Ella, Baxter Dury, at the track’s impact and the interested in catching up with in Caity Baser, Baby Queen, billy doors it has opened for the Temple Newsam this May, the nomates, Overpass, Courting, Good duo. This success has not answer is immediate. “It’s obvious, Neighbours, Sea Girls, Circa Waves, Corinne Bailey Rae, HotWax, Lucia only validated their artistic but we love The Kooks,” Oli gushes & The Best Boys, Orla Gartland, direction but also emphasised about the festival’s headliners.

Tom A. Smith, The Clause and the importance of genuine “They’re a real inspiration for more. connection with their audience. bands everywhere, so hopefully, liveatleeds.com “Obviously, blowing up on we can bump into them.”

TikTok is one thing, but getting Maybe it’s a position Good those people from all over the world to actually Neighbours could have one eye on for the future - but stream the song is super hard, so the fact it’s now even with a way to go before they’re bonafide indie over 120 million streams is mad!” legends, there’s a confidence underlying all that buzz.

As they gear up for their performance at Live “The best is yet to come,” Oli concludes. With a big At Leeds: In The Park, an event that celebrates the summer ahead, he’s almost certainly right.

LIVE AT LEEDS

READDORK.COM 21.

FESTIVALS

THE

GREAT ESCAPE K “I LOVE MAKING UP STORIES” KENYA

DORK PICKS SNAYX Fierce and frenetic, Snayx deliver an electrifying punk-rock experience. Known for their raw energy and rebellious spirit, their performances are a thrilling call to the mosh pit.

LAUREN MAYBERRY Best known as the lead vocalist of CHVRCHES, Lauren Mayberry steps out solo with her captivating voice and heartfelt songs. Expect a deeply personal and emotionally charged performance

BEEN STELLAR New York’s Been Stellar mix sharp lyrics with a lo-fi rock sound that’s both nostalgic and fresh. Their live shows are a thrilling dive into the vibrant energy of the city’s indie scene.

CINCHILLA With her flamboyant style and powerful vocals, Chinchilla brings pop music with an edge. Her performances are packed with attitude and an infectious energy that makes for an unforgettable live experience.

SAYA GRAY Saya Gray stands out with her eclectic blend of jazz-infused pop and introspective lyrics. Her musical prowess and unique voice provide an intimate, soul-stirring performance that resonates deeply.

DELLAXOZ DellaXOZ brings an innovative fusion of electronic and alternative sounds to the stage, mixing intricate beats with ethereal vocals. Her performance promises a captivating audiovisual experience that blurs the lines between digital art and music.

22. DORK

GRACE

15TH-18TH MAY 2024 VARIOUS VENUES BRIGHTON

After becoming a genuine sensation with her smash hit ‘Strangers’, KENYA GRACE is proving that she’s not just passing through.

by STEPHEN ACKROYD.

enya Grace is already a big deal.

Topping the charts, grabbing award nominations - she’s an artist with that certain something something, an inescapable but hard-to-define quality that suggests she’s a talent that’s not just passing through; she’s carving out a permanent spot.

Her secret weapon? An otherworldly voice paired with a softer touch on the electronic scale that’s as refreshing as it is unique.

But Kenya’s not just about the sound; she’s a storyteller at heart, diving deep into the emotional turmoil of post-breakup vibes with her new EP, ‘The After Taste’. It’s a sonic journey that marries the indie ethos with the relentless energy of D&B, and frankly, it’s about to set the world alight.

In the whirlwind of success, there’s always something going on. Kenya is currently in the middle of a day of rehearsals, planning her next shows. Her latest single, ‘It’s Not Fair’, encapsulates a hauntingly familiar feeling of unrequited fixation, marrying lo-fi nuances with raw kinetic energy. Continuing her story of unfiltered emotion against the backdrop of shimmering keys and a pulsating beat, the song is a perfect segue into her upcoming EP - a collection that navigates the bittersweet residue of relationships. “It’s about that feeling of constantly thinking of someone, almost like you can’t escape them, but it seems like they are completely fine without you,” Kenya explains, highlighting the emotional depth and relatability that permeates her work. “I wrote it a couple of weeks ago and wanted a super soft, almost indie feel to this D&B song.”

Kenya’s approach to songwriting is a cocktail of real life and imagination, sprinkling in a healthy dose of artistic license for good measure. “They aren’t really from events in my life; I love making up stories and building upon actual events that happened to me or my friends,” she notes. It’s a mix that creates a resonance that feels both personal and universal - a tricky balance that she strikes with ease.

But ask her what gets her creative juices flowing, and she’ll tell you it’s all about the melodies. “I love writing melodies so much.

I could do it all day,” she explains. And it checks out. “I’m super inspired by synths and chord progressions,” she adds, full of enthusiasm for her craft. “Once I make

FESTIVALS

DORK

@

TGE

DORK STAGE

THURS 16TH MAY VENUE: COALITION

KENYA GRACE Fresh off the back of her success with her EP ‘The After Taste’ and smash hit ‘Strangers’, Kenya has big plans for the year ahead. You can catch her Drum and Bass storytelling at TGE.

MISO EXTRA Japanese-English singer, rapper and producer Miso Extra coined the term “umami for the ears” when describing her sound. Utilising both her languages in her work, she released her EP ‘MSG’ last year, with no doubt more to come in 2024.

COUPDEKAT Coupdekat, the moniker of Luton born Katherine Reilly, is also known for co-founding Loud LDN. Taking inspiration from The 1975, pinkpatheress and Beabadoobee, she put out her EP ‘*For Entertainment Purposes Only’ last year.

ABBY SAGE With a love for music from a very young age, Canadian Abby relocated to London to be able to focus on her craft. It did the trick, and the experience culminated in her 2022 ‘The Florist EP’. Not stopping there, 2024 has seen her release her debut album ‘The Rot’.

RIKA The first ever artist signed to Warner Music India, singer/ songwriter Chandrika achieved over 50 million streams in 2022.2024 has seen her release her EP ‘Conversations I’ve Never Had’.

something I’m inspired by, then it all flows easily after that.”

That passion translates into ‘The After Taste’, offering a journey through the spectrum of post-breakup emotions. “It’s the third song on my EP, and I think it fits with the theme well,” she says of ‘It’s Not Fair’, situating it within the broader narrative.

It’s a collection “about how there can be lingering feelings and emotions left after a relationship”, be they “good or bad, sweet or bitter”.

Kenya’s hands-on approach to her music writing, producing, and performing - ensures that every note and lyric is infused with her unique perspective, and ‘The After Taste’ is a true reflection of her multi-faceted talent.

Emerging as the sole architect of her musical universe, she’s inscribing her individuality into everything she touches.

The ascent of Kenya Grace’s ‘Strangers’ to chart success exemplifies her meteoric rise. The single’s impact was instant and profound, clinching the Number 1 spot on the UK’s Official Singles Chart for three consecutive weeks and achieving a peak position on Billboard’s Hot Dance/ Electronic Songs Chart. That widespread acclaim, coupled with the single’s platinum certifications in three countries, speaks volumes of its universal appeal - not that it’s hard to understand why. Her artistic prowess has already seen her score a nomination for Song of the Year at this month’s BRIT Awards - something she’s following up with a US tour and an appearance at Coachella.

Basically, the success of ‘Strangers’ has been transformative for Kenya Grace. “It’s been so incredible,” she recounts. “I have been able to do so many things I never thought possible!”

Of course, success can increase pressure - making an artist think about their music differently. Once you’ve scored a hit, there’s an expectation you’ll get another one. There’s a tightrope to walk between what’s come before while also making whatever feels right. “It’s scary when your platform grows a lot very quickly,” Kenya says, “so I was a bit nervous to post new things.” Thankfully, that’s not a feeling that lasted for long - that desire to post songs crafted from the inner sanctum of her bedroom taking hold once more. “It’s my favourite thing to do in the world,” she admits.

Reflecting on the resurgence of D&B, Kenya credits the creative contributions of artists like Chase & Status, Charlotte Plank, Venbee and others for its enduring appeal.

“I think it’s such a versatile genre. There are so many different types of D&B now, which makes it so exciting,” she observes.

As for the future, Kenya’s creativity is flowing, and she is anticipating whatever comes next. “I am writing so much at the moment, and I can’t wait to release those songs too,” she shares. “I’m also working on my live set for shows, and I’m really excited for what we’ve started building.”

Kenya Grace’s journey through ‘The After Taste’ offers a compelling invitation into her world — a space where introspection, melody, and rhythm converge to build stories that resonate with the heart. Looking ahead, Kenya’s horizon is brimming with more new music, more live shows, and the kind of boundless creativity that promises more hits, more heartfelt stories, and, without a doubt, more moments that remind us why music is the ultimate connector. Kenya Grace is inviting us into a world where the beats tell stories, and those stories are achingly, beautifully real. Buckle up because if ‘Strangers’ was just the beginning, we’re in for one hell of a ride. ■

DORK

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TGE

UPSET STAGE

ARE YOU LISTENING? 11TH MAY 2024

VARIOUS VENUES, READING

SOFT PLAY Isaac and Laurie are back. Their last album, ‘Acts of Fear and Love’, was released back in 2018, with a four track EP quickly following in 2019. Returning as Soft Play with singles ‘Punk’s Dead’ and ‘Mirror Muscles’ in recent months, their hiatus has only geared them up for their renowned energetic live performances.

LAMBRINI GIRLS Lambrini Girls are a band with something to say. With recent government-blasting (Hear! Hear!

- Ed) track ‘God’s Country’, and a headline show at Scala on the way this summer, they’re definitely a band On The Up.

LIP CRITIC Most bands get one drummer and decide that’ll do it. Not this lot. The New York four piece, including TWO drummers, merge together electronic and punk to make a sonic fusion rarely seen. With their debut album on the way in May, 2024 is going to be a big year for them.

FROZEMODE Trio FROZEMODE are no stranger to TGE, having performed at the festival back in 2023 with no less than FIVE SETS. A blend of genres, they released their debut album ‘Decode’ at the end of last year.

Ready to go again lads?

SULK Originally a duo, East London SULK are have now doubled to a four-piece. Taking inspiration from a variety of genres, ranging from punk and riot grrrl to blues to shoegaze, we are told they promise a good time in their live sets.

Supporting Reading Mencap, a charity that champions people with learning disabilities, Are You Listening?

Festival returns to Reading on 11th May. The line-up boasts a diverse range of emerging artists. The Mysterines, Antony Szmierek Picture Parlour, HotWax, Fat Dog, C Duncan, Heartworms, Frozemode, Opus Kink, SNAYX and more are all on the bill. Looking to add to the £85,000 already raised for the cause, it’s a chance to find the next big thing and do some good. You can find out more at areyoulistening.org.uk.

ELECTRIC CASTLE HAS SIGNED UP PAOLO NUTINI, SEAN PAUL AND MORE Electric Castle has announced over 80 more acts for this summer’s festival. Joining the event’s tenth birthday bash are Paolo Nutini, Sean Paul, Todd Terje, Yune Pinku, Antony Szmierek, Palaye Royale, Kawala and more. They join loads of already-announced acts like Massive Attack, Bring Me The Horizon, Queens Of The Stone Age, Chase & Status Live, DJ Shadow, Khruangbin, Sleaford Mods, Kenya Grace and Genesis Owusu .Electric Castle takes place in Transylvania, Romania, from 17th-21st July. Visit electriccastle.ro for more.

DORK’S NIGHT HEADING TO

OUT IS TRUCK

Dork’s Night Out is heading to Truck Festival this summer, with a specially curated line-up set to take over The Nest. Our we’re-gonna-call-ourselveslegendary party wagon will roll up on Sunday 28th July with a line-up full of Dork faves and brand new talent as part of our Big Summer plans. Headlined by the mighty Bob Vylan, you’ll also find Personal Trainer, Hype List 2024 inductees Heartworms and Mary In The Junkyard, and the hedonistic brilliance of Vlure. The line-up is rounded off

by The Manatees, Juice Pops, Eliza May and Delights. Held between 26th and 28th July on Hill Farm, Oxfordshire, you can find out more and buy tickets at truckfestival.com now.

READDORK.COM 23.

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE BEST NEW NAMES.

THIS

MONTH

IN

NEW MUSIC

PARIS IS BURNING → Paris Paloma has announced her debut album. Titled ‘Cacophony’, the record is set to arrive on 30th August. The news comes alongside a new version of her breakthrough single ‘labour’. Titled ‘LABOUR (the cacophony)’, it features more than 100 fan vocals throughout the song.

‘Cacophony’ will feature 15 tracks, including previously released singles ‘my mind (now)’ ‘drywall’, ‘as good a reason’, ‘yeti’ and ’labour’.

HOUSE

MUSIC

→ Mary In The Junkyard have announced their debut EP. The news follows the release of their debut single ‘Tuesday’ and follow-up ‘Ghost’, with ‘This Old House’ set for release on 9th May. They’ve also shared teaser track ‘marble arch’.

GO

TO

NELL

→ Dork’s Night Out is back featuring one of our very favourite new acts, the magnificent Nell Mescal.

The 2024 Hype List inductee and previous cover star will play London’s 100 Club on Wednesday, 8th May alongside special guests ‘TBA’ soon.

The gig is in celebration of Nell’s debut EP, ‘Can I Miss it for a Minute?’, which is set to land a few days before on 3rd May.

24. DORK

LIZZIE ESAU’s journey to a dynamic force on the UK music scene embodies the fiery transition of turning a passion into a life’s work, fuelled by relentless touring, evolving musicality, and the unyielding desire to stay authentic.

Words: Finlay Holden.

Photo: Richard Mukuze.

L

LIZZIE W ESAU HYPE

ith many successes already under her belt, Newcastlebased singersongwriter Lizzie Esau is only growing more confident with her musical identity. Having dropped her debut EP amidst a hectic festival season last year, Lizzie and her closeknit band have been busy touring those tunes around the UK while working on the bones of a new project.

Taking her music from a small hobby to a growing commitment, this last year has been a fiery induction.

“That is exactly what I wanted!” she declares. “For so long, nobody was around me pursuing music, and I felt like I kept that part of me separate from everything else - you’re always told that you need to build a plan B. Now, I’ve made this my whole life, and that’s all I wanted. In terms of a balanced workload or switching off, I just don’t,” she laughs, “but I love it, and it’s never a chore.”

Sharing her talents far and wide, Lizzie is no longer creating in isolation. With a great team around her, she has explored a huge range of tones – from the haunting tension of fan-favourite ‘Bleak Sublime’ to the cathartic chorus of ‘Roadkill’ – while maintaining a grounded consistency.

As she puts it, “I’ve got loads of people around me that just get it.”

That has never been as important as with her delightfully heavy new single, ‘Wait Too Late’, which mixes droning synths and screeching guitars with relentless layers of rhythm and an excellent vocal top line. Fans who’ve seen Esau perform will instantly be familiar with the track, but nailing the final recording proved no easy feat.

“I can’t think of a single show we’ve played where we haven’t opened with ‘Wait Too Late’,” Lizzie starts to reflect. “We’ve played it for years as a band and worked on it together for a long time. I brought it in as a demo years ago, and we rerecorded it later on, but it’s disheartening when you can’t recreate that live energy on a recording, especially when you have such a relationship with the track. We were terrified to touch it again, but

now was the time, and we weren’t gonna half-arse it.”

Taking a third and final swing at the heavy hitter, the four-piece capitalised on a weekend residential opportunity at Somerton Castle with long-time producer Steve Grainger and studio engineer Oli Porter to knuckle down and capture the intensity they needed while also bringing a refreshed perspective to the core elements.

“We nailed the drums on the first night, laid up guitars in the morning…

Overall, it was like 48 hours of intense focus, which is unusual for us,” she reveals. “It’s the most time per track that we’ve ever had. If any song needed that time and love and deserved it after the years, it was this one. I also adlibbed on the chorus and came up with a second hook, or rather, divine intervention handed it to me a week before the final mix.”

Trying new approaches right up until the very end and repeatedly testing out opposing production decisions was undeniably worth the investment, with the final result encapsulating that excitement of a live unit rushing on stage and instantly leaping into a loud and vibrant performance. “We’ve been working on this for years, so it is a big moment and one of the most meaningful releases to us as a band.”

Previous single ‘Impossible & Strange’ fused the melodic charm of early discography cuts with a newfound scope that paved the path for ‘Wait Too Late’’s “punky, in-your-face” instrumentals, serving as a transition into a new era while still nailing an identifiable, genre-

“MAYBE I’M SAYING THINGS THAT PEOPLE WILL HATE. I DON’T CARE” LIZZIE

ESAU

crossing fingerprint.

The desperate lyrical content of the song certainly warrants its aggressive leanings. “We’re killing off the wildlife, and we’re emptying the seas, to fill them with bodies who longed for shores they’d never reach,” Lizzie sings, vocalising her biggest frustrations about the modern world and the emotions that surface the more she thinks about it.

“Music is a great way for me to process things,” she explains. “It’s the only thing I feel I have control of; this is how I can contribute. I want to be educated, so this is me questioning myself as well.” Although Lizzie is always open to self-improvement, she is also steadfast in her beliefs. “Maybe I’m saying things that people will hate. They might disagree with me, they might feel attacked. I don’t care.

I feel so strongly about it, and when you’re putting yourself out there with authenticity, what’s the worst that could happen? If you disagree with this song, then I disagree with you; it’s that simple. I’m learning not to be afraid of my own opinions.”

Besides demanding action from the Tory government, Lizzie is also demanding it from herself. Past efforts like ‘Lazy Brain’ have revealed a tendency to pick away at her own mind, but this is turning into a strength. “I’m very self-critical, which I think makes me self-aware. I hope I’m critical to the point where I can identify where there’s room to grow. I find empowerment through meeting like-minded people when what I’m saying connects with others. I’ve already found so many people who think and feel the same way, and the stronger the opinion you share, the stronger the connection you make with your community.”

That community is always building momentum, with crowds growing and rooms regularly filling up with dedicated fans. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such genuinely lovely people deeply getting the music,” Lizzie remarks. “Someone took a jellyfish I drew on a show set list and got it tattooed! That’s dedication. How moved must you be to connect with a song so much that you need it with you forever?”

Reaching new heights on upcoming material, a second project is on the horizon and will be pre-empted by a support tour alongside Dork Hype List alumni and Lizzie’s self-declared inspiration Swim School. All of this is to say that Lizzie has brought music into her life, and her life now revolves around music. “We’re not reliant on anyone; we’re doing it ourselves and keeping it authentic. But if our next release isn’t the catchiest thing you’ve ever heard, I’ll happily retire.” ■

READDORK.COM 25.

HYPE

BLUE BENDY ditch rock star clichés for signed vinyl and sword rentals on debut album, ‘So Medieval’.

Words: Stephen Ackroyd.

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→ Forget the rock star cliché. Blue Bendy will

TWENTY

TWENTY

→ Cat Burns has announced her debut album, ‘early twenties’. The news follows up on previous hits ‘alone’, ‘live more & love more’, ‘people pleaser’ and ‘go’, plus her ArrDee collab ‘Home For My Heart’, with the full-length set to arrive on 12th July. Cat says, “early twenties is my love letter to this period of time in my life. It’s my attempt at showcasing the highs and lows of being in your early twenties.

The album talks about romantic relationships, both my own and people closest to me, whilst also speaking about self introspection and accepting who you are.”

DEEP SOMETHING

BLUE

→ Sophie May has announced the release of her new EP titled ‘Deep Sea Creatures’. The EP, which features five tracks, explores existential themes and reflects May’s personal experiences with OCD. The lead single, ‘Tiny Dictator’, delves into the impact of intrusive thoughts on her daily life. Sophie hopes that the song will shed light on the misrepresented topic of OCD and provide comfort to others facing similar struggles.

‘Deep Sea Creatures’ is set to be released on June 21st.

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tell you it’s more like signing limited-edition vinyl at your record label’s offices until your wrists cramp (250 copies? Try it!). But hey, there’s a certain charm to the unglamorous side of music, right?

So, here they are, fresh-faced and “feeling floral” on the first day of spring. Today’s agenda? Scribbling autographs and maybe renting some swords and armour for a music video. Less private jets, more old-world cosplay - that’s the Blue Bendy way.

Their debut album, ‘So Medieval’, reflects this unconventional spirit. It’s a genrebending labyrinth, a heady clash of sounds that feels like a rock opera from the past soundtracked by a band raised on a steady diet of psychedelics.

“I think we had the core of ‘Cloudy’, ‘The Day I Said You’d Died’ and ‘Come On Baby, Dig!’ written before our EP ‘Motorbike’ came out in 2022,” guitarist Joe Nash explains, shedding light on the album’s long gestation period. “We were certainly playing ‘in progress’ versions of these at all the gigs

supporting the EP release. They were the first three we recorded. The full album came together over quite a long period, over probably more than a year of free weekends and evenings, with huge favours pulled in from lots of people, especially the many slogs into the early hours from Nathan Ridley at Hermitage Works studios who did the whole thing. It really felt like a proper body of work came together when we knew who and when it was going to be released; that’s when it really started to feel exciting.”

When it came to creating the record, the band operated in the moment, trying out ideas and seeing what sticks or creates a reaction amongst the group. “We work out what we want to write by writing,” fellow guitarist Harrison Charles reveals. “Taste is a huge part of this process; whatever ideas appear, they either die on the vine or we fall in love with them and get giddy.”

Lyrically, things get dark and romantic. “It’s as if Byron was in that scene in A Clockwork Orange where his eyes are clamped open,” says Harrison,

“GOOD FIRST ALBUMS NEED TO TAKE RISKS” JOE

NASH

describing vocalist Arthur Nolan’s style.

He’s “a romantic that’s been warped and manipulated by the constant barrage of violent, meaningless, odd content” or “a corrupted butterfly catcher” - whichever you prefer.

The album is a wild ride, drawing on a rich tapestry of influences, from “big religious imagery” to “delusions of grandeur,” as Joe explains. “Not that we’re religious, a couple of lapsed childhood Catholics, but there’s a really fun angle to explore in the holier-thanthou, larger-than-life attitude whilst dealing with insecurities, intrusive thoughts and crippling anxieties. There’s this enormous dark undercurrent in lots of religions, too, which you’re only ever one step away from if you don’t make all the virtuous choices.”

Debut albums are a big deal. It’s your first impression, your chance to make a lasting mark. “I think all good first albums, from bands anyway, need to keep a rawness and to take risks,” Joe muses. “It’s the first full statement you get to make, and people have only had samplers in singles and EPs up to it.

I think to overproduce a first album is to do a disservice to it.”

“The debuts from bands like Pavement and Stereolab aren’t necessarily their bestsounding,” he continues, “but are so full of quirks and foibles and loaded with so much energy and personality that it feels like you really know who the band are from the off.”

That’s exactly what Blue Bendy want to achieve – to be a band that feels genuine, a band where music isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity. “There’s not a lot of choice in the matter,” Harrison explains. “I think it’s the only way us, as a band, can express ourselves coherently. There have been moments where it would’ve been easier to pack it in, shake hands with everyone in the band and pop off to give your job in retail the attention it deserves, but we can’t for some reason. A lot of bands would’ve quit had they gone through what we have, but we’re too scared to do anything else.” ■ Blue Bendy’s debut album ‘So Medieval’ is out now.

THIS

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gglum

HYPE

→ Emerging from the vibrant, eclectic

SOFT HARD

LAUNCH LAUNCH

→ Soft Launch have arrived with their debut single, ‘Cartwheels/.

The Irish quintet, who have been whispered about by those in the know for a while now (Seriously, at least two recent cover stars have name-checked them to us of late – Ed), got their first spin on BBC Radio 1 from Declan McKenna (Yep, that was one of them – Ed) as he sat in for Clara Amfo. A press release explains that we’re “not in traditional boy band territory here: unless the boy band in question is as much Vampire Weekend and The Beatles as they are Harry Styles.”

It’s a pretty good marker.

HEAVEN

SENT

→ Softcult have announced their new EP, ‘Heaven’. The release follows on from their recent drops ‘Shortest Fuse’, ‘Heaven’ and ‘Haunt You Still’, as well as their six-track EP ‘See You in the Dark’, and is set for release on 24th May. They’ve also shared new single ‘Spiralling Out’. “We wrote this song about those times when we ruminate over a situation over and over again to no end,” the band explain.

GET

LIPPY

→ Lip Filler have announced a new EP, ‘witchescrew’. Set for release on 24th May via Chess Club Records, it’s teased by early single ‘followup’ and accompanied by June headline dates in London, Bristol and Manchester.

“This song feels like a big turning point for us,” the band explain, saying that “this is the closest we’ve ever sounded to how we always wanted to sound... It’s always felt like a Frankenstein of a song; stitching it together was a nightmare. But what we ended up with feels like our most accomplished track to date.”

backdrop of London, gglum - or Ella Smoker, for it is she, etc etc - embarks on a deeply personal and exploratory musical journey with her just-dropped debut album, ‘The Garden Dream’.

A pivotal moment for any artist, it’s a record that dives headfirst into a realm that blurs the lines between the surreal dreamscapes of her mind and the tangible reality of her experiences - not just as an introduction to gglum’s artistic prowess but also a gateway into the complex tapestry of her inner world.

Following on from her formative projects ‘Weak Teeth’ and ‘once the edge has worn off’, ‘The Garden Dream’ is where Smoker fully blooms, nurtured by vivid, sometimes unsettling dreams that she couldn’t help but transcribe into her music. “At the time of writing it, I was having loads of really freaky dreams that I accidentally started writing about and mushing up with real-life events,” she admits. “I guess it’s about how your dreams are fantastical stories to explain the way you feel or process things that you never really managed to process in real life. A kind of fever dream mish-mash of the world in your head and reality.”

Beyond its thematic richness, ‘The With her debut album ‘The Garden Dream,’ gglum weaves Garden Dream’ is a musical odyssey that spans the breadth of gglum’s influences and a rich tapestry of dreams and reality, exploring a deeply inspirations. From the raw emotion of indiepersonal musical journey that spans the gamut of her rock to the introspective lyricism of folk and eclectic influences and introspective lyricism. Just don’t the avant-garde edges of alt-pop, Smoker skip on the first listen. Words: Stephen Ackroyd. weaves a sound that is both distinctively hers and resonant with the wider human experience, where the fantastical and the mundane blend in a tapestry of sound and story.

Pushing past the introspective boundaries of bedroom pop to embrace a fuller, more collaborative process of music-making, as we delve into ‘The Garden Dream’, we’re invited not just to listen but to experience the world through both gglum’s eyes and the visions her mind cooks up alongside them.

But not every day can be spent traversing ELLA SMOKER the dreamscape. Today, Smoker is embracing a quieter vibe, reflective of the calm after the storm of creativity. “I’m really good, thanks,” and pick out the things that stuck out to you.” album lies in making a definitive statement. she greets us before revealing that, actually, Initially written with Karma Kid just under “I think it’s about making a solid statement.

Digging your feet in and saying, ‘This is “really good” may also come with a bit of a two years ago, the album was “basically done what I sound like’,” she asserts, emphasising fizzy-pop-sponsored caveat. “I went to a

by December”, but an album is never really the significance of authenticity and selffriend’s gig last night and bumped into a finished until it’s out. “Over 2023, we added expression in establishing an artist’s identity. bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a while, so and removed some songs and just polished “It can be quite intimidating because you can I’m pretty hungover today. I think I’m going it all up,” Ella reveals. “I felt really ready and only make a debut album once, and I felt a lot to take it easy, maybe practice for some gigs geared up to write an album, so we wrote it of pressure from myself to get it right.” coming up and eat a toastie,” she adds, her mega quickly.”

Looking ahead, Smoker’s aspirations priorities clearly straight.

Choosing the title ‘The Garden Dream’ for ‘The Garden Dream’ are centred on Ella’s songwriting often ventures into was a deliberate nod to one of the central connection and continuity. “I just want it to macabre territory, set against deceptively dreams that inspired the album. “In the less reach people who can connect with it and serene melodies. “Someone mentioned graphic way of telling the story of the dream, want to stick around for more. That’s what to me that I tend to write a lot of violent I was planted in a garden with loads of other or disturbing lyrics over the top of quite people and tortured for months,” Ella explains. it’s all about for me,” she states, expressing a desire for her music to resonate with listeners pleasant-sounding tunes, which made me “The final track was one that summed up the on a personal level. giggle,” she says. This approach allows her to feeling and location of that dream. Since it As ‘The Garden Dream’ weaves its way construct vivid, immersive worlds within her was such a big inspiration, it kind of felt right into life, Ella’s message is pretty clear. “Listen songs, drawing inspiration from memories to give credit to it.” to my album! It’s my little baby, and I would and the minutiae of moments past. “I tend to Smoker had considered a more love for people to try it out. And listen to it imagine a place and write from there,” she provocative title, though. “I wanted to call chronologically,” she urges. “Shuffling an continues. “Whether it’s a place my brain has the album ‘Years of Slaughter’, but no one album on first listen is insane behaviour.” ■ created that I go to in my dreams, or a friend seemed to be into that idea. ‘The Garden gglum’s album ‘The Garden Dream’ is out from when I was fifteen’s living room. I think Dream’ is a lot more pleasant,” she laughs. that’s very inspiring. Put yourself in a memory For Ella, the essence of a successful debut now.

“I WANTED TO CALL THE ALBUM ‘YEARS OF SLAUGHTER’, BUT NO ONE SEEMED TO BE INTO THAT IDEA…”

READDORK.COM 27.

MEG ELSIER From her raw yet bold music to the visual world around it, meg elsier is introducing us to an album that is uniquely, entirely hers.

Words: Stephen Ackroyd. Photo: Jacqueline Justice.

→ meg elsier is everything. A big statement,

but with her new single ‘oldnews’, she continues to solidify her position as a dynamic and versatile artist. A tantalising preview of her upcoming debut album, ‘spittake’, set to drop in summer, elsier’s music intricately weaves together the raw edges of indie-rock with the polished nuances of folk and the bold flavours of alt-pop, creating a sound that is both uniquely hers and strikingly unifying. ‘oldnews’ joins a collection of singles that have steadily built up excitement for ‘spittake’. Following ‘ifshitfuq’, ‘iznotreal’, ‘baby’, and ‘forlyleinsanfrancisco’ - yeah, with friends and trusted creatives to ensure she’s not a fan of capital letters and spaces every aspect of her project feels authentic - each release has unveiled new layers of and true to her vision. “Every part of my elsier’s artistry. With grungy guitars, heavy work is so incredibly important to me, and production, her signature lush vocals and a important that I was a part of it and had hint of electronic swagger, she crafts songs people I trusted and loved to be involved,” that resonate deeply. Her music showcases she explains. “You can say so much with both versatility and an ability to tap into the just how you’re styled, or the camera you’re collective consciousness, exploring deeply using, or the lighting. It’s just another tool to personal yet universally relatable themes. be creative with and have self-expression.” elsier’s journey to her debut album is a “I have been very lucky with this project narrative of growth, experimentation, and to have people who believed in me entirely the relentless pursuit of artistic authenticity. and only really wanted to do something that She greets us with the warmth and vibrancy felt like me,” she says, shouting out some that fans have come to love. of her closest collaborators. “Visually, most “It’s been a busy few months,” she admits, “but it’s honestly been great.” She’s got a show later tonight. “I’m just drinking tea and doing really bizarre vocal warmups on YouTube that are embarrassing but also so fucking funny,” she quips. It’s this kind of dedication and relatable humour that helps make elsier resonate with so many.

In a place as musically rich and competitive as Nashville, elsier treads her path with a keen awareness of the world around her. Despite the challenges and the noise, she finds strength in the community of empathetic, informed, and diverse individuals who support each other.

When asked about the current vibe in city, elsier reflects on some complex dynamics.

“To be honest, the news in Nashville is hard to navigate and tough not to get upset about,” she admits, echoing a political climate that increasingly drives opinions to extremes and leaves the vulnerable at risk, but even in the difficult times, there’s always hope. “I think the most important thing is that I’m so lucky to be surrounded by an incredibly empathetic and informed diverse group of people who look out for each other and harbour this community.”

Thankfully, music can provide something brighter to focus on. meg reminisces about her musical journey with a blend of nostalgia and humour. From the climb up the live circuit (“like The Blue Room and Basement East - honestly playing DRKMTTR is also so fun because I’ve seen Machine Girl hang from the ceiling there”), to hearing her music on the radio, every step has put a little more fuel in the engine.

“Hearing your music on the radio is a great way to make your parent think you’re doing well,” she jokes. “It’s not a TV show placement or a TikTok gone viral; it’s a radio liner and then your song, so that meant a lot to my mom and me.” elsier’s artistic vision extends beyond her music; she’s deeply involved in the visual aspects of her work, collaborating closely

of the videos and photos were Jacqueline and the comfort, fun, and confidence they Justice, Mary Violet Woosley, and me. give me to do this. You can’t do this shit Jaqueline and Mary are two of my greatest, by yourself, and it’s a gift if you let people deepest, and longest friendships I have had in. It doesn’t have to take away from your here in Nashville. We spent such a long time individualism.” producing, sourcing items, location scouting, Collaboration and being heavily involved and styling everything for three videos that in the wider world around her music are we did in three days back-to-back.” important to elsier. “Working in this way is “The ‘forlyleinsanfrancisco’ video that I something that means so much to me, not made with my great friend Roberto Kohler only as an artist but just as someone who was honestly this last-minute idea that wants to learn,” she explains. “Music looks ended up being me and my friends having a like so many different things to me, and karaoke party,” she continues. “It showed a I feel like I’m such a visual listener. It was side to me that’s closer to the live show and such a treat to be a part of these videos. It’s shows a side to me that adores my friends something that I will be involved in in the future.”

Reflecting on what makes a debut album truly resonate, she believes in the power of authenticity. “What I want to hear from a debut album is just an authentic, true depiction of what the artist wanted to show,” she reveals.

It’s something that came to the front when working with producer Ryan McFadden. “He asked me what some of my MEG ELSIER favourite records were,” she recounts. “I was just quiet for about 10 minutes. I knew records that I liked from artists I loved, but I think I never really thought about it because, for me, what makes a good record is the genuine energy that it flows through.

When you have the component of THEM throughout the music, you can kinda jump in and be taken for a ride. That also applies to debut albums. If it’s true to the artist, you really can tell and feel it through the music.”

Being true to meg elsier can be all kinds of things. She’s a cook (“I’m half Korean, so you know my gimbap and kimchi pancake is on point”), a film aficionado (“Don’t look me up on Letterboxd!”) and a crafter (“It first started with making props for videos, and now we’re just papier mâché-ing for shits and gigs”), but one thing that’s definitely present is her commitment to her art above all.

“Success is such a funny and interesting thing to put onto something that shouldn’t have anything to do with that word, like music,” she considers when asked what success would look like for her as a musician. “It’s so individual, but I would say for me if I can keep making music that helps me clear my head and heart and make things with my friends and community for my friends and community, and anyone who wants to engage with it can take something from it, that’s all I want.”

And if that doesn’t work out? “I can do a killer Bjork impression, too. ‘It’s oh so quiet’ is my go-to karaoke song,” she reveals, “although I’m afraid of karaoke!” ■

“YOU CAN’T DO THIS SHIT BY YOURSELF, AND IT’S A GIFT IF YOU LET PEOPLE IN”

28. DORK

R

OVER-

HYPE

THIS

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→ India Armstrong, the bassist for

PARTY

POOPER

→ Aziya is back with a new single, ‘party’s over’. Co-produced by Aziya and Grammy award winning producer John Hill, the release follows on from the Londoner’s recent EP ‘LONELY CASTLES’.Aziya explains: “It’s about seeing someone in the crowd and all of your fantasies and intentions and lust is on that person from the moment you see them, an instant attraction but the inability and lack of being able to approach them.

So you play at the ‘confident you’ walking up to them in your head. And by the time the party’s over you go home and realise you didn’t get that persons number and you didn’t ask them so they’ll forever just be a ghost, a memory in head and a thought of what could have been.”

ABBIE

RETURNS

→ Abbie Ozard has announced her debut album, ‘everything still worries me’. The full-length will arrive on 25th July via House Anxiety, teased by new single ‘anything for you’ and a headline show at YES basement, Manchester on 17th May.

ZONE

OUT

→Chanel Loren has released a new single, ‘Zone’. The track follows on from her recent drop featuring Kota The Friend, ‘Carelessly Doomed’.

Her first track of 2024, the now Sydney-based artist supported Kota for his headline Australian tour dates a year ago. On the new track, Chanel says: “’Zone’ is an open letter to modern-day dating. It highlights the phases of having a crush, to lust, to being unsatisfied with a love interest. The song dances with my internal thoughts on the cat and mouse games we play. Not even liquid courage can help me win in this dating scene!”

Birmingham’s buzziest new band, overpass, is a busy woman. Between Uni classes and late-night cramming sessions, she’s just back off tour and is currently preparing for a hometown headline gig at the O2 Institute in Birmingham. Who says bands can’t multitask?

Overpass are a four-piece outfit brought together by a shared love of music. “We all came together through mutual friends with a passion for playing the music we loved, starting mainly with covers,” says India. “We realised that we could have a go writing our own tunes and that people wanted to hear them, and that was the start of overpass.”

With its rich musical heritage, Birmingham has proven to be a fertile ground for the band. From the heavy metal titans of Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, who emerged in the early days, to the iconic sounds of UB40 and Duran Duran in the 80s and the 00s iconic B-Town scene, Birmingham has always had a sway on the cutting edge of British music. The city fosters a collaborative spirit amongst musicians, a nurturing environment that has played a role in shaping the sound of overpass. “There’s a nice community here,” India explains, “and we’re lucky to have had a lot of support from the city – our Brum shows are always the best! There are lots of great With sold-out shows, a debut EP, and a hometown venues here so it’s definitely a good place to be starting out from a live perspective.” headline of their dreams on the horizon, overpass are Bands like Peace, Jaws, and Swim Deep, crafting euphoric anthems and relatable lyrics that are who came before them, serve as inspiration. resonating with audiences across the UK. “We’re constantly inspired by everyone in the Words: Stephen Ackroyd. local music scene,” says India. “It’s nice to know who else is pursuing creative projects in your city and see them grow as you do.”

Their debut EP, ‘From The Night’, is a culmination of their journey so far. “It’s been an amazing journey, from recording the songs last summer to releasing the EP a month ago; seeing it in physical form on vinyl just makes everything worth it,” India beams.

“The main challenge of releasing an EP as opposed to singles is that it’s a collective body of work,” she continues. “We wanted it to translate in everything, from the artwork to INDIA ARMSTRONG the songwriting.”

Despite their relatively green status, along the way. “It’s being able to play shows overpass are fast becoming seasoned true. Like any band, there’s always a run of live performers. “The tour has been great; hometown venues that seem like starry-eyed in so many amazing cities to such friendly people who always put a smile on our faces,” we’ve played some iconic venues like King dreams as they start out. Finally getting to she says. “I’d never been to Scotland before Tuts in Glasgow and the Deaf Institute in grace those stages is like making it big on a we played shows in Glasgow, and playing Manchester,” India says. “All of the dates were hyperlocal level. “It’s been at the top of our Dublin for The Road To The Great Escape sold out, which made us all the more excited. bucket list since we started,” India admits.

We were so overwhelmed with the reception “It’s so surreal that we’re about to tick that one will be my first time in Ireland this summer. we had; hearing the EP sung back to us each off; we never thought would actually happen.” The band has given me the chance to have so many amazing experiences, and I’m really night was quite an emotional experience.”

But for India, the real joy lies in the lucky that I get to do it all with my friends.” ■ Festivals are another highlight. “Isle of experiences and the friendships they make Wight was great because we spent the whole weekend there watching great bands,” India recalls. “We also love Truck; the crowds are always energetic, and we’re super excited to be playing on the main stage this year.”

Looking ahead, Live At Leeds offers a chance to catch some inspiring acts. “The whole line-up is great! We’ll definitely be sticking around to watch The Kooks and Declan [McKenna],” says India. “It will also be nice to catch up with Vistas, who we supported back in November.”

That headline show at the Birmingham O2 Institute remains a dream come

“BANDS LIKE PEACE, JAWS AND SWIM DEEP SHOWED US THAT PEOPLE FROM OUR AREA COULD SUCCEED”

PASS READDORK.COM 29.

FULL COVER STORY

ENGLISH TEACHER are living up to their undoubted potential, carving their own path with a remarkable debut album, ‘This Could Be Texas’.

by NEIVE MCCARTHY. photography by PATRICK GUNNING assisted by DECKARD HURD. styled by MOLLY ASHMAN assisted by REBECCA EVANS WHITE. hair and Makeup by CHLOE ROSE using SAIE BEAUTY.

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ENGLISH TEACHER

A

n age-old debate of absolute importance is consuming a corner table of a pub in Leeds.

Lidl or Aldi? For English Teacher, there can only be one right answer, and of course, it’s Lidl. Naturally, the bakery is the deciding factor for the Leedsbased four-piece. “I really miss Lidl,” says Lily Fontaine, the frontwoman of the band.

Thankfully, over the last year, English Teacher have seen their fair share of Lidls and Aldis – from currywurst sausage rolls in Germany to hot dogs in an admittedly “trash” Aldi bakery in Belgium, sold-out shows across Europe have seen them sampling the best supermarkets of the continent left, right and centre. It’s just one joy in a year that has seen the band busier than ever; from Jools Holland to the BBC 6 Music A-List, it’s been pinch-me moment after pinch-me moment.

“I don’t think I’ve processed it still, especially Jools Holland,” reflects Nicholas Eden, the

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COVER STORY

band’s bassist. “I don’t think that’s gone the whole way through my brain yet. Some time to take stock would be good.”

Lewis Whiting, the group’s lead guitarist, continues. “Equally, in the past year, I think we’ve really got used to touring. We’ve adjusted a fair bit to the busyness of it all. I think that’s prepared us in a way for the coming year. It’s a big year.” Lily adds: “I hope so. I want it to be crazy.”

Luckily for English Teacher, it’s looking like it will be. As they chat over pints of Guinness on a bank holiday Friday, there’s just a couple of weeks until their debut album, ‘This Could Be Texas’, is released to the world. Nerves are growing amongst the group as the approach nears, but they needn’t be. There’s never been any doubt that the debut from English Teacher would be fantastic.

Just two years on from their debut EP ‘Polyawkward’, and yet their debut sees them reach stratospheric new heights. For the band, however, things remain a work in progress through their eyes. “We’re still figuring out a lot,” Lewis admits. “That’s how the process of

32. DORK

“IF THERE ARE EASTER EGGS IN THERE LYRICALLY, IT’S PROBABLY ON PURPOSE” LILY

FONTAINE

writing the album felt. We had an idea of what we wanted to do with the EP, but it didn’t feel fully formed. Now, even still, there’s a lot to figure out in terms of what we sound like.” Nicholas agrees: “It’s still early days, isn’t it?”

“It is in the grand scheme of things,” responds Lewis. “I definitely don’t think we’ve hit a point where we’ve got it all figured out.”

“No, I think we’re all still quite confused!” laughs Douglas Frost, the band’s drummer.

English Teacher may well be in the spring of their career, but on ‘This Could Be Texas’, they sound like a band who confidently know their way around making a track that sticks with you.

Recorded predominantly in Church Studios in Hackney but born across studios and bedrooms and writing trips over the last few years, it’s an album that digs through the English Teacher archives whilst allowing space for completely fresh tracks. Though they flit between different sounds, their music has a way of burrowing deep.

From the immersive sonic undoing that occurs in the album’s title track to the wistful yet frenetic ‘Nearly Daffodils’, each track is completely consuming and assertive of the power in English Teacher’s hands.

“We were definitely ambitious with it and wanted to be,” says Douglas. “It was subconscious, in that we wanted to break away from the ‘post-punk’ label we had, but also, we all like very different things music-wise. Naturally, each song progressed into what it is now.”

Nicholas chips in: “This album is very maximalist in the sounds and the writing. When we’re in the studio, I get a bit nervous, but you guys are good at trying out different instruments and creating new textures all the time, and you can really hear that.”

Perhaps it is the friendship that is integral to the group that allows them to create those all-encompassing worlds – pushing one another to create something innovative and new, allowing the album to take shape as something much bigger than it could’ve been conceived. In part, though, that came with the tools at their disposal.

“We had recorded with a cellist before, and we always liked the idea of introducing new instruments, but we really leant into that with this album,” Lewis confirms. “We knew that we wanted more orchestral instruments and a wider palette – we had never done it on that scale and had never had the budget or the time, so we definitely wanted to.”

Douglas continues: “It was more what we found when we got to the studio and what was available. Where we recorded the bulk of the album, Marta [Salogni] had her own private studio next door. In there, she had a vibraphone from the 70s, and a pump organ harmonium thing. There were all these different percussion things we came across in each studio – there was a theremin which we used. It was such a nice snapshot of the place where we actually recorded it as well. We went in wanting to pile a load of shit on it, but not really knowing where that could end up.”

It ended up with something intricately layered, begging for you to listen once more so

ENGLISH TEACHER

you can uncover something new – each time, there’s something to marvel at that might have slipped your attention previously. Taped vocals, a flurry of strings, quick switches between gentle and ferocious, it doesn’t shy away from experimentation and instead flourishes because of it. “If anything, we’ve made it hard for ourselves to play these songs live,” smiles Lewis.

That intricate entangling is something equally as present in the lyrics of the album, too. Meticulously crafted, certain phrases echo around the album, prayer-like. There are mantras and manifestations woven into each line, often deliberately so. With each track, the scale of this world develops, and it becomes harder to not get completely absorbed in it.

“I’m annoyingly obsessive about things linking up,” laughs Lily. “If there are Easter eggs in there lyrically, it’s probably on purpose because I’m very annoying about words. It’s quite a selfreferential album.”

“Lyrically, you’re a very layered person, Lil,” says Douglas. “I’m an onion!” she laughs. “It’s a good mixture of us deliberately trying to do cool things and also happy accidents.”

Perhaps its most meta moment comes on standout track ‘The Best Tears of Your Life’ – it’s a sharp inhale, layers of textures subtly hinting at the hardship that came with writing the album, a meditation on the shock to the system that becoming a visible musician can be. “You can take the girl out of her comfort zone / but you can’t put her back,” sings Lily over dreamy, spaced-out guitar. It’s a line that hits like the drop on a rollercoaster – your stomach gone from under you, your breath stolen. As the track amps up, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirling emotions as though they’re your own.

It’s something English Teacher have mastered – weaving the very heart of the song’s lyrics into the tension of their bass lines, the fever of their percussion. They might be hyper-specific in their detailing, but there’s a resonance that cuts deep. With their delivery, they provide you with little choice but to feel those feelings with them, to become riled up or deflated with equal measure. ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’ winds you up tightly; its guitar lines and vocals become increasingly more frenzied and turbulent until it finally releases you from its clutches, still reeling.

“We definitely wanted that song to be tense – that was a conscious thing,” says Lewis. It doesn’t just stop at immersing you in that tension, however. From Leeds to Liverpool to Lisbon to Louisiana, there’s a universality to their experiences that will resonate deeply.

“It’d be nice if our music had affected people or made them think and talk about our music and important topics,” Lily explains. “Some of the things we talk about should be talked about more. It would mean the music was having an effect and sparking conversation – that’s the ultimate goal, I think.”

“We had a Zoom the other day,” Nick recalls.

“And the guy was explaining how he felt in his 20s was connected to ‘Albert Road’, and he’s 5000 miles away.”

Lewis continues: “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s

“BEING ABLE TO TOUR AND TRAVEL ABOUT WITH YOUR BEST FRIENDS PLAYING SONGS, WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT?” LILY

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READDORK.COM 33.

COVER STORY

“SOME OF THE THINGS WE TALK ABOUT SHOULD BE TALKED ABOUT MORE” LILY

Lily wears: top: Pickles Knitwear - Guinness Top, shorts: Chillie London, boots: Steve Madden, jacket: Vintage. Nicholas wears: trousers: Dickies (from Chillie London), shoes: Dr. Martens, jacket: SCRT, jumper: Urban Outfitters. Lewis wears: trousers: SCRT, shoes: Adidas, blazer: Vintage. Douglas wears: jacket: Joshua Samuels, trousers: SCRT, shoes: Kickers.

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the best bit about the songs. For me, that’s a big reason why I like the idea of doing it. So many songs have had a big impact on me, and I hold them close, and if anything we write has anything near that impact, that’s the goal; what more could you want?”

‘Nearly Daffodils’ is a shattering example of the band achieving just that – heartbroken and devastated but desperately, fervently clinging to the hope of spring and some kind of joy around the corner. It’s no doubt already found its way into the hearts of many of the band’s listeners.

Despite its relatability and conversationsparking nature, many of the album’s best moments come in the form of odes to the places that have shaped the band. It is rooted in the landscape of the North - ‘Sideboob’ immortalises the beauty of the Pennines in their own way, whilst the video for ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’ sees the band in and amongst the lush greens that surround Lily’s hometown of Colne, Lancashire. The places they were made are seemingly irreversibly entangled with who they are as a band in many ways.

“Because I started writing these songs when I moved to Leeds for uni, there was a parallel,” Lily says. “Moving to a new place and reflecting on home and the different ways that it impacted me.

It’s become really important because I’ve realised that it’s a good frame to explore lots of different topics through. You can talk about political stuff, personal experiences, other characters – because it’s full of them!”

It’s equal parts paean and eye roll at the parts of those places that are frustrating. “You want to get out of it,” muses Lily. “But as soon as the option to go back is removed, it’s really desirable.”

That complicated relationship lingers in the songs, and the rurality of the album is keenly felt, too. It comes as no surprise, then, that the idea of desire paths was recurrent when it came to the process of putting the album together.

An unplanned trail caused purely because it is the more convenient route; there are plenty of parallels to be drawn between the idea and English Teacher’s journey to and making of their debut album.

“When we were writing, and we were struggling with a song, we’d strip it back and simplify it to basics,” recalls Douglas. “That links back to a desire path – it’s a human naturally figuring out the quickest route.” Lewis adds: “As a band, it felt like a journey of figuring out what we were and what we sounded like.”

“I really like the metaphor because I feel like to create a desire path you have to tread down loads of shit over so much time,” shares Lily. “It’s been hard. It hasn’t been easy – not many people know

ENGLISH TEACHER IDLES

“IT FELT LIKE A JOURNEY OF FIGURING OUT WHAT WE WERE AND WHAT WE SOUNDED LIKE” LEWIS

that it’s been really hard. Making this album has been like beating down general life and trying to stick to what’s best and stick to your own guns and not worrying too much about what other people are telling you to do and the way you should be. There are a lot of things I really like about it.”

A reflection of toil and turbulence but also a reassurance that you are not alone in that, the idea of a desire path is inextricable from ‘This Could Be Texas’.

“I love seeing a desire path so much,” Douglas adds. “There’s so much fucking history to it; when you see an actual well-trodden path, people have worked hard to make that and to make their lives a split second easier.”

Lily continues: “It’s also people that don’t know each other – they’re not connected, but they have something in common. That’s another thing about the album. There are themes that

WHITING

are in common experiences, like disregarding borders. All of these people that tread this desire path – they don’t know each other; they haven’t communicated it.”

Despite that, there is a kinship that transcends time and space. When ‘This Could Be Texas’ is released, many people will walk this desire path that English Teacher have created – it’s the quickest route to the core of the band. A tour of the places they’ve lived, the people they’ve been, the anger, love and frustration they’ve felt.

The easiest way to understand English Teacher as a band is to listen to ‘This Could Be Texas’, knowing this world they’ve created is entirely their own.

Throughout the process, they’ve continued to flesh out the world on their own terms, too. From Douglas playing a part in co-directing music videos like ‘Albert Road’ to Lily’s involvement with the album artwork, English Teacher are a

band bringing their vision to life through sheer hard graft.

“Overall, in everything we do, we like to have a lot of control creatively because it feels right, and we can put effort and love into other passions we have,” explains Douglas.

Lily chimes in: “I think that’s just one of the things that attracted to making music. If you want, you don’t have to just be a writer – there’s artwork, videos, merch. There are so many things that I want to try. I want to do more.”

Given the sheer excellence of ‘This Could Be Texas’, it seems pretty likely that Lily will get those opportunities soon enough. With a soldout UK tour around the corner, things are looking full-steam ahead for the group – things can only get bigger from here. “It’s my favourite thing in the world,” Lewis shares. “It’s exhausting, but being able to tour and travel about with your best friends playing songs, what more could you want?”

Douglas agrees: “Before, I look at the calendar and get quite stressed, but it always happens – I have these anticipatory moments before a really busy period and freak out. As soon as you’re on the road and at festivals you forget about that crap, and it’s so fun.”

As they approach what looks to be some of the craziest few months of their life so far, there’s a lot to process. ‘This Could Be Texas’ is about to land, and there are a lot of emotions to be felt as a result of it. Nicholas sums it up best, though: “Dead nervous. Dead excited.” ■ English

Teacher’s debut album ‘This Could Be Texas’ is out now.

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COVER STORY

As breakout smash ‘End Of Beginning’ achieves the sort of belated success that has us wondering if any other songs are currently available on TikTok, DJO is becoming far from a mere side project for Joe Keery.

by ALI SHUTLER. photography by ZACHARY GRAY, GUIDO GAZZILLI.

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D

jo’s nostalgia-fuelled ‘End Of Beginning’ is fast becoming the biggest song of 2024, despite being released 18 months ago as part of his twisting second album ‘Decide’.

“It’s pretty unbelievable,” grins Joe Keery during a flying visit to London that sees him present the BRIT Award for Best New Artist to RAYE. “You always hope your music finds its place in the world, and it seems like that one has, in a really big way,” he continues, admitting ‘End Of Beginning’ has already reached more people than he ever thought possible. It’s racked up well over a quarter of a billion streams on Spotify, is still climbing the Billboard Hot 100 in America (currently at Number 11, sandwiched between Noah Kahan and Taylor Swift) and has gotten comfortable in the Top 5 of the UK Official Singles Chart. “I’ve just stepped back and watched it take on a life of its own.”

“I wasn’t writing ‘End Of Beginning’ with the idea that it would connect with people, though,” he continues. “It’s a very specific song based on my own life and my own experiences.”

Written about returning to Chicago, the city where Joe went to college, cut his teeth as a live musician and paid bills by waiting tables while auditioning for commercials, the song is bittersweet, anxious and driven by wonder. He believes ‘End Of Beginning’ is connecting because of how intimate it is.

“My perspective is pretty clear. Going back somewhere, remembering a time, yearning for it, but also wanting to live in the present.

Turns out that’s a very specific thing that is also really common.”

“To see the humanity behind a bunch of people feeling the same way as each other is super rewarding,” he says. “The fact that other people saw themselves in something I made is thrilling.”

With reflective lyrics and jagged musical chaos, ‘Decide’ is a very human album.

While his debut record under the Djo moniker, ‘Twenty Twenty’, pulled heavily from escapist psychedelic rock and laidback pop, ‘Decide’ sees Joe embrace a little bit of everything. There are still nods to The Beatles, Tame Impala and Pink Floyd, but there are also echoes of Charli XCX, Daft Punk and Talking Heads.

“I like the eclectic nature of it,” says Joe. “I think that there are no rules to follow, so why not just really dive into every angle that you’d like to explore? Why can’t a ‘pop’ record have that attitude?” he asks.

Lyrically, ‘Decide’ tracks Joe’s progress from working part-time jobs as a waiter to becoming a globally recognised star thanks to his portrayal as empathetic, READDORK.COM 37.

COVER STORY

loyal jock Steve Harrington in Stranger Things. Throughout the 12 tracks, there’s celebration, ego, anxiety and uncertainty.

“A lot of that album is also me learning to trust my gut because, really, that’s all you’ve got,” he says. “If I think something is cool or exciting, I’ve got to trust that other people will feel the same way.”

“It’s the same for acting,” Joe continues.

“You sometimes can do a scene, and it feels fine, but there are other times where something gets dislodged, and you feel like you’re really telling the truth. Instead of performing, you’re actually speaking to someone. That’s the thing to go after,” he offers. “If you overthink it, it doesn’t really work.”

He goes on to describe ‘End Of Beginning’ as a great example of not overbaking an idea. While most of ‘Decide’ is driven by flamboyant electronics, the delicate three-minute song is far more straightforward and revealing.

“In a way, it was really difficult to write,” he says. “I knew it had to be simple, but simple things are really hard sometimes,” especially when your background is sprawling, proggy epics. “I had to get out of my own way and let my subconscious tell the truth,” he says.

It’s one of the many times Joe subverts expectations with ‘Decide’. On paper, the title feels like a looming deadline, but the actual record consistently pushes back against the idea of sticking to one path. The music dances freely between genre lines, and Joe regularly changes angles as a storyteller while away from the

“THE FACT THAT OTHER PEOPLE SAW THEMSELVES IN SOMETHING I MADE IS THRILLING” JOE

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music; he’s confidently spent the past two years establishing himself as a versatile actor (Free Guy, Fargo, Spree) as well as a musician without compromising either.

It all comes to a head with hypnotic album closer ‘Slither’ and the haunted line, “We all wanna be someone”.

“That song has this gloomy atmosphere, and it feels oppressive, but it also has what I see as a hopeful message,” says Joe. “You’re always changing. There’s always another day to improve and chase the things you’re interested in chasing. It’s important to remember those sorts of things,” he continues. “I’m a pretty positive person, but it’s a good way to pep yourself up as well.”

“We are just all trying,” he adds.

“Everybody’s just trying to do their best, and I find so much hope in that.”

“Making ‘Decide’ was definitely a learning experience,” he says, comparing the art of making music to “trying different hats on”. One day, he’d want to make a track that sounded like Gorillaz; others, he’d want something more like The Beatles. “I like to wear my influences on my sleeve,” he admits. “I know some people shy away from making music that sounds like something else, but why not?” he shrugs.

“Music is what inspires people to create.

You might end up with something that’s a bit of a rip-off, or you might get something completely different. I’ve trusted myself to

DJO

do more of that, and it’s yielded some cool results,” he adds.

Ultimately, ‘Decide’ is a record about embracing the jagged edges and doing away with the idea of perfection. “The things that are the least polished are often the most exciting. Look at a band like IDLES; how exciting is their music? It still sounds brilliant but it has an energy to it that you can really feel. That’s so inspiring.”

There’s a touch of that on ‘Decide’, which was recorded in just five days due to money and time constraints, but ahead of that tight schedule, Joe rehearsed every song intricately. “The goal now is to capture the original feeling instead of trying to recreate it,” he says, having spent a fair amount of time playing at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Taylor Swift was using the space at the same time, leading people to assume a collaboration is coming, but it’s not like he’s going to confirm that in a magazine that has printed the word ‘Dork’ above his head.

“Deep down, I am a dork, though,” he says.

“More power to us.”

Since ‘Decide’ was released in 2022, Djo has released a handful of ‘D-Sides’ “leftover things from when we recorded the album. There are more, but I don’t know if they’ll ever see the light of day, honestly” and is deep into the next era. “There are a bunch of songs in the bag. There’s still more recording and mixing to do, but I’m really trying to focus on finishing stuff,” he says.

“I’m excited to wrap this thing up, pick the things that work well together and see what it all means.” According to Joe, new music will be out sooner rather than later.

He goes on to describe the new stuff as eclectic as ever. “It feels like a couple of different albums in a way, but it’s all coming from one place, and there’s a goal in mind,” he says, having been inspired by the simplicity of ‘End Of Beginning’.

“I wanted to get less in the box and focus on songwriting, melody and moving swiftly.

It’s not that every track has to be concise, but I want everything to be punchy.”

Lyrically, the songs are all “very clear and specific to my life, rather than about a broad feeling. That really is the power of ‘End Of Beginning’,” Joe continues. “With that said, the songs are all over the map.

There’s not too much to give away at this point, but it does feel like I’m dipping into a bunch of different places.”

Despite writing songs about his real life, there won’t be any tracks about the imminent end of his commitment to Stranger Things on the next record, “but only because I’m not there yet,” he says.

“Maybe that’ll be on the next record.” Djo’s very much an ongoing concern.

Alongside the creation of new music, he’s also eager to tour. “It’s a shame we couldn’t do more with ‘Decide’. I had a lot of ambition about the way that record could have been done live, but the main hang-up has always been my schedule and working on what feels like my day job,” he continues.

“I always want to put the right amount of time, effort and prep into the live show. I need a chunk of time where I know I’m not

“THE THINGS THAT ARE THE LEAST POLISHED ARE OFTEN THE MOST EXCITING” JOE

KEERY

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“I REALLY WANT TO GET AWAY FROM THE IDEA THAT EVERY SONG IS MY GREATEST SONG, BECAUSE THAT EXPECTATION STRANGLES THE EXCITEMENT”

music, the more I’m interested in trying new things. It’s the same with movies,” he adds, turning things around. “You’re never trying to do the same thing every time.

You’re just trying to create a breadth of work that resonates with people in different ways.”

When Djo first launched, Joe was so wary of how his art would be viewed; he used character play, fancy dress and a stage name born from the question “What is the most confusing way to spell my name?” to hide who was actually behind the project. Live, he took on the guise of an outlandish, guru-like life coach while on social media, his photos were garish collages of disarming wigs and over-the-top sunglasses.

“It was trying to avoid, like, ‘Yo, that’s Steve Harrington!’” he told Dork previously.

Now TikTok is full of Djo fans having their mind blown that their favourite new musician is also an actor.

In the studio, he’s still having fun JOE KEERY toying with character, though, taking inspiration from artists like David Bowie, going to get pulled away at the last minute Paul McCartney and David Byrne, who use because it’s a cloudy day, so they need me their voices as a wide-ranging instrument. back on set. It just hasn’t worked out yet.”

“I’m just trying to take the rules off. I want “It takes hundreds of shows to become a to create things without any sense of how real touring band. We’re late to the game, so great it might become, or how precious I we got a lot of catching up to do,” Joe adds. am with it. I really want to get away from “Getting to do it, and do it right, is really the idea that every song is my greatest song, exciting to me.” because that expectation strangles the Because of his successes as an actor, he excitement.” believes he “definitely” still has something All those theatrics also acted as a to prove as a musician. Despite the reach shield to help him share music that felt of ‘End Of Beginning’, “I think I’ll forever increasingly vulnerable. “There was a time probably feel that way,” he says. when I was using that armour through fear The thing is, Joe isn’t new to making of rejection. If Djo did badly, no one really music. As a kid, he grew up on a diet of knew it was me. But that’s quite human, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, James Taylor isn’t it, trying to protect yourself?” he says and Eric Clapton but really fell in love before breaking into a grin. “Now I have to after seeing School Of Rock as a 12-yearreevaluate everything because the cat is out old. From there, it wasn’t long before he of the bag.” was getting involved in Chicago’s vibrant “Honestly, I’m just feeling a lot more indie community and creating music in comfortable now,” he continues. “Even this his bedroom as Cool Cool Cool. He joined week, I’ve felt like maybe it is okay to just psych-rock band Post Animal in college and be myself. Now that it’s been accepted, it only left after his Stranger Things schedule makes me feel like I can be my fully weird, started clashing with touring commitments. freak self.”

No matter where his acting career has And that’s what he hopes fans take away taken him, he’s always come back to music. from Djo. “The more you can lean into “It just gets in there, doesn’t it? I love how who you really are, the more you can let albums can forever act like a teleportation your freak flag fly, the more you’ll be able device to a specific point in your life,” to connect with others and find genuine he explains. “It’s only happened a few happiness,” says Joe. times, but there are gigs where everything “When it goes right, acting lets me just clicks, and it can feel like a spiritual process emotions from my life and work experience. Trying to do that from the other through them. It’s pretty selfish, but that’s side is a very satisfying experience as well.” also how I viewed music. When the world With Djo, the only goal is to make more feels too heavy, I pour my feelings into music and work with friends. “I just love to songs and that always feels good to do. I be creative,” says Joe. “As an actor, you get used to think it was entirely self-indulgent, to be a small part of a big thing, and that but after the reaction to ‘End Of Beginning’ really scratches an itch for me. But with and seeing how people can really connect music, it’s nice to have a vision and see it with something, I’m starting to think it isn’t through.” so selfish after all. In fact, it’s a powerful “It’s like someone who really loves thing to be a part of.” ■ mowing their grass and getting the stripes to line up,” he continues with a distinctly un-Hollywood analogy. “The more I do

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“WHEN THE WORLD FEELS TOO HEAVY, I POUR MY FEELINGS INTO SONGS” JOE

KEERY

READDORK.COM 41.

FEATURE

“M St. Vincent’s new album ‘All Born Screaming’ is a unifying record that traverses life, death and love.

by ALI SHUTLER. 42. DORK

usic is still so mysterious to me,” says St. Vincent’s Annie Clark. Since 2007’s debut ‘Marry Me’, she’s created seven brilliant but very different solo albums including the beautiful, snarling purge that is ‘All Born Screaming’. There has also been a string of gorgeous collaborations with everyone from David Byrne and Dua Lipa to Gorillaz and the surviving members of Nirvana.

“You do gain a level of expertise the more you do something, and I’m always learning new skills, but it seems that the more proficient I get, the more mystical music becomes,” Annie explains. “Isn’t that funny?”

Rather than trying to wrestle inspiration into something tangible, Annie just follows it. “It’s all about trusting your gut,” she says. “The main thing is being able to follow that instinct, even when you are faced with self-loathing and self-doubt, which are endemic to the process. All I know is that if you follow it, chase it, put the hours in, struggle, love and hate, the whole thing will eventually reveal itself. It just takes the labour.”

The industrial electro sneer of ‘All Born Screaming’ follows on from the 70s psychedelia of ‘Daddy’s Home’ and comes in the wake of Annie co-writing Taylor

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Swift’s recent megahit ‘Cruel Summer’ and Olivia Rodrigo bonus ‘Guts’ track ‘Obsessed’.

Despite this crossover from critically acclaimed art-pop into something more stadium-sized, no part of ‘All Born Screaming’ was written to continue that journey. “None of that stuff is ever on my mind,” admits Annie. “I just try and make work that I think is excellent, and that means something to me. Anything that comes as a result of that is a pleasant surprise,” she explains. “I have no great advertising instincts and even thinking about that stuff makes me tired,” she adds, having already slept through a pilates class this morning. “Rock’n’roll,” she grins.

Previous records have seen Annie explore our relationship with technology via a “housewife on pills” (2014’s ‘St. Vincent’), while 2017’s follow-up ‘Masseduction’ saw her take on the role of cult leader to pick apart sex and power.

There is no character-player on ‘All Born Screaming’ though, with the fantastical replaced by the urgent everyday. “It’s not concept in any sort of way. It’s just life, death and love.”

Annie goes on to explain that ‘All Born Screaming’ is a record of two halves. “The first half is the season in hell and dealing with the violence of life. The second half is the realisation that, of course, there is suffering, great loss and self-hatred in the world, but there’s also great joy and beauty.

I’m keenly aware of how short life is, and there’s really nothing else to live for except love,” she says, with ‘All Born Screaming’ stripping things back to the basics. “It’s the hardest thing in the world and yet dead simple at the same time.”

Lead single ‘Broken Man’ was designed to “throw a little dynamite onto the dancefloor” with a little help from Dave Grohl, while Cate Le Bon and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa

also feature across the record. It might be the first self-produced St. Vincent album, but it’s still full of community.

“The record ends with the ecstatic mantra, which is that we’re all born screaming.

We are all in this together,” she explains.

“You today, me tomorrow. Not to be fully kumbaya about it, but I do believe that a lot of modern life is designed to put us in factions and echo chambers, so we forget that every one of us is in this shit together.

That’s the human condition, the beauty and the brutality of it,” she adds.

Annie has co-produced every St. Vincent album, but ‘All Born Screaming’ sees her go it alone. “I had a lot to prove as a producer,” she says. “I wanted to make something that was completely emotionally raw but sonically perfect because I care. I care that things sound good. I care that it will stand up for the ages.”

Speaking about the decision to produce the album herself, Annie says, “There are some places, emotionally, that you can only get to by taking the long walk into the woods alone - to find out what your heart is really saying. It sounds real because it is real.” She doesn’t believe this makes ‘All Born Screaming’ any more authentic than previous records, though.

“I don’t really go back and listen to my own records because I’m not one for masturbating in a mirror, but I have had to revisit them recently because I’m currently putting the show together for the All Born Screaming tour,” says Annie, who’s rediscovering just how personal every record has been. “It’s interesting to realise how I hid my suicidal ideation in a song like ‘Digital Witness’, which sounds like a song about the perils of social media.”

“With those records where I’ve played with persona or deconstructed identity, I don’t look at that as hiding,” she continues.

“It’s just where I was at the time and what I was interested in exploring,” once again following her gut wherever it took her.

“Also, I’m queer, so I know how to code switch. I’ve been doing that since Jump Street, so of course I would explore that in my work. Of course, I would explore identity, and costume and gender as performance, because that’s all been part of my consciousness since I was a child. With ‘All Born Screaming’ though, that’s just not where I was.”

Instead, Annie was going through “the big clarifying, galvanising forces that are great loss and great love” when she was making ‘All Born Screaming’. “I love this record,” she says. “Every song is a lived experience, but I also wouldn’t ever put out anything that I didn’t fully believe in because what’s the point?”

While ‘All Born Screaming’ sees St. Vincent explore grand topics, previous album ‘Daddy’s Home’ was incredibly personal. “That album was about me reconciling a lot of painful experiences and coming out the other side. I was honest about the autographical part of ‘Daddy’s Home’ because I thought, perhaps a little naively, that naming the record ‘Daddy’s

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Home’ and having lyrics about signing autographs in a prison waiting room was so obvious,” she explains. “However, that era quickly became about why I was personally responsible for the for-profit prison system in America and if I had suffered enough for the sins of my father. That’s really not what that record was about, but whatever. I’m not too fucked off about it.”

“I feel very strongly now about making sure that I don’t explain too much about the song,” she says a little later. “I know that as a fan, and I don’t know if this is just me being hideously selfish, but I just don’t care what the artists were thinking when they wrote one of my favourite songs. I don’t care what they were trying to say. I just care what it means to me. It’s not my place to correct someone who’s allowing my music to make its way into their life. That’s so egocentric. That’s so not generous.”

With ‘All Born Screaming’, you certainly don’t need the back story to make sense of the record “because the back story is universal,” says Annie. “The back story is

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“EVERY ONE OF US IS IN THIS SHIT TOGETHER” ANNIE

what every single person in their life unfortunately will have to go through. Sometimes the music says it all,” she shrugs. “You don’t need a back story to make it meaningful.”

There was no grand vision for ‘All Born Screaming’. No deliberate desire to fight fury with fury. “The genesis of this record was building a studio that I loved, where I could fully explore,” says Annie. That resulted in hours of playing with synths and drum machines until something felt right. “I was just playing with electricity,” says Annie.

“I was turning knobs and finding sounds that lit me up inside.” The bassline of ‘Big Time Nothing’ came directly from that careful play, as did most of ‘Broken Man’. “’Sweetest

CLARK

Fruit’ was me being turned on by sound and then figuring out the story,” says Annie.

Likewise, the meaning of St. Vincent’s snarling journey from hell and back is open-ended. “I hope people get whatever they want and whatever they need from it. If they love it deeply, that would make me so happy, but if they hate it, great. It’s for them now. It’s not about me.”

That sense of ownership travels all the way back to St. Vincent first falling in love with rock. “Obviously, I’ve always loved music,” says Annie, who grew up on 80s pop institutions like Madonna and George Michael.

When she was nine years old, though, her best friend and his older brother were building a half-pipe in their

front yard and learning to skateboard, which is where she was introduced to the likes of Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers and Nirvana. “The other stuff that our parents listened to was great, but this felt like our music. It felt dangerous,” says Annie.

“It’s heavy. It gets your heart pumping.

You get a violent catharsis from it.”

With her upcoming tour, St. Vincent hopes to offer “a pummelling and an ecstatic rave before a bleeding heart.”

Through the heaviness, the rage and the loss, ‘All Born Screaming’ is still incredibly ambitious. ‘Flea’ sounds a bit like a musical, ‘The Power’s Out’ is dreamy and lush, while ‘Violent Times’ has all the epic drama of a Bond theme. The whole thing is dark and menacing, but never oppressive. There’s humour, beauty and a whole lot of romance to it. “I just go where my brain and my heart take me,” says Annie. “And pacing-wise, you have to disturb and console, disturb and console, because that’s what life is.”

■ St. Vincent’s album ‘All Born Screaming’ is out 26th April.

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COVER STORY

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A. G. COOK

by MARTYN YOUNG. photography by SINNA NASSERI.

A. G. Cook

is one of few artists in the 21st century who can truly say they have shaped the future of pop. Daring, exuberant

and subversive, PC Music, the pioneering record label and collective he founded back in 2013, has been a constant shining beacon of questing experimentalism and pop brilliance that has defined an era, traversing through all manner of genres and wild ambition. It’s been a journey that has taken in triumph and tragedy and has seen the producer forge powerful and inspiring creative collaborations and reach the exalted heights of working with Beyoncé on ‘Renaissance’. Does the unassuming, softly-spoken, longhaired producer consider himself a star as he prepares to release his third solo album? “I don’t see myself as a pop star, but for the last decade or so, I’ve really enjoyed playing with ambiguity,” he smiles from a sun-drenched room in his home in Los Angeles.

Ambiguity has always been central to the PC Music story and A. G. Cook’s vision for what music can be. ‘Britpop’ is perhaps the ultimate realisation of all that ambiguity, creative expression, and sheer bonkers escapism, but is it pop music? Does it matter? Like most things for A. G. Cook, the answer is it’s

anything you want it to be. “People can’t even decide what pop is,” he says animatedly. “Every year, it gets less and less clear with the different levels of what’s considered mainstream now. The whole argument about is pop popular or is it like classic pop, what does that mean? Is it a genre?

Specifically, I feel like a lot of the music that I’ve worked on with different collaborators hasn’t been shying away from that conversation at all levels.”

He cites 2016 song ‘Superstar’, the first to feature his own vocals and his first solo single, which would go on to be incredibly instructive in the journey of A. G. Cook, the artist. “That song, in the way I recorded myself and the way the lyrics are, and the whole tension of it, is very much a music producer taking centre stage and the awkwardness of that. It plays into a bit of a Napoleon Dynamite quality,” he laughs.

The awkwardness is the charm, though, and that’s what makes it brilliant. The producer began to sprinkle his DJ sets with flashes of performance as he cultivated the vision of his own artistic career and how he might work within a pop space. “The idea is that we’re all documenting ourselves like pop stars in a way because of how socials encourage it,” he says. “I have a self-awareness of the

A. G. COOK, the visionary behind PC Music, has already redefined pop with his audacious and inventive approach. His latest project, ‘Britpop’, blurs genre boundaries, exploring the essence and future of pop through a blend of nostalgia, innovation, and a deep dive into British cultural identity. theatre of pop, and that’s the only thing really left in pop, more than the music itself, in a way.”

Perhaps the strongest artistic and creative partnership A. G. Cook has developed over the years, certainly since he first started making music with fellow producer genius Danny L Harle in the proto PC Music duo Dux Content in the early 2010s, has been his visionary work with Charli XCX. Charli is a musical force of nature, and her boundless personality and genius with a hook has provided rocket fuel for all of Cook’s musical endeavours.

Working closely with Charli, you can’t help but feel energised. “A lot of the Charli tracks we’ve done together have these outrageous outros where it’s almost like a kind of, victory lap is not the right word, but in my head, I’m like she’s nailed the hook, and it’s so

catchy we can go anywhere from here, and anything can happen.”

Anything can happen: three words that perhaps encompass the entire A. G. Cook story and the philosophy that guides everything he does.

“The way that someone like Charli does it is genuinely inspiring because of how much of the writing she can make work as well as her being someone who’s slightly more known in the mainstream and has this amazing stage energy. It’s really the hooks. We could be doing something really casual, and suddenly, she can give it the DNA of a big radio song, and then it can go back to something more lo-fi. She has the willingness to jump between those things.”

As A. G. explains the joy of working with Charli, some of the principles of his creative vision emerge. The READDORK.COM 47.

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importance of contrast and imbuing different pieces of music with different musical dynamics is central.

On both his previous solo albums, 2020’s sprawling and musically adventurous ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’, A. G. Cook fully began to realise how he could make sense of all those clashing musical ideas and bring them together in harmony.

“A real recurring theme for me with my own music or working with other people is this high contrast feeling,” he explains. “I’m not really trying to go for the middle ground of a perfectly blended mainstream experimental thing. I want to go fully catchy and bombastic and then do something much more difficult or sound design intensive. That’s very much related to my own listening habits and how I enjoy experiencing things.”

The breadth of his musical palette was highlighted in the vast expanse of both his 2020 releases. “I felt this very much when I was doing ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’ as a sort of double album where the real album is somewhere between the two,” he says. “There’s a 49-track way of doing things, and there’s a ten-track way of doing things, and they all have their focus. You can kind of assemble it in the middle.”

For A. G. Cook, music is never anything as prosaic as a functional collection of files. It has to be a real living and breathing thing within its own distinct world. “I don’t want to target streaming specifically, but I as a listener can get underwhelmed even if it’s an artist I’m excited about and following then the release date comes, and you get tiny artwork and a little playlist,” he says. “It’s not that everyone does that but we’re all slightly channelled or made to do a version of that. For me, the material, whether it’s someone else playing the song or me doing a DJ edit or someone else doing a remix, songs or tracks can have a life outside of just ‘Here is the final master on streaming that we’re going to rinse’. It’s high contrast but also the personality of different artists or different genres and the feeling that it’s in dialogue with itself.”

It’s fair to say it’s taken a while to work out who the artist A. G. Cook is as opposed to the label head and producer. “A big part of the artist journey for me was not doing an album for 7 years of being A. G. Cook,” he laughs. “I had one sort of EP online, and then these singles, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Superstar,’ were important moments. I relished not having an album. Not having an A. G. Cook sound.

“Obviously, after a while, I went full circle and found a window that made sense for an A. G. Cook project, but I never wanted it to be a producer album with lots of features. I enjoy those, but that feels like its own category that is cynical at times, I think. You can have all the instrumentals and just farm them off.

It took time for me to figure out something that would not just be personal to me and be a bit self-reflective but would just be interesting in the context of PC Music and the other artists I work with.”

Inspired by the artists in his orbit, the possibility of A.G Cook’s solo work became more tangible. “The year that ‘Apple’ and ‘7G’ came out, I also did this album with Jonsi, which was really interesting. Working on Jonsi’s album at the same time as working on the Charli self-titled album with all these things going on suddenly gave me such a wide frame of reference.

Obviously I’m always writing my own songs and bits of stuff. Somehow, between the vantage point of those two things and PC Music and all the things I was doing with that, I was like, ‘Oh, ok, an A. G. Cook album could be like this’, and I started to devise what became ‘Apple’.”

Something of a breakthrough came when he started using his own voice more and more on tracks and

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“PEOPLE CAN’T EVEN DECIDE WHAT POP IS” A.

tapped into a whole different kind of emotion and way of working. “It’s not just cool tracks,” he enthuses.

“There’s something that this can explain. I was really enforcing the literal, personal computer music name of PC Music. To do that after bits and pieces of singles and collaborations and production work and artist aliases, it somehow felt right to wait about seven years and then really do a lot.”

The burst of creativity that spawned those two albums is really quite staggering as Cook branched out into all the weird and wonderful corners of his musical imagination as he performed a high-wire act of balancing countless styles that could tip over the edge at any time.

“What’s been interesting since then is how to keep some of that energy for what I’ve come together with for ‘Britpop’ and not just repeat it with the idea of doing a really long album or two albums, but how can I find something to latch onto by playing with the album format but it still has to be part of an A. G. Cook album?” he ponders. “I like the idea of giving people multi vantage points and giving myself the opportunity to not be too literal with how I interpret electronic music or pop music. I want to find some conditions that can make it get a little bit out of control like I’m improvising rather than making the perfect album.”

So, we arrive in 2024 at ‘Britpop’, and yes, A. G. Cook

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knows what you’re thinking, and that’s ok. He’s ready to take you on a journey of what Britpop means to him, one that’s much darker and stranger, yet ultimately gloriously uplifting, than you might imagine.

“There are a lot of reasons why I wanted to bring out a phrase like Britpop and use it in a particular way,” he explains. “It’s an incredibly loaded phrase. I can retrace it, but even pop is an incredibly loaded phrase.

All the different categorisations of being a Brit are very loaded. It’s also loaded in America. It’s loaded in the UK for different reasons. There’s all kinds of confusion for what Britain is, the British Isles versus England etc., so there’s already all that tension there.”

There are multiple versions of what A. G. Cook’s Britpop is or can be. There’s the OG Britpop of Blur vs Oasis and all of that. A. G. was born in 1990, so was only very small when the kings of Britpop were lording it about, but like anyone very young or very old in that era, you took everything in almost by osmosis.

There’s also a different kind of Britpop, the Britpop as cultural ephemera. Films, television adverts, Supermarket Sweep, the Argos catalogue, Tango soft drinks, football, Mr Blobby, Take That, Dale Winton presenting Top Of The Pops - it’s all there in creating the tapestry of life that A. G. Cook wanted to channel mixed in with some very clear and iconic images.

“It’s funny for me, but my memories of the rock version of Britpop are so meshed into other British

A. G. COOK

stuff. I see the lineage of Geri Halliwell wearing the Union Jack dress, Tony Blair and the Teletubbies.

It goes into this attempt to have this Cool Britannia moment. I would have been 6 or 7, and it was all part of the same thing,” he remembers.

The music of the Britpop era would have a slow influence on him as he carefully picked through some of the more esoteric strands and some of the most striking iconography of the time. “I personally got into music quite late,” he explains. “I’m an only child. I had some friends who had older siblings, and they were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go and see Blur tonight’. I really grew up in a bit of a bubble. I was very into visuals. The visual impact of Blur, who would always mix visuals up, with ‘Parklife’ having a strong visual identity; that’s the stuff that stood out to me the most.

“As a kid, things with really strong visual worlds were the only thing I tapped into. Obvious examples are Daft Punk and Gorillaz. I was definitely aware of Damon Albarn and Blur, but it was Gorillaz that really resonated with me. I was like, ‘Oh shit, it’s this whole immersive world’. Being a bit older, I suddenly got very into music as a teenager, messing about on computers and recording friends, and suddenly, the era I was really discovering everything was the early blog era. The MediaFire era. It was nuts that you could read a review of this really obscure thing, and then the whole album would be there. I was trading mp3s with friends. Even LimeWire feels quite Britpop to me.”

With the liberating freedom of the internet in its most Wild West era, the seeds of A. G. Cook’s pop experimentalism, burnished by the idealism of Britpop, were beginning to take root. A formative time when the whole world seemed to be opening up for him online.

“A lot of it was me discovering things as I got older and getting into music really fast,” he recalls.

“That’s why I’m so casual with genre and have these big switch-ups. I really did experience a lot of music in this flattened internet way. Now, it’s quite normal for younger generations to be super eclectic.

Someone will be like, ‘Here’s my jazz playlist, here’s my 90s rap playlist’. It’s so carefree to just pick things from streaming. I remember really being on a hunt for different discographies and trying to find a Kraftwerk discography. That’s how I would have experienced Blur in a proper way, looking at all their albums from debut to ‘Think Tank’ and having a lot of respect for the albums having such a different approach.

“THERE’S A 49-TRACK WAY OF DOING THINGS, AND THERE’S A TEN-TRACK WAY OF DOING THINGS” A.

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COOK

and even some controversy,” he says confidently.

This is no Last Night At The Proms, flag-waving celebration, though. “The cover art avoids red, white and blue. I basically banned red, white, and blue from the graphics, which immediately, for me, differentiates it from the much more literal og indie-rock Britpop - here’s the guitar with the Union Jack on it,” he says clearly. “The process of doing that is how I work on music. Playing with these certain elements but looking for ways to reframe them. You always have to start with something quite bold. That can be someone with a strong personality like Charli or a producer with a strong sound or a cultural banner that’s already very overloaded.”

The album is split into three discs, Past, Present and Future, each one telling the story of British pop and electronic music filtered through A. G. Cook’s unique prism. As he experienced more life in America, primarily a year with his girlfriend spent in rural Montana’s relative wilderness, the strange exoticism Americans felt towards this odd little British man became apparent. The relationship between America and Britain has always been part of the Britpop lore as Americans imagined the British Isles as some sort of fantasy island. It was an aspect Cook began to ponder and then sought to embellish as he created this expansive new world for his inventive music to inhabit.

“I was very aware of the mythic quality of

In the late 2010s, with PC Music established as

one of the coolest and most inventive record labels in the world, A. G. Cook moved to America, and it was there that he began to question and explore his own sense of Britishness and where his work and PC Music related to it.

“I’ve only really felt more British by being in the US more,” he laughs. “It’s not really something that I’ve thought about when I was growing up in London, but then coming here, there are people highlighting the accent, and I realised that PC Music itself is in this lineage of British eccentrics and inventive pop music, like the Pet Shop Boys.”

Like all his previous work, ‘Britpop’ is conceptual and overwhelming, but when you begin to break it all down, it all begins to make perfect sense. It’s an odyssey years in the making. The use of the phrase itself is an example of the fearless quality of all Cook’s art.

“There’s a lot of joy for me in this phrase that’s overloaded, that’s over spilling with connotations READDORK.COM 49.

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publications were like, ‘Oh, it’s a thing’, it opened the doors to a few more UK ones. There’s always been that sensation which after a while was pretty interesting for me to tackle.”

Concept locked and ideas swirling, Cook began to create the music that would soundtrack ‘Britpop’. Disc 1 is the past, and if you could ever say A. G. Cook had a classic electronic sound, it can be found here. “For me, what was amusing is that the classic sound I’m referring to is an innately futuristic one. A lot of that disc is dominated by vocal chops and chords, which was a headspace of how I was very naturally making music in 2013/14, taking vocals and chopping them up and trying to make them exciting. It was quite nice for me. I’ve never stopped making music like that. That’s always been part of it, but I was really revisiting that atmosphere with some updated tools.”

Disc 1 is banger central. “There are longer tracks, 10 or 7 minutes, that play like the journey of a DJ set mix.

SOPHIE

In January 2021, A.G. Cook’s friend and collaborator SOPHIE tragically passed away.

“I RELISHED NOT HAVING AN ALBUM. NOT HAVING AN A.G. COOK SOUND” A.

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COOK

being British. Understanding that there was this idea of the UK as somewhere with history and a fantasy quality of kings and queens and wizards,” he explains. “I started to notice that there were a lot of classic American authors like Steinbeck who did his version of Arthurian tales. There’s a Mark Twain book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is a time traveller thing that started to give me this notion that if I was going to do a thing with Britpop or Britishness, I should also mess with history and the idea of eras.

“The idea of dividing the album into past, present and future is also me thinking about how I can relate to the idea of Britain as having this vast, infinite past from Stonehenge to the Roman Empire and everything else.

It’s impossible to really comprehend. I started reading

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more about history in general and enjoying an insider/ outsider approach. For lockdown reasons, I wasn’t travelling. It’s the longest I’ve been away from it, so I was really starting to play into the real historical research and the imaginative quality of it.

“I was starting to see that, especially in Montana, where there’s a lot of Cowboy imagery - it’s very connected to this imagined idea of British heraldry, having these crests for cowboys. The whole attitude of chivalry and knights is reflected in the Wild West.

I saw it both in the attitude and visually, where you’ll see what feels like a cowboy-style belt, but it has all these embellishments that are very much referencing an old history aesthetic. It all started to stew together.”

The concept established, A. G. found himself freed creatively to really run with it. “I started to amass and organise things, and it almost made it less precious than something being called ‘A. G. Cook Album Number Three’ or whatever; it’s suddenly, ‘Oh, it’s all Britpop, don’t worry about it!’ It gives it a charisma of its own,” he laughs.

He began to think about his hometown and his newly adopted home more and more and how musically he was embraced by America first as Britain took a white to suss PC Music out. “Historically, even from the first PC Music press and engagement with different writers and producers, London was obviously where it was born and where the initial friendships and relationships happened, but in terms of local support or club nights, it was pretty negative, honestly,” he remembers.

“There was something interesting about the early club nights and the amount of things I saw where it was seen as breaking the rules of dance music or not being right. All these things that were issues for an established mini music scene in London and the UK were completely ignored by an American audience who were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is great and really entertaining’. All the early big crossover moments were driven by the US but seen as a very British thing, and looking back around, once certain American

A one-of-a-kind musical visionary who forged a genuinely pioneering path through experimental pop music throughout the 2010s, she hadn’t even nearly reached her peak when she passed away universally recognised as a musical genius ‘Britpop’ marks A.G. Cook’s first release under his own name since her death and the closing track on Disc 2, ‘Without’, is a beautiful and tender tribute to her as he interpolates the lyrical hook of one of her breakout songs ‘Bipp’.

“That’s a song that I just wrote in one go. I wasn’t planning to write a song about SOPHIE; I just had these chords and realised the chord progression at its most basic level was the same as that of ‘Bipp’. ‘Bipp’ is super different, tempo, baseline, everything, but I was like, ‘Oh, this is weird’. There’s definitely a subconscious thing in here. I wasn’t really planning to interpolate it, either. I just kind of got to that part of the song and was like, this is ‘Bipp’ as well, using it as a kind of ad-lib outro in a slightly unusual way. That’s a good example of one of the songs that was written in a really intuitive way.”

It’s clear that SOPHIE’s death had a big impact on A.G. Cook, but what’s important now is maintaining her legacy with this heartfelt song, a small part of the healing process. “It’s still pretty strange processing it. It’s already a while ago. I’ve definitely processed it with different friends and family, and at this point, it’s about holding onto the memories that I’ve been very lucky to have had. I wrote a very long piece after a while on the whole journey I’d had with her. It was obviously very difficult to write that, and it took a while. It was kind of a strange dedicated month of my time where I was processing, not just writing the whole time but remembering certain things and trying to organise it. It was at the tail end of my time in Montana, the real dregs of winter, not the kind of early Christmassy snow, but just fucking cold. The song is about that as well, I think. It’s me writing a song about the time of processing that just before I’d written the piece. Noticing the absence, noticing the attempt to make sense of it. It’s always going to feel weird. It’s the missing limb type of thing, metaphorically.

“Putting it at the end of Disc 2 made sense because it’s hard to go anywhere after that. It is about that window of processing something like that and being in this cold environment. In a way, you really have to process it by yourself. There were lots of friends I reminisced with, but on some deep down level, you have to look inside yourself as a total barren individual to really come to terms with that kind of thing.”

A. G. COOK

All the blends are happening with synthesis rather than things just fading into each other. There was a real attitude I was nostalgic for, but I was also still trying to do it in a futuristic or advanced way. That was the most natural one for me because it was a very clear brief,” says Cook.

Disc 2 is where things really get interesting, though, as A. G. Cook goes deeper into this own warped vision of Britop with his own voice on a collection of lo-fi pop songs that are the most personal music of his whole career rather than making them too overtly beautiful, they are often scarred by jolting and harsh guitar lines and sonic textures that sweep in giving the whole thing a blissful yet woozy tension. It’s his most instinctive work. “It feels the most present in the sense that it feels like I accidentally took a photo of something, and I’m looking at the photo. It has an immediate feel,” he says.

Despite having done a lot of music in this lane before - ‘7G’ even featured covers of rock staples like Blur’s ‘Beetlebum’ and Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today’ - Cook is aware that the pivot from electronic mayhem might be a bit jarring. “Sometimes there’s a little bit of a shock value thing with the contrast between a typical PC Music thing and something with instruments, but compared to the ‘Apple’ / ‘7G’ ones, I think there’s a bit more of a developed language between the use of guitar and the guitar tone,” he explains.

The Present disc is the emotional heart of ‘Britpop’.

“A lot of the other songs are a little bit melancholy in

a sense. It’s easier for me to drift into that,” says A. G. wistfully. “It really made me double down on the electronic tracks being more uplifting. Some of those electronic tracks are a testament to Sophie as well, sometimes some of the things I’ll do in a DJ set or some of the fun dancey pieces are really as much as a tribute as something as literal as ‘Without’ so I think it’s quite interesting to have both on there. The intensity of the lyrical moments really made me double down on the fun that surrounds it on Disc 1 and Disc 3.”

Disc 3 is concerned about the future, a concept which has always been tied to PC Music. From their formation and throughout a dizzying decade run of music, they have frequently been labelled as pioneers for a new way of making music; terms like future pop merged into hyperpop as groundbreaking visionary artists like SOPHIE began to imagine a bright new pop utopia built on the creative freedoms and invention of PC Music. “The idea of aiming for the future of something is a bit silly, but I’m always generally trying to be quite progressive or optimistic in a sense,” says Cook passionately. “A lot of my really close collaborators from back then through to now, and honestly, something I shared with SOPHIE more than anyone was this ambition to not repeat things.

It’s more of an attitude than a sound. SOPHIE was so skilled at making a hybrid between her concepts and actual physical scientific sounds of the drums and the synthesis. That’s all her. No one has really

“I SEE THE LINEAGE OF GERI HALLIWELL WEARING THE UNION JACK DRESS, TONY BLAIR AND THE TELETUBBIES” A.

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done it at that level. I was nowhere near that level of skill. SOPHIE was someone who could really synergise that and make it such a literal force that it actually confused people. People were saying, ‘Oh, maybe this is objectively the future because it’s so technically advanced’.

“What we shared personally and what I share with a lot of other collaborators like Charli is much more of an attitude than a sound. The idea was that working instinctively and quickly would put your guard down and take you somewhere you hadn’t thought of. We would actually have conversations about it. It wouldn’t be so serious. There’d be a lot of whimsy to it, not afraid to take the piss out of each other, but there’d always be a real sense of how can we always go somewhere we haven’t thought of ourselves yet and challenge and have that feeling that anything can happen.”

There you go again: anything can happen. On the final disc of ‘Britpop’, so much stuff happens that it will leave your head spinning. “Disc 3 is the lost-the-plot one,” laughs Cook. “Having no context whatsoever is quite a nice feeling. The future was like messages in a bottle thrown out in this crazy way.”

Despite the glorious ecstatic feeling of many of these electronic symphonies, they are underpinned by a feeling of uneasiness that persists across the entire album as a whole. “These could all lead to something or nothing; they’re all songs and tracks that I like, but they all take some kind of strange risk that makes me uncertain,” he continues.

“Even on the very last song called ‘Out Of Time’, there are parts of it that are out of time: the pun of running out of time at the end of an album. Each disc has something that makes me not doubt myself but be uncomfortable in a fun way. They’re all hard to pin down which is the most emblematic for the future.”

The future disc offers one shining example of the past, present, and future, all meeting together as one on the lithe pop banger ‘Lucifer’. “There are no features across the thing, but Charli is doing the hook across the chorus,” says A. G. excitedly. “It’s weirdly a demo that I started myself, and she was into it and rewrote parts of it. This is pre-’How I’m Feeling Now’ and pre-’Crash’, so quite a long time ago, I’d been toying with this.”

‘Britpop’ is the start of a new era for an artist who has already reshaped what pop can be and is now looking to hit even greater heights. With PC Music transitioning to an archive label, the focus now is on bringing the all-encompassing world of ‘Britpop’ to life as it is released on A. G. Cook’s intriguing and mysterious new label, New Alias, with all manner of subversive projects and stunts in the pipeline for example the music journalism parody of the Witchfork media website and the aural and visual overload of the much anticipated and hyped ‘Britpop’ shows.

Despite all this excitement and pop nonsense, though, A. G. Cook is keeping his feet on the ground.

He’s not a pop star, remember. Or is he?

“I’m keen to do this properly and do some really good shows and then get back to being a producer,” he says with a smile. “For me, the ultimate way of organising my career is this episodic style, a season of A. G. Cook, a season of collaborating. I really do enjoy shaping someone’s sound.”

Just like it was in 2013, the most important thing is always what comes next. Shaping the future by understanding and reimagining the past and what it means to be an artist in 2024, A. G. Cook’s future is filled with endless possibilities; remember what he said: anything can happen. ■ A. G. Cook’s album

‘Britpop’ is out 10th May.

READDORK.COM 51.

COVER STORY

Symptom

LIFE

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WILLOW

of WILLOW embarks on an exploration of self-love on ‘empathogen’, an album bursting with new-found confidence.

by ALI SHUTLER. photography by SALOMÉ GOMIS-TREZISE.

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COVER STORY

’ve never given up on the idea that if I practise enough, I can make music that can change people’s lives,” says Willow.

It’s an outlook that can be found across her back catalogue, but that ambition really sits at the forefront of WILLOW’s sixth album, ‘empathogen’.

“I’ve never made a record that’s sounded the same as what’s come before,” she continues, having comfortably pulled from conscious pop, psychedelic folk and R&B since the release of 2015 debut album ‘Ardipithecus’. 2020’s ‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ was inspired by urgent 00s pop-punk, while 2022’s ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’ was a proggy, intricate purge of heartache and uncertainty. Those two guitar-driven records inadvertently exposed Willow to a

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wider audience, coinciding with a new generation discovering the cathartic power of heavier music.

Despite being one of the few artists to break through the nostalgia of that scene and offer something new to the genre, WILLOW’s got no interest in staying in the same space. “I want to challenge myself,” she says. “I felt like if I made another rock album, it wouldn’t help me grow as a person or as an artist. Every album I’ve ever done is driven by the desire to make me more than I was before, and nothing to do with external circumstances.”

She knows it’s a risk to change things up, but at the same time, “good music is good music,” she offers. “And I feel like my fans just really like good music.” ‘empathogen’ is built around funk and jazz, with flourishes of pop.

Despite those different sonic explorations, every one of WILLOW’s records has the same hopeful spirit. “I feel like all of my music is characterised by a reaching and a yearning for something greater than what we’re experiencing in the present moment,” she offers. Album six is no different. “I’m really excited; I’m really hopeful,” she says.

Empathogen is the scientific name for naturally occurring substances that people have been using for thousands of years to “connect to each other, connect to the earth and live with a deeper sense of awareness,” says WILLOW, listing marijuana and a number of plant medicines as examples. “I wanted to channel that energy into this album,” she continues, building community throughout the recording process. “Let’s come together, let’s sit in a circle around a fire, let’s have the plant medicine and let’s sing. It was all about getting deep down into this mysterious thing called the moment,” she explains.

It might sound intangible, but WILLOW has twisted those sprawling, baggy ideas into something fiercely relatable.

Piano-driven lead single ‘symptom of life’ is a lush slab of self-reflection that takes the mantra “life is pain” and switches things up. “Yes, there is a lot of pain with living, but there’s also this inexplicable beauty to be found,” says WILLOW, while the lyrics vibrate with uncertainty. “While beauty is a symptom of life, gotta decide if I’m gonna see it,” she sings.

That struggle between growth and fear also provides the backbone for follow-up single ‘big feelings’, which is a beautiful, empathetic song about overwhelming emotions and hard-fought acceptance. “All my life, I’ve had these explosive emotions. When you’re a kid, you’re constantly told not to cry or scream.” As you get older, you’re pressured to make yourself and your feelings small, explains WILLOW. “The way people react to how you’re expressing yourself can really mess with how you view yourself,” she says.

“The thing is, if you can’t shut them down or channel them, you’re left in this middle ground where you’re just dying inside. That song is for all the people who just want to feel their big feelings.

Don’t shy away from them,” she encourages.

“Love them, and never be afraid to fully be who you truly are.”

“I think seeing people being unapologetically themselves can be scary,” she adds. Some tracks on ‘empathogen’ are glitching and intricate, others are bold and theatrical. “Every moment has its own voice,” says WILLOW. There are also rumours of a collaboration with St. Vincent’s Annie Clark after the pair shared photos together

WILLOW

“THERE IS A LOT OF PAIN WITH LIVING, BUT THERE’S ALSO THIS INEXPLICABLE BEAUTY TO BE FOUND” WILLOW

in the studio.

“My God. Annie is one of the most intelligent, proficient musicians I have ever met. She just really knows what the fuck she’s doing. I aspire to be half as amazing as her,” says Willow with Annie telling Dork: “I love her. She’s so talented, and a real musical risk taker. The breadth of her knowledge of music, the things she loves, and her influences are so, so cool.

I’m very excited to see everything she does.”

While WILLOW wants to keep the specifics of the collab under wraps, she does say her part turned into a “deepseated love song, but not for the reasons people might expect. It was built on this foundation of gratitude and reverence,” she adds, inspired by that shared sense of creation of community. “Working with her makes me want to keep wanting to do music.”

That confidence wasn’t there at the start of ‘empathogen’, though. “I was a little bit lost after ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’,” WILLOW admits. “Everything about that era was such a blur, emotionally and mentally. I’d screamed, I’d let this heartbreak out. I was so proud of what I’d made and what that album taught me, but I didn’t know what to do with myself next,” she continues, with that era feeling like a complete purge. “I certainly didn’t know what music I wanted to make,” she adds.

That changed after a road trip soundtracked by “Prince of Cool” Chet Baker. “That music just cracked my heart open,” says WILLOW, who also pulled inspiration from Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye and Hiatus Kaiyote. “Sometimes one song can change your life,” she grins. “’<COPINGMECHANISM>’ was very dark for multiple reasons that were extremely important and needed to happen for this album to be made,” she reflects, with ‘empathogen’ more joyful, more optimistic and lighter. “Not to be gross, but it’s like having a pimple - you need to pop it and get the bad shit out before your skin can heal. It’s the same with emotions. You can’t heal if you still have all that weird, toxic shit inside of you.”

“It does feel like music romanticism the darkness a little too much,” WILLOW continues. “We know there’s depth and beauty in sadness, but there’s depth and beauty in joy as well. Some people are scared of fully embracing that joy because there’s always that fear that you’re going to lose it, but I say go headfirst into the joy.

Soak it up while you can.”

She’s well aware there’s probably going to be another down point in her life that’ll inspire another inward-facing project like ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’, “because that’s life. Everyone has those ups and downs, but both those moods have something very important to teach us,” WILLOW says. And ‘empathogen’ isn’t without flecks of darkness either, with songs about intrusive thoughts and escape to go alongside the urgent, cathartic yell “I know I have, I know you have problems” in ‘big feelings’.

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COVER STORY

“WOMEN, PEOPLE OF COLOUR AND ANYONE WHO’S BEEN OPPRESSED, OUR JOY IS A TRUE ACT OF REBELLION”

WILLOW

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It’s a fearless approach, considering how intense the spotlight can be. WILLOW’s dating life is routine tabloid fodder, while a conversation on her Red Table Talk podcast (which she hosts alongside her mum, JadaPinkett, and grandma, Adrienne BanfieldNorris) about her polyamorous identity sparked headlines all over the world. And that’s before we get to just how famous and well-known her family are. The thing is, WILLOW sees her honesty as necessary. “If I don’t stay vulnerable with my music, I’d be wasting my time. I’d be wasting this beautiful opportunity to tell people something meaningful.”

“There is a lot of judgement,” she admits.

“But it feels like we’ve gotten so disconnected from each other, and I want to be someone that brings others together,” WILLOW says. “The best musicians are the ones who encourage community and champion that idea of coming together. It’s the most important message because we all know how much violence comes from believing the opposite.”

The music always comes from a personal space, but it often becomes bigger than that. ‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ started as a love letter to the pop-punk bands she listened to as a teenager and helped channel feelings of fury and angst, but that record quickly went on to spark conversations of race, gender and belonging.

“Music has always been a vehicle of social change, and rock has always been a genre of rebellion,” starts WILLOW. “Those two things mixed together create a very interesting arena

for a lot of opposing ideas to bounce off each other. I think being a Black woman shredding on the guitar is as much of an artistic statement as it is a political statement. Being a Black woman who has emotional, physical, mental and artistic autonomy is also an act of artistic and political rebellion,” she says.

With both ‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ and ‘empathogen’, WILLOW wants to “encourage people to take on their autonomy, and inspire others to do so as well.”

She stops short of calling ‘empathogen’ a political album - “I don’t like politics. The way that it’s done is deeply hateful and is lacking in love and compassion” – but does believe it’s a protest record.

“Women, people of colour and anyone who’s been oppressed, our joy is a true act of rebellion. I want this album to reflect the joy of those who haven’t felt like they’ve had a voice,” she explains.

She goes on to call everything from 2015 debut album ‘ARDIPITHECUS’ to “pinnacle of my adolescence” ‘<COPINGMECHANISM>’ one era, with “empathogen’ representing the first chapter in her new, more-evolved era.

“It’s different because my skill level and focus has increased, but it’s also a return to what I was talking about in ‘ARDIPITHECUS’, [2017’s second album] ‘The 1st’ and [standalone single] ‘Female Energy’,” she offers. “I was digging deep to find myself then, and I feel like ‘empathogen’ embodies that.”

“I used to shy away from those older records because I was so young when I made them,” WILLOW continues. She’s an artist who’s always been more interested in the

WILLOW

future than her own past. “But listening back to them now, I can hear my voice growing into what it is now. It’s definitely an act of rebellion to want to go back to our roots and figure out who we really are,” she adds, believing she’s both “ancient and brand new”.

Across her six albums (“That sounds like a lot”), WILLOW has never once tried to chase trends or done something because it was popular.

“The best artists say what’s in their heart, and people relate to that.” It’s an outlook shaped by WILLOW’s debut single ‘Whip My Hair’, which gave her a global megahit at the age of ten. It was swiftly followed up by a number of singles that tried to capture the same boisterous energy and a slot supporting Justin Bieber around the world, but the whole experience was so intense that she walked away from music for a time.

WILLOW grew up in an extremely musical household. Her dad is a rapper; her mum fronted nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom, while her older brother Jaden has made a name for himself with innovative, experimental hip-hop. It was Goldfrapp’s 2000 debut album ‘Felt Mountain’ that really spoke to her, though. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is really dig deep within myself and put that out into the world,” she says. “It might not be pretty, it might not be popular, but let’s get right in there.”

“I love the pop stars of this world. They are fantastic and are fabulous, but they do something I could never do. And that’s just the truth,” she offers. “I want to play intricate shit, challenge people’s ears and push the envelope of what people perceive as being pleasurable to listen to. That’s my future.” Recent tours have seen WILLOW take to festival main stages across the world, alongside a string of arenas supporting Machine Gun Kelly, but for ‘empathogen’, she wants something more intimate.

That’s not to say WILLOW hasn’t had her share of hit songs. 2021’s ‘Meet Me At Our Spot’ is a wide-eyed burst of youthful romance, while 2015’s ‘Wait A Minute!’ keeps having breakout moments as it resonates with new audiences.

“I’m going to be honest with you; I don’t know why that keeps happening,” grins WILLOW. “I do know that ‘Wait A Minute! came from such a spontaneous place, and I was in a complete flow state when I was recording it. Maybe that energy and the space the song came from is what makes people feel the way they feel. I’m so grateful it’s connecting, but I honestly put almost zero thought into that track.” It was the same with ‘Meet Me At Our Spot’. “Maybe I’m overthinking things.”

“I trust that the music will find its audience, but when things really do pop off, a part of me wishes I could recapture that energy and do more with it,” she admits. “And maybe one day I’ll do a full album of stream-of-consciousness music.”

“If you’re craving a certain thing when you go into the studio, though, it’s not going to be pure, and I’m not interested in making music like that,” WILLOW continues. “Everyone wants a hit album, including me, but I would rather just say what’s on my heart and stretch my abilities. Maybe it’ll happen while I do that. I am so grateful when things go so well, but I am careful not to latch on to that.”

Following a number of breakout hits and the acclaim that came with her rock era, ‘empathogen’ is shaping up to be a focused, confident and ambitious album driven by purpose. From the

“IT’S LIKE HAVING A PIMPLE - YOU NEED TO POP IT AND GET THE BAD SHIT OUT”

WILLOW

outside, it seems like WILLOW has finally got to a place where her success is seen as hers and not the result of a surname.

“You know what, if six albums doesn’t get me to that place, I do not know what will,” she smirks. “I try not to think about it because thinking about that has haunted me for so many years. I see myself as being a beautiful musician who could always learn more. I try not to get too caught up in worrying about what other people think I deserve.”

“If I’m studying the shit out of the craft and I’m really trying my best every day to understand the science and the magic that is music, there’s not much more I can do. I think that’s worthy of some self-love,” she adds.

It’s an outlook she wants to share with ‘empathogen’. “I want people to tell others they are loved more,” WILLOW starts. “I want people to look into the eyes of each other and think, ‘Wow, you are God’. I want people to look into the eyes of animals and say, ‘Wow, you are God’. I want people to look into the mirror and believe, ‘This is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen - not just because of what I look like but because of who I am’. That’s the energy I want to bring to the world right now.” ■

WILLOW’s album ‘empathogen’ is out 3rd May.

READDORK.COM 57.

ABOMIFEATURE

LYNKS lets the mask drop for their personal dance-pop debut, ‘ABOMINATION’.

by CIARAN PICKER. photography by MARS WASHINGTON.

“I’M NOT TRYING TO BE HOT OR SEXY; I’M JUST BEING REAL” LYNKS

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I

f an example was ever needed to show how far genre has broken down in recent years, look no further than Lynks. Ostensibly a dance-pop act, they’ve featured on tracks with punk-rockers Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, toured with thrash-punk icons Amyl and the Sniffers, and featured on art-pop hero Christine and the Queens’ curated line-up for 2023’s Meltdown festival. On debut album ‘ABOMINATION’, all of these disparate strands combine to create a knockout record that will have you crying in the club, murdering the dancefloor, and calling your ex-situationship to see if they’re still up.

Lynks was born in the dark, sweaty corners of Bristol’s nightclubs, taking freedom, liberation, and a heaped spoonful of queer joy and smashing the concepts together, the result being something unlike anything else on the scene. Combining, in their own words, a “compulsive addiction to RuPaul’s Drag Race” and a sharply Gen-Z message, Lynks breaks the mould as the best (and maybe only) pop star to ever grace the stage in custom-made and gorgeously garish gimp suits.

‘ABOMINATION’ is the most intimate Lynks has been yet, exploring the sad dangers of London’s gay dating scene, inbuilt shame about their own sexuality, and fear that this fifteen minutes of fame is about to come to an end. It wouldn’t be a Lynks record, though, without a good slathering of humour, wit, promiscuity, and sickening floor fillers.

“It’s good that music seems to be working because I’d be a therapist otherwise, and I just can’t be serious about anything,” Lynks giggles, thus proving their own point. “The hardest moments in life are always the funniest for me; I guess you could say something like ‘tragedy is the richest well for humour’ if you wanted to.” It’s this inbuilt ability to turn negative situations to their advantage that has made Lynks so popular. That, along with the tireless work that the musician behind the mask, Elliott, put into making Lynks a success. “I wrote the album in 2022 in my bedroom and basically just sent it to a whole load of record labels.”

This process came with its own trials and tribulations, with their laptop getting stolen right in the middle of creating the album. “My two mottos are ‘trust the process’ and ‘don’t overthink shit’,” Lynks calmly admits. “If I live by that, then I can get over the moments where I’m like, ‘Have I fucked it?’ and focus on getting mentioned in The Guardian!”

Hard work and manifestations will only get you so far, though, and clearly, Lynks has that little something extra: talent. That’s why ‘ABOMINATION’ remains the same album that was created in a bedroom in East London. The most daring release of Lynks’ career so far, it is an avant-garde exploration of dance music, moving through hyper-pop, hip-hop, and trance, sometimes even in the same song.

“Writing an album is so different to just singles. Not everything has to be on-brand; it’s more creatively free and means I can try on different personas.”

Across the course of the record, we travel from existential crises in ‘USE IT OR LOSE IT’ and titletrack ‘ABOMINATION’, into lust-driven ‘CPR’ and ‘TENNIS SONG’, and through a Mean Girls-esque break-up anthem in the form of ‘NEW BOYFRIEND’.

All the things that Elliott has been through, Lynks has allowed them to openly express themself for the first time.

“I’ve been thinking about that question, ‘Where does Lynks end and where do I begin?’, and I don’t

LYNKS

really know the answer. It’s infinitely easier writing for other characters – I put the mask on, and I don’t care how I’m perceived because it’s Lynks. Perception is the number one enemy for creation.”

Elliott feels this especially deeply as an openly queer artist, with the whole album being rightly unapologetic in its wonderfully camp yet realistic view of life as a gay man in 21st Century Britain.

“Lynks is honestly the best thing in my life because it’s allowed me to get closer to my friends and family, to just be me without trying to fit into all these expectations about how I’m supposed to act because of the categories that society’s put me in.”

Living an “unfiltered existence”, in their words, was not something that Elliott believed possible before Lynks. “I guess the whole mask thing is a literal part of Lynks, but also something I’ve always had on. I just thought that if I let that go, everyone would know who I really was.”

Coming out, for want of a better term, is never an easy experience, one made worse by a persisting social view of what LGBTQ+ people ‘should’ be like.

Through drag, Lynks is pushing back against these stereotypes that can be so damaging for young queer people. “Lynks has made me more open because I’m not trying to be hot or sexy; I’m just being real.” They continue, “There are all these views that queer people are all, like, narcissistic, or loud, or whatever. If Lynks can be those things, then I can leave that on stage and just act how I’ve always wanted to in my own life.”

It’s not that much of a surprise that Lynks has found themself so many fans amongst punk bands, really, with the whole point of the act to be unequivocally real, sadly still a radical stance in 2024. It’s why the record’s moments of introspection are so well-received, with the mid-album duo ‘LEVICTUS 18’ and ‘ABOMINATION’ speaking to a continuing homophobia within the world; discussion of homosexuality as a sin in ‘LEVICTUS 18’ is paired with the contrasting world of science in ‘ABOMINATION’, with Lynks setting their sights on the unequal world of healthcare through the rules of blood donation (“gay blood isn’t fit for circulation”).

As much as the sonics on the record are, on the whole, uplifting and designed to dance to, emotion is at the heart of this whole project. Hopelessness reigns supreme in the menacing backdrop of ‘I FEEL LIKE SHIT’, while the record culminates in the unstable and anxiety-centric ‘FLASH IN THE PAN’, a track that sort of sums up everything that this LP is trying to achieve.

“It’s really ambitious,” Lynks admits, “but I wasn’t going to overthink it because it’s the first album, and it is just real life. I have got this streak inside that tells me Lynks is going to be massive, but I’ve also got to be rational and realise that it might not happen. When this album got the green light, my first thought was, ‘Great, that’s bought a few more years!’”

The contradiction between optimist and realist is the album’s central ethos, carrying an incredibly raw and endearing quality. It’s this rawness, the DIY, grassroots feeling of the record, that makes clear how far Lynks can go, refusing to bend or break to fit into boxes they don’t want to be in.

“Perfectionism is the death of everything good

in this world,” Lynks says poetically. “I made the decision early on that I didn’t want a sense of cohesion. Like with ‘TENNIS SONG’, it goes from being my favourite song one day, then the next I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck have I done?’’’ Stemming from the chaos of club culture, where misfortune and setbacks are greeted with laughter and bombastic side eye, Lynks was built to succeed within an industry that is always trying to knock you back down to size.

More than that, though, it means that they know how to put on one hell of a live show. Their UK tour kicks off in April and includes a stop at London’s KOKO, before travelling across the channel for their first-ever European tour. Lynks must be looking forward to it, right?

“To be honest, it’s amazing, but it’s really overwhelming,” they laugh. “I never think of people listening to my music; it’s just a lot of adrenaline and pressure.” Nevertheless, they promise something that you’re probably unlikely to experience anywhere else. “We’ve got choreography, we’ll have a really sick set, it is definitely going to be one of the best tours ever.” It’s hard to describe exactly what a Lynks show is like, especially now there’s label cash to splash, but in their words: “Imagine a Sugababes gig, but you’ve taken a whole bag of shrooms. Or a pop show that’s been put through a Nutribullet. Basically, you’ve got all the campery of Charli XCX, but people mosh.”

While chatting with Lynks/Elliott, it’s clear that they’re torn between two competing personalities; one that feels as though it’s all going to come crashing down and one that says they can do anything they want and is going to be a superstar. As such, it’s ambition and self-awareness that are Lynks’ most striking attributes and explain why they can blaze so bright without fizzling out.

Ambition does not equal arrogance, however, and they’re therefore cautious when asked about hopes for the year ahead. “It’s really tough because out of anything I’ve ever done, it’s Lynks that has had the most positive reception, so I’m fighting with myself to just set achievable goals.”

These goals include a television performance and a tentative nod towards that little festival known as Glastonbury. Always one to tease and entice, “I’ve got the sickest idea for a Later… with Jools Holland performance, but I’m not going to tell you what it is; you’ll have to wait and hope that I get on it!” At the moment, everything is coming up, Lynks, so that wait is likely to be a short one.

Equality is something we often talk about in music, whether in terms of racial and gender bias on festival line-ups, the fact that many music moguls are still straight, white men, or the commercialism that means working-class acts struggle to make it past their first live shows. Lynks proves why representation is so important on the scene. Taking their queerness, turning it up to eleven, and donning a luminous yellow tennis ball mask, they’re all the evidence you need to highlight that music is all about celebrating difference in any and all forms.

Lynks is burning bright, spreading like wildfire, and hotter than ever. ■ Lynks’ album

‘ABOMINATION’ is out now.

READDORK.COM 59.

Luke wears: suit: Two point Two, vest: Holzweiler, rings: Rat Betty (red), Pyrrha (blue), Capsule 11 (yellow)

COVER STORY

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B

BOY DIVISION LUKE HEMMINGS HEMMINGS LUKE

5SOS’ LUKE HEMMINGS bares his introverted soul on his new solo EP, ‘boy’ - a love letter to nostalgia and a quest for self-discovery.

by ABIGAIL FIRTH. photography by SARAH LOUISE BENNETT. styled by CHLOE, FLO FASHION STYLING assisted by AMELIA CONNOLLY. hair and makeup by SANDRA HAHNEL.

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COVER STORY

uke Hemmings’ time in the spotlight – now clocking in at over a decade – has been a delicate balance between facing thousands of people and facing himself when he steps off that stage.

Much more private and shier in person than you’d expect from the charismatic frontman of one of the biggest bands to blow up in the 2010s, 5 Seconds Of Summer, Luke’s second solo venture, the upcoming EP ‘boy’, is a representation of who he is alone, at home and in hotel rooms between those massive moments.

“My default mode is very introverted, like trying not to look anyone in the eyes and not talking to anyone,” says Luke. We’re chatting over Zoom, camera off. “So it does take two minutes to get in that mode. But, you know, I think that’s kind of what life is about, duality.”

The various dualities that run through Luke’s life – not only his reserved nature coming up against his job as a performer, but his longing for home and security while spending a significant portion of his time out on the road – and the anxieties that bring forth are explored on both the album and ‘boy’.

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“SONGWRITING IS SUCH A WAY TO DEAL WITH HOW I SEE THE WORLD AND HOW I FEEL” LUKE

His solo debut, ‘When Facing The Things We Turn Away From’, released in 2021, was written as a pandemic-led experiment, but the introspective ideas presented on that record haven’t left him. The album introduced Luke as a songwriter who looked inwards, reflected on his unusual adolescence, longed for normality; time spent away from the band he’d always written with gave him space to explore those themes in music, and those feelings weren’t limited to his lockdown headspace.

Describing the feeling he aims

HEMMINGS

to convey on ‘boy’ as a vague and constant ache, it’s wholly present on the hazy balladry of the EP’s first offering ‘Shakes’.

“I think for me, songwriting is such a way to deal with how I see the world and how I feel, like my place around people,” Luke says.

“It is a constant up and down, and I think I’m just sort of capturing moments in time of how I feel. This whole EP has this sort of longing to go home, and this ache for more emotionally. I think it was a definite need to get back to normalcy at home a little bit, with my wife and

LUKE HEMMINGS IDLES

just being at home. It’s difficult to explain; it’s just something that I feel within me that I need to express and get out. Otherwise, that sort of gets trapped there.”

Growing up just outside of Sydney, Luke’s working-class upbringing was flipped on its head during his teen years. Initially posting solo covers on YouTube after being taught how to play the guitar by his two brothers, he was soon joined by schoolmates Calum Hood and Michael Clifford, and later Ashton Irwin, who’d go on to form the group that’d catapult the four-piece to international fame.

A swift uprooting to London in his later teens, following the instant success of 5 Seconds Of Summer’s early touring schedule, and a whirlwind first few years as a musician while the group dropped back-to-back albums between arena tours, clearly left him longing for normality as he grew up.

“I think what I’ve found is that, you know, it’s a unique youth that I’ve had, but I don’t think they’re necessarily unique stories to me. And I think I’ve found that even more when releasing that first album, like, oh shit, this is something that people really resonate with. I think it’s just figuring out who you are, where your place is in the world and how you deal with your inner thoughts and emotions. They’re all universal stories, even though they’re very specific to me.”

“THE SONGS I’M WRITING ARE LOOKING BACK A LITTLE BIT, BUT THEY’RE ALSO LOOKING FORWARD” LUKE

A common thread across Luke’s writing in recent years, whether it be his solo album, work on 5SOS’ last record or this EP, is pure nostalgia. From the chorus lyric of his debut single ‘Starting Line’ “I’m missing all these memories, maybe they were never mine”, to the ‘good old days’ sentimentality of 5SOS tracks like ‘Best Friends’ and ‘2011’, to his first solo tour being titled ‘Nostalgia For A Time That Never Existed’, Luke consistently calls

Luke wears: trench coat: vintage Italian leather (Sylk store), trousers: Sylk store vintage, shoes: Dr. Martens, necklaces: North Cross, Capsule 11, rings: North Cross, Rat Betty, Capsule 11

HEMMINGS

back to a past he seems to still be unpacking himself.

“When you look back at stuff, for me I don’t really get it in a clear day by day way. And some people’s brains work like that, but mine is very blurry and sort of becomes like this, I don’t know, wash of memories. For the tour, I wanted to get across that with the name and go straight to the heart of it. It’s kind of that crazy name, but it’s a longing for an idealised time that we’ve

dreamed up, not actual memories.

People’s memories change as they get older, and they remember things differently, and the songs I’m writing are looking back a little bit, but they’re also looking forward. I think there’s always going to be like a feeling to my songs of trying to figure things out, whether that’s me now or me at 15.”

Now living in Los Angeles with his other half, singer-songwriter Sierra Deaton, his life is wildly different from that of the teenager he speaks of. Still only 27, Luke seems to be both someone who had to grow up quickly, but has never really aged either, which honestly, is a common emotion across most millennial-gen-z-cusp twentysomethings.

It’s not groundbreaking, but it becomes apparent that songwriting is the vehicle he uses to deal with that.

“I’m always writing; it doesn’t really ever fully stop. But after the band’s fifth album [2022’s ‘5SOS5’], I was writing little bits and pieces at home, in Sydney and in LA, and then dabbling with whatever I was feeling. It was a lot of traveling, planes and hotel rooms and stuff, so I was feeling a bit insular and a bit existential, and that’s kind of where it came from. I was listening to different things and pulling in many different influences that I

READDORK.COM 63.

COVER STORY

“NO ONE WAS EXPECTING ANY MORE MUSIC FROM ME, SO I JUST MADE WHATEVER I WANTED TO MAKE” LUKE

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HEMMINGS

hadn’t really tapped into before. It’s hard to pinpoint because I write for my stuff in such a different manner. It’s in very sporadic places, sporadic times, and then I piece it together.

“For my stuff, I have this specific emotion that I’m going for, so when I get it, I’m like, I know this is a great part. Sometimes, it can take a long time to piece it together and try and finish it off because I know exactly what I’m looking for, and if it’s not right, then I can feel that straight away. It does get frustrating but makes for hopefully something good at the end.”

Writing on the road, and between ‘home’ (LA) and ‘home-home’ (Sydney), ‘boy’ came together in very different circumstances to what he’s used to when working with the band.

Noting that the collective process is usually much quicker, as they’re able to bounce ideas off one another and create whole songs in a single day, writing solo takes away the safety net of having another brain to fall back on.

The only other brain on both ‘When Facing The Things We Turn Away From’ and ‘boy’ is Sammy Witte (who’s also worked with big hitters like Harry Styles, SZA, Noah Kahan and Halsey), a trusted creative partner who Luke says is able to filter whatever ideas he’s bringing to the table into something that makes sense (although Luke is a producer on the record, he notes “My producing level is like, getting something like a demo-y thing, something I would never send anyone except Sam”).

No longer harbouring the nerves of stepping into the solo realm for the first time, Luke was instead unsure of how he’d live up to his own expectations, wondering if he’d get to the point where he was putting out music that did his debut album justice.

“I guess the way I was looking at going into this is like, no one was expecting any more music from me, so I just made whatever I wanted to make, and then it ended up being something I really love. So that’s kind of how I approach my solo stuff like no one,” he hesitates before landing on, “no one needs it.”

He continues, “I don’t know if that’s the wrong way to put it. I wasn’t sure if it was just because we were in COVID, and that’s what the first solo album was, this crazy turn of events - like, can I do this on my own again? It was challenging and rewarding in a different way. I love it more than the first album, for sure.”

We’re under strict instruction not to spill what ‘boy’ sounds like. Luke does say he’s taken the parts that resonated the most with him from ‘When Facing The Things We Turn Away From’ and expanded on them, and that he was listening to a lot of 2000s New York indie scene albums (think LCD Soundsystem and The Strokes) during the recording, but beyond two tracks, we’re sworn to secrecy.

“There’s seven tracks,” Luke confirms. We can tell you they’re all very good songs that remain within the universe of ‘Shakes’. “I’m very close to all the songs, and by the point that we’re picking first singles and all that, I’m a mess. It’s just too much for me. I’m like, these all suck. I hate these. I get into that space. And then I’ll be like, oh my god, I love these. I’ll go back and forth because I’m so

LUKE HEMMINGS

“I WAS SCARED TO DEATH OF THOSE SHOWS THAT I DID AND I FELT REALLY GOOD AFTER THEM” LUKE

stressed about letting go of them. ‘Shakes’ was one where, when that chorus played, I was like, oh, Jesus, this just sums up the whole feeling of what I’m trying to get across. When I would play it to friends and family, that would be one that they would pick out, and I was like, okay, the instincts were correct on this.”

Coming next is the pacier ‘Close My Eyes’, the first song written for the EP (he says he’s said that about a few songs, but is absolutely sure now that ‘Close My Eyes’ came first), which sees Luke experiment with vintage synths and embrace the

HEMMINGS

uncertainty of the drum machines he was playing with, again backing wistful lyrics like “Where is the time I lost?”

Solidifying his brand with the title of his upcoming spring tour, it’s also his first time going out on the road solo. Last summer, he played two shows at Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre, where he performed his first album live, boosting his confidence enough to go out and do it again, even bigger and across several continents.

“Nostalgia for a time that never existed - you can expect that,” he deadpans when we ask how

the setup is looking. “We’ve still gotta rehearse for it, so we’ll see how I go. The music is, for me, something you can get so lost in, and I just want the tour to feel like that as well. I want the whole tour to feel like a dream - surreal and fun and blurry and you walk away from it just feeling like you’re a bit more connected to the songs and to whatever that feeling I’m trying to get across is.”

As Luke prepares to go out on tour again, that duality returns.

“I feel great about it, but I also feel nervous about it. I think playing the two shows last year was a reminder that people like these songs, and it brought it from words on the screen to real humans in a room screaming the lyrics back and that was really powerful for me. I was scared to death of those shows that I did and I felt really good after them. Most of the time, for something that you’re apprehensive about, there’s usually something good on the other side of all that anxiety.”

For all the time Luke Hemmings spends thinking about the past, he’s firm on where this takes him. Overall, his solo work serves as an exercise in bettering himself as an artist and as a person, pushing past his anxiety and out of his comfort zone towards a greater goal. The music he’s putting out now brings Luke closer to the person he is in private.

“I think a lot of the reason why – apart from emotional reasons and feeling I have something to say as an artist on my own – making solo music and playing solo shows are uncomfortable, and they’re difficult to navigate for me emotionally and anxiety wise, is because I just want to be great at what I do, I want to be a great performer, I want to be a great writer and producer, and I think this is my route to do that.” ■ Luke

Hemmings’ EP ‘boy’ is out 26th April.

READDORK.COM 65.

FEATURE

PORIJ are serving up their very own, innovative take on dance with debut album ‘Teething’.

by CIARAN PICKER. photography by JESSE GLAZZARD.

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hen Porij released their To prove this point, their newest single, breakout single ‘Nobody ‘Unpredictable’, is all about a period where vocalist Egg Scared’ in 2021, it appeared felt that they were constantly in flux. More than that, as if the world was their oyster. though, the song is a totally different incarnation than They snagged not only a the original concept, emphasising Porij’s obsession with support slot for electronic warping boundaries. superstars Metronomy but also “It was originally quite dark house music, but I for indie-pop heavyweights think it was just too on the nose,” Egg levels. Nathan Coldplay, setting them on agrees, “We tried a whole load of small changes, like a course set for the stars. It different high-hat patterns or whatever, until we just seemed as if Porij were not only destined for the big lost all perspective and had to say, ‘Right, let’s do time but that it was imminent. something totally different’.” The result was, in Egg’s Beneath the surface, though, the band were at a crisis words, “wonky garage”, creating a bouncy, upbeat point, with two members leaving in early 2022, replaced dance anthem reminiscent of ‘After Laughter’-era with quite literally hours to spare before huge moments Paramore: gut-wrenching lyrics complemented by a in Porij’s career; drummer Nathan Carroll entered the shiny, summery soundscape. fold at the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival, while guitarist Clearly, Porij haven’t just gone into a studio and Jacob Maguire’s first day included a live session and a produced an album for the sake of it; they’ve lovingly gig. Luckily, though, this haphazard way of working not crafted and curated a body of work that is authentically only suited the band, but actually made them shine even human. It’s real life in all its humdrum glory, taking brighter than before. apart the most traumatic of times stitch by stitch The line-up, completed by vocalist Scout ‘Egg’ Moore and rebuilding to beats and tricks that amplify and and bassist/keyboardist James Middleton, are totally reinvigorate the subject matter, making for one of the fearless, always looking to subvert natural pathways and most impressive debut albums you’re ever likely to hear. push their genre forward. Their debut album ‘Teething’ Sadly, though, part of being alive is struggling is a case in point, with the album art - a massive tooth through, just about managing to keep your head above against a white background - being pretty much the only water. When Egg looks back at the start of the album straight-up thing about the record. cycle, Porij were stuck in this exact pattern. “We started Somehow, Porij have not only fused together house, writing it in 2022. We’d played something like 27 festivals garage, and techno but even managed to place them and done a headline tour, but we still had no money alongside moments of shoegaze guitar, classical piano, and were basically just sending ideas to each other via post-punk reverb, and Tarantino basslines. The record Soundcloud links, travelling up to James’ house, and has the potential to make you dance, cry, and headbang, hoping something would come of it.” evidence that Porij refuse to be boring and that they have With this context in mind, whilst trademark Porij ethereality is slathered across the LP, this project is poured their whole selves into the record.

PORIJ

physically more present, more rooted in the grit and grind. Egg’s stark vulnerability and penetrating lyricism give long-term fans the same quality that made them fall in love with the quartet, now with added tooth and claw.

Porij are firmly biting back, and what better way to do it than with an album chock full of passion, personality, and panache. The band’s hard work is front and centre in the masterpiece that they’ve painstakingly created, with their experimental yet perfectionist manner pushing them to the brink.

“Most of the drums on the album are live; by the time it came to the later tracks, I was just delirious,” Nathan smirks. “It was the height of summer, and I was stuck in this room with my brain melting.”

Egg laughs, “I have such a clear vision of you sat in your pants just screaming through frustration.”

Meanwhile, Egg found themselves in their own world. “I was basically nocturnal for two weeks and so spaced because, when I’m writing, I just can’t get out of that zone; I’m fully immersed in it.”

The band wouldn’t have it any other way, though, especially given they got to work with award-winning super-producer David Wrench, whose incredibly impressive portfolio includes FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Young Fathers, and Bat For Lashes. At no point, though, did the band lose creative control, given nine months to flesh out ideas and add the nuance necessary to make their mark.

“The time frame allowed us to better understand what we were trying to achieve,” James states. “We’re addicted to learning, and we’re always trying to pick up new tricks from YouTube videos or whatever, so getting to live with the album meant we could fiddle with it if something needed to go.” Egg nods, “100%; we just let the album breathe, and it meant we could indulge in exploring all avenues, like kitchen percussion, for example.”

Don’t worry, kitchen percussion isn’t a thing you should necessarily know about, although its integration on the record – most obviously in deliciously devious ‘Gutter Punch’ – does make it feel like it’s always been around. Egg explains that “basically there was a tiny kitchen next to the studio, so we went in and recorded while I threw spoons around the room or ran a serrated knife over a metal chain; apparently, I’m naturally gifted at kitchen percussion!”

This excursion into the thin line between madness and genius is what makes the album so special and underlines why they were given such free rein over the process. “We’ve learnt a bit about the music industry, so we know how lucky we were to be

given the time to make something like this,” Nathan admits. “We just felt really respected because no one really meddled or got too involved.”

Writing a debut album is never an easy process and never goes exactly the way a band expects, but if there were ever a band capable of handling said rollercoaster ride, it’s Porij. “It’s amazing to be able to write and not make everything a single,” Egg beams.

“It meant we can go from being super serious to wonderfully silly, and it suited the record’s subject matter, really.”

‘Teething’ is essentially an exorcism of all the things that make us miserable, handled with the delicate touch of Egg’s poetic nature. The exploration of body dysmorphia and gender identity in ‘Stranger’, taken from a diary entry that was taped together into stanzas, is placed alongside tales of yearning in ‘Endlessly Waiting’, painting a realistic picture of what it’s like to grow up in what can be a very dark global picture.

There is still immense levity in the material, though, nowhere more clearly than opening track ‘Marmite’, which beckons in Porij’s new era, sinking its fangs in from the get-go. As always, though, it’s not as simple as you’d think, with the song’s visceral anger radiating from a story that, at its core, is as funny as it is confusing.

“I was on a bus in South London,” bassist James reluctantly recalls, “and I was sat next to this beautiful stranger, one that you fall in love with for half an hour.” So far, so classic. “What was weird is that she smelled of Marmite.”

And thus, an epic love story was halted before it could even begin. But this simple idea, borne of an experience that is all too familiar to much of today’s urban youth, provides exactly what Porij are all about illuminating imperfection.

It’s for this reason that, in a genre dominated by almost robotic rhythm and seemingly never-ending 90s

samples, the band are able to shine through. “We have so many takes of each song, and they’re different every time,” Nathan explains. “It’s just that human element; it’s the imperfection that you crave from dance music.” Of course, this makes complete sense, given the whole point of club culture is the feeling of freedom.

After having spent the best part of a year holed up creating the record, the band were able to take this imperfection of a test drive at an intimate, grass-roots venue tour in January. “It was super stressful,” Egg admits. “It took a lot of concentration to actually be able to play the songs, but also, you’re looking into the crowd trying to see what they think.”

It was undoubtedly a valuable experience for the band and bleeds into what comes next: a characteristically hectic touring schedule, starting with the band’s first-ever American shows, where the quartet are hoping to make a splash. “We just crave seeing a room pop off. Honestly, we’re super jazzed!”

After a New York headliner and a trip

“WE CAN GO FROM BEING SUPER SERIOUS TO WONDERFULLY SILLY” SCOUT

‘EGG’

MOORE

down to the hallowed grounds of SXSW, Porij make their way to Idaho, where James is “mad excited for the potato content”. Honestly, who’d expect anything less?

A UK tour beckons in April, including the band’s biggest-ever headline show at Camden’s iconic Electric Ballroom, as well as shows in Leeds, Bristol, and Glasgow. What can we expect from said performances?

“I’m picturing Nathan in CMAT’s backless Brits dress,” Egg teases.

Nathan doesn’t explicitly disagree, so watch this space…

In all seriousness, though, this is an album that is begging to be played live, and the gang are chomping to be back out there. “Dance music and club culture are just so infectious,” Jacob says. “It’s a really addictive experience, and I guess I hope people find somewhere to escape.” Nathan adds, “I feel like we know what we’re doing with it all a bit more now, so I just want it to hit people in whatever way it hits them and just help them feel a bit freer.”

Porij represent dance music at its best. In fact, let’s go one further – they represent music at its best. James’ hopes for the album are simply, “I hope people listen back in several years’ time, and they always find something different. I just hope it still sounds good.” Dance music remains Britain’s biggest-selling genre, and with bands like Porij on the scene, it’s easy to see why. Constantly chopping and changing, they are never afraid to push themselves in their pursuit of art.

This is a band totally in love with what they do. A big ball of fuzzy energy, soaking up all their experience and throwing it into their music. It may have taken a little longer than maybe we first expected, but there’s no doubt that success is on the horizon for this lot. And frankly, it couldn’t happen to better people. ■ Porij’s debut album

‘Teething’ is out 26th April.

READDORK.COM 67.

INCOMING. THE NEW RELEASES YOU NEED TO KNOW

WHAT DO THE SCORES MEAN? ★ Rubbish ★★ Not Great ★★★ Fair ★★★★ Good ★★★★★ Amazing

Conan Gray

Found Heaven ★★★★★

ENGLISH TEACHER This Could Be Texas

★★★★★ ENGLISH TEACHER have been widely regarded as one of the best new bands in the UK for a while, but their debut album goes way beyond that.

→ If you haven’t heard of English Teacher, then where the hell have you been? Widely considered ‘the next big thing’, their debut album ‘This Could Be Texas’ not only proves that theory, it might actually be understating just how special this band is.

‘This Could Be Texas’ is a love letter to frontwoman Lily Fontaine’s cross-Pennine life so far. Her lyrics strike to the heart of urban, working-class living, with her strained voice conveying nostalgia, introspection, and ambition with effortless beauty. Weaving abstract metaphor into otherwise run-of-themill experiences, Fontaine fleshes out tiny details to ensure you feel included in every little aspect.

Much of this album is pure cinema. The stilted, cut-and-paste intonation of ‘Broken Biscuits’ embodies stagnant smalltown drama, whilst the swirling experimentalism of ‘Not Everyone Gets To Go To Space’ creates

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a galactic dreamscape, mirroring the place your mind wanders to when you’re staring out your bedroom window. There is scathing social commentary in grungy-punk banger ‘R&B’, addressing racial bias within a still majority-white indie scene, while epic finale ‘Albert Road’ injects colour and verve into Fontaine’s childhood memories.

English Teacher are impossible to pigeonhole, breaking out of the saturated post-punk scene and pulling from multiple contrasting influences with poise and precision. Ebbing and flowing, building and breaking down when you least expect it, the quartet travel from classic indie-rock in hit single ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’, through to jazz-blues in ‘Sideboob’, via a quick detour into jangling college rock in ‘Nearly Daffodils’, and even grabbing a handful of goth in ‘The Best Tears Of Your Life’.

There’s no other way to put it, really. This is an absolute masterpiece. Sure, not everybody gets to go to space, but English Teacher prove that we’ve got more than enough stars here on Earth. CIARAN PICKER

→ Conan Gray does a 180 on his latest album, ‘Found Heaven’, ditching the melancholic world of ‘Kid Krow’ and ‘Superache’ for a vibrant, synth-soaked dance party. This isn’t to say growing pains are absent; they fuel the album’s electric energy. With the adept hands of production maestros like Max Martin, Greg Kurstin and Shawn Everett steering the ship, the album unfolds as a series of anthems, each ready to fill arenas with their resonating beats and Conan’s emotionally charged vocal delivery, pushing the boundaries of his artistry into uncharted territories.

At the heart of ‘Found Heaven’ lies a narrative rich with the complexities of young adulthood - new loves found and lost, the sting of heartbreak, and the profound self-discovery that bridges the chaos of one’s twenties.

A track like ‘Killing Me’, with its pulsating synth backdrop, captures the paradox of pain and liberation, articulating the rawness of loss while simultaneously offering an electrifying release. This duality showcases Gray’s knack for tackling heavy emotional subjects with a resilience that’s both empowering and cathartic.

‘Found Heaven’ stands as a testament to growth; a danceable, heart-wrenching journey through the pains and triumphs of young adulthood.

Conan Gray proves once again that the most profound growth often comes from the most profound pain, making NOAHFINNCE ‘Found Heaven’ not just a listening experience, but an Growing Up On The immersive journey into the Internet heart of an artist at a pivotal ★★★★ moment of transformation. → Noah has DAN HARRISON always had Main Character Energy, but on the aptly named ‘Growing Up On The Internet’ everything that came before is supersized. Sharper, brattier and - dare we say - better than ever, it sees all the necessary edges smoothed off, with the rest left as razor-sharp as possible.

Dragging from across the lexicon of heavier music, ‘I Know Better’ is grotty, grungy and glorious, while ‘Alexithymia’ channels rage and confusion brilliantly. Like going from dial-up to fibre-optic broadband, it’s a whole new world. DAN HARRISON

INCOMING

RECOMMENDED

RELEASES The albums out now you need to catch up on.

Bleachers

Bleachers ★★★★★

→ Bleachers’ self-titled fourth album hums into being, exhilaration rife in every single note. It feels like a fresh-faced ode to new beginnings. Those first crisply sunny days after a long winter, the nervous excitement of the first drink of the night, the dizzy tumble into the throes of love.

Empress Of

For Your Consideration ★★★★★

Blue Bendy

So Medieval ★★★★

→ Blue Bendy aren’t interested in playing by the rock’n’roll rulebook. Their debut album, ‘So Medieval’, throws genre expectations out the window, weaving a unique tapestry of sounds that will keep you guessing. Imagine a fantastical soundtrack reimagined by a band raised on classic rock experimentation and a healthy dose of modern anxiety. Tracks like ‘Cloudy’ morph and shift, starting with a nervous energy that explodes into epic grandeur. ‘Come On Baby, Dig!’ injects a frenetic energy, a sound that feels entirely fresh and unpredictable. Blue Bendy are a beacon for those yearning for something that dares to break the mould. ALEX INGLE

Nell Mescal

Can I Miss It For A Minute? EP ★★★★

→ There’s been something special about Nell Mescal.

Slipping perfectly into a musical niche that swiftly became more of a movement, her early promise is more than realised with debut EP ‘Can I Miss It For A Minute?’. Across five tracks, Nell shows the kind of assured, quiet confidence and emotionally driven craft that sets her well beyond the reach of most peers. Opener ‘Warm Body’ swells into a titanic crescendo, while ‘Yellow Dresser’ weaves heartbreak into something special. But it’s ‘Killing Time’ which feels like the real calling card. Taylor, Phoebe, Julien, Lucy... Nell? Sounds about right. STEPHEN ACKROYD

Lizzy McAlpine

Older ★★★★

→ ‘Older’ is a marked departure from the folk-pop leanings of Lizzy McAlpine’s second album ‘Five Seconds Flat’. Gone are the airy soundscapes; in their place, a richer tapestry of instrumentation unfolds.

String sections and piano flourishes paint a more dynamic backdrop, while McAlpine’s vocals soar with new-found confidence.

Thematically, ‘Older’ delves into the complexities of navigating your twenties.

Tracks like ‘Drunk, Running’ explore the emotional toll of codependency, while ‘Broken Glass’ confronts the aftermath of emotional abuse.

McAlpine doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of this life stage, crafting lyrics that resonate with a raw honesty that’s both relatable and refreshing.

Through ‘Older’, she solidifies her voice as one of nuanced beauty, authenticity, and undeniable resonance, inviting listeners into a world where growth is both a challenge and a celebration.

DAN HARRISON

→ Empress Of is arguably one of the coolest artists at work – if that wasn’t already clear, the title-track of her new album ‘For Your Consideration’ makes it abundantly so. Effervescently fizzing between sultry beats and honeyed vocals, it paves the way for an album filled with pulsing, feverish hits.

Fletcher

In Search Of The Antidote ★★★★★

→A confessional, earnest journey towards finding love in every aspect of her life, Fletcher delivers her truths and lessons with some of her most electric tracks yet.

MAGGIE ROGERS Don’t Forget Me

★★★★

MAGGIE ROGERS embraces joy and truth through adversity.

→ Maggie Rogers’ rapid evolution has been nothing short of captivating, and her third album, ‘Don’t Forget Me’, continues to surprise and impress. Following a meticulously crafted second project born behind the closed doors of a pandemic, this next offering takes the opposite approach. Written in just five days and largely untouched in its initial recordings, it exudes a charisma, spontaneity and lightheartedness.

An intimate road trip through a new chapter of freedom, comfort, and fun above all, while there are moments of moodiness scattered throughout (‘Drunk’, ‘On & On & On’), the core essence of the album revolves around Maggie’s sheer enjoyment of the life she has forged for herself.

It’s a celebration of learning to embrace the present moment, as humorously articulated in the tongue-in-cheek manner of ‘So

Sick Of Dreaming’.

Maggie’s unique blend of folk roots and dance-pop sensibilities has previously driven her artistic vision, further enhanced by sharp production. However, on her third full-length, she sheds any instrumental shroud, opting instead for a raw, warm, and distinctly human approach. The vulnerable quiet of ‘I Still Do’ and ‘All The Same’ showcases her ability to deliver emotive vocals without sacrificing an ounce of potency.

2022’s landmark LP, ‘Surrender’, served as a guiding light for navigating emotion and identity, and ‘Don’t Forget Me’ stands as a testament to Maggie’s journey through that turbulence.

It’s a record crafted for those who have found joy and truth through adversity but are still eager to explore. As Maggie herself once promised, “It all works out in the end”. FINLAY HOLDEN

Pet Shop Boys

Nonetheless ★★★★

→ You don’t get to do 15 albums unless you’re a bit good. And yes, Pet Shop Boys are a bit good. Arguably the greatest British pop act of all time, the duo of Neil and Chris have managed to stay at the sharp end of pop for almost 40 years with a pretty much unchanged philosophy of witty yet evocative lyricism and electronic dance sounds that have gently moved with the times while retaining a classic Pet Shop Boys sound.

‘Nonetheless’ is as familiarly brilliant as ever: you get all that warm and familiar glow, but as the years go by, there’s an added sense of gravitas and feeling, a feeling of luxuriating in a comforting pop genius.

MARTYN YOUNG

READDORK.COM 69.

INCOMING

The Lemon Twigs

A Dream Is All We Know ★★★★

→ A mere year after the release of ‘Everything Harmony’, the melodic wizardry of New York-hailing sibling duo The Lemon Twigs has struck again. This time, poking exquisite sunshine through the clouds of doubt and melancholy cast by their previous album. ‘A Dream Is All We Know’ makes you feel nostalgic for a time that you might not have even been alive to experience. It’s difficult to imagine feeling anything but pure warmth and optimism listening to this album; it’s just lovely, a testament to the enduring power of classic songwriting that further solidifies this wonderful band as timeless. REBECCA KESTEVEN

Home Counties

Exactly As It Seems ★★★★

→ Home Counties are now an entirely different beast from their early days. A feast of dancefloor-imbued bangers, ‘Exactly As It Seems’ is bursting with a character and attitude.

Making everyday mundanities feel like gripping TV megashows, it places the feeling of release and joy at the heart of everything. The whipping ‘Bethnal Green’, hypnotic ‘Uptight’ and hip-thrusting ‘Funk U Up’ are immediate, while the hypnotising ‘Push Comes To Shove’ and the breakdown of ‘Wild Guess’ are as unexpected as they are hooky. A record that sees Home Counties firmly finding their voice and sound, ‘Exactly As It Seems’ is a joyous, grin-inducing call to arms.

JAMIE MUIR

Owen

The Falls of Sioux ★★★★

→ The new Owen record is a masterclass in restraint, storytelling and embracing ennui. Apart from a psychedelic detour in ‘Mount Cleverest’ around the midpoint of the album, the changes in mood and tone are subtle shifts here and there. The opener ‘A Reckoning’ adopts a weatherbeaten cowboy persona and ‘Hit and Run’ is at the mercy of a violent drunk but ‘The Falls Of Sioux’ shines where Mike Kinsella feels at home. From the cyclic rhythm of ‘Qui Je Plaisante?’ or the sprawling landscape of ‘With You Without You,’ it’s an album you can easily get lost inside.

ALEXANDER BRADLEY

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COMING

Bodega

Our Brand Could Be Yr Life ★★★★

SOON What’s out in the next few months you should have on your radar.

BIG SPECIAL

POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES

→ BIG SPECIAL aka Joe Hicklin (vocals) and Callum Moloney (drums) - are a frustrated, vital new voice in rock, and their debut album ‘POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES’ is their fiery opening statement.

Released 10th May 2024

Wallows

Model

→ Mark it on your calendar: former Dork cover stars, Wallows Dylan Minnette, Braeden Lemasters and Cole Preston - will release their third studio album, the John Congleton-produced ‘Model’, this spring.

Released 24th May 2024

Maya Hawke

Chaos Angel

→ All the best musicians are a little bit chaotic, and Maya Hawke is embracing the mess and joy of life with her upcoming new full-length, ‘Chaos Angel’.

Released 31st May 2024

Hana Vu

Romanticism ★★★

→ Three years since her dark and expansive debut, Hana Vu has taken a step into the light, creating a follow-up that is more coherent in terms of ideas and content, but not a total departure. With ‘Romanticism’ on the pop-ier side of indie-pop, Vu channels her fellow LA cohort Olivia Rodrigo on ‘How it Goes’, while ‘Airplane’ and ‘Play’ see her experiment more with drum samplers and digital beats.

Her vocal is still the star of the show, though, with the whole LP feeling like a real exorcism of some romantic demons.

Replacing the gothic, post-punk vibes for more accessible tracks, it’s a good album, but it’s hard not to long for slightly less glitter and slightly more grunge.

CIARAN PICKER

RACHEL CHINOURIRI

What A Devastating Turn Of Events

★★★★★ RACHEL CHINOURIRI makes a splash with one of 2024’s stand out debuts. → “Erm, I think we should record that,” says Rachel Chinouriri on the opener for her debut, ‘What A Devastating Turn Of Events’. By the end of the track, you’ll be glad she did, and the same can be said for the rest of the album, too.

Learning to grow is a journey – in the face of hardship, seeing the other side of it can be an impossible task. For Rachel, though, she’s seemingly mastered the art. Her debut doesn’t shy away from the deeply affecting; her voice is soft and sweet but her lyrics are often stirringly candid. Death, losing control, belonging, heartache – they all get their airtime in equally heart-aching tales. Yet, there’s a stream of light that threads its way throughout.

The euphoric guitars of ‘The Hills’ are just as cathartic as the outraged ‘fuck you’ of ‘It Is What It Is’, delivered with the dry wit of

someone completely done with a situation. With the help of her friends (“No, no, no, Rachel!”) immortalised in voice notes, the album takes on a forwards-trajectory. From start to end, there’s a real sense of ploughing through. With every frustration and tragedy, Rachel is ready to be over it.

‘Dumb Bitch Juice’ and its selfaware depiction of poor-decision making will no doubt resonate with many of her listeners, whilst the album’s title-track’s driving beat is a backdrop to a truly heartbreaking story. Rachel weaves a rich story, one that comes with a myriad of lessons to be taken forward, all to the soundtrack of dreamy guitars and sparkling soundscapes. It is a page turned for her, a reminder of everything she has been through, but proof she has made it to the other side and can move on. The dizzy romanticism of ‘So My Darling’, the final track, feels like her landing on a new destination – one where she can relish the good that is coming. NEIVE MCCARTHY

→ In the postapocalyptic age, when aliens invade and we’re looking for something to explain where it all went wrong, we should hand them this new Bodega record.

‘Our Brand Could Be Yr Life’ is at once both a fuzzy, joyous soundscape and a scathing, incisive precis of the misgivings of modern-day consumerism.

Switching between genres with ease, the five-piece bring slacker rock in ‘Cultural Consumer’, 80s post-punk in ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Drum’, and fuzzy dancerock in fantastic lead single ‘Tarkovski’. It’s another really, really good Bodega album - but who expected anything else?

CIARAN PICKER

LYNKS

ABOMINATION ★★★★★

→ Trying to explain LYNKS in one sentence is impossible.

Actually, make that in one paragraph. Since first touching down to Earth with the sort of sugar-rush singles that immediately grab attention, everything LYNKS has done has been must-see. Away from the live shows, outfits, and inyour-face anthems, though, it’s debut album, ‘ABOMINATION’, that stands as LYNKS’ greatest challenge to date. How can they distil everything that they have come to be into one body of work?

‘ABOMINATION’ is frivolous, fun, unpredictable, hilarious, infectious, tender, raw and unabashed all at the same time. What pulls it all together from its many turns and sound-pushing steps is LYNKS’ voice. The dark treasure chest of electrobeats that is ‘New Boyfriend’ can sit side by side with the hypnotic rumble of ‘(What Did You Expect From) Sex With A Stranger’ and the chilling industrial croons of ‘Small Talk’ because those worlds can all exist alongside each over - LYNKS combines it all with stunning and surprising results. Undeniably honest, the album reads like a document of LYNKS’ world where anything can happen.

It’s album closer ‘Flash In The Pan’ that truly rebels against any preconceptions. A tender track that grows from a mournful ballad into a fizzing indietronic epic, complete with dream-pop vocals. It’s the most ambitious song they’ve ever released, and it cements ‘ABOMINATION’ as the answer to every question you may have had around LYNKS. Except what comes next there’s not a chance anyone can predict that. JAMIE MUIR

INCOMING

Vampire Weekend

NIA ARCHIVES

Only God Was Above Us ★★★★

Silence Is Loud

★★★★★

NIA ARCHIVES’ debut celebrates expression and freedom.

Pillow Queens

Name Your Sorrow ★★★★

→ ‘Name Your Sorrow’ is not one for veiled emotion, wearing its bleeding heart on its sleeve and revealing an aching soul for all to see. An album of atmospheric indie, the band lay bare tales of love, loss and perseverance. Pamela Connolly’s richly brooding vocals move like the wind, smooth yet strong, capable of a howl just as much as a whisper. As the album progresses it becomes clear that Pillow Queens have an uncanny ability to paint a scene with poignant realism.

‘Name Your Sorrow’ is for the tired, tender hearts who, despite it all, keep on hoping.

Pillow Queens have produced yet another triumph. KELSEY MCCLURE

→ Nia Archives can do it all, and on her debut, she explores all the different facets of her musicality.

With beautiful and affecting songs on which the power of the beats amplifies the emotional resonance of her voice, Nia’s distinctive vocals, bursting with personality, are foregrounded to provide the heartbeat of the album. There’s a wistful, yearning quality to much of the material here, like the soaring title-track, which illuminates the intimacy and, at times, isolation of its creation as Nia wrote the lyrics in her bedroom, channelling her formative musical steps as a bedroom producer.

While the lyrics are evocative and tender, the music is frequently expansive and dynamic as she opens up her club banger palette to take on different forms like the insistent guitar-based rush of ‘Tell Me What It’s Like’, which echoes some of the indie-rock

Porij

Teething ★★★★

→ Three years and two new band members since their breakout hit ‘Nobody Scared’, alt-dance quartet Porij are in the ascendancy with ‘Teething’. A truly transcendent debut, it twists and turns, emphasising the band’s exceptional musicianship and desire for invention. Creating intensity through imperfection, the parts of the album where the band unleash a menacing, snarling grin, most clearly in ‘Marmite’, ‘You Should Know Me’, and ‘Gutter Punch’, underline a confidence that is rarely found on album one. Porij haven’t just cut their teeth here; they’ve gone straight for the jugular, torn it to shreds, and now reign victorious. CIARAN PICKER

and guitar influences that filter into so much of her work. As genre increasingly breaks down and the fluidity of an anythinggoes approach becomes more common, Nia offers a glorious example of this aesthetic as she combines the anthemic immediacy of melodic indie-rock with the jumped-up fevered energy of the club.

‘Silence Is Loud’ is a record of expression and freedom.

Freedom to experiment and make exactly what you want, but also freedom to look deep within yourself and make something that, has a legacy beyond simply the dancefloor.

Something you can hold dear to your heart and also use as the score to one of the best nights of your life. Nights that promise to be soundtracked for years to come by one of our most vital and thrilling creative voices.

MARTYN YOUNG

→ An album in which the first words uttered are ‘fuck the world’ might be a little unexpected coming from a band like Vampire Weekend, whose clean and happy pop sound has been their hallmark. ‘Only God Was Above Us’ marks an ambitious and pretty immense pendulum swing into new sonic territories; he album is full of instrumental textures, with fuzzy, distorted feedback buzzing from the offset in ‘Ice Cream Piano’ - a track in which it sounds as if a rogue amp has been accidentally left on throughout and is as exciting and upbeat as it is chaotic and maximalist. This texture is a common thread throughout, lending itself to the nostalgic visions of New York City which inspired it.

‘Only God Was Above Us’ is exciting. It’s unpredictable, and even a little jarring at times, but it serves to demonstrate the band’s everevolving sound; and is a thrilling foray into new musical terrain. REBECCA KESTEVEN

girl in red

I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! ★★★★★

→ Remember the heartwrenching vulnerability of girl in red’s breakout hits?

The hushed bedroom pop anthems that mirrored the ache of young heartbreak?

Those days are over. With her second album, ‘I’m Doing It Again Baby!’, Marie Ulven throws a metaphorical middle finger at melancholic melodies, crafting a maximalist explosion of pure, unadulterated joy.

This isn’t a calculated shift – it’s a sonic reflection of Ulven’s own journey. Gone are the anxieties that clung to her debut, ‘if i could make it go quiet’. In their place, a new-found confidence and a celebration of self-discovery.

Tracks like the stadiumbaiting title-track and the infectious ‘Too Much’ pulsate with a frenetic energy, drawing influences from pop-punk and indie anthems. It’s the kind of music that begs to be blasted with the windows down, a joyous rebellion against the over-saturation of sadness in mainstream music.

But ‘I’m Doing It Again Baby!’ isn’t sunshine and rainbows all the way. Ulven isn’t afraid to delve into insecurities and vulnerabilities. The epic ballad ‘Pick Me’ explores the gnawing fear of abandonment, while ‘Ugly Side’ confronts the imperfections we all try to hide. This exploration of duality adds depth to the album, demonstrating that joy and introspection can coexist. girl in red doesn’t shy away from the messy realities of life, approaching them with a sense of humour and a desire for connection. She’s here to stay, ready to conquer the world, one pop anthem at a time. ALEX INGLE

READDORK.COM 71.

GET OUT. LIVE MUSIC, FROM THE FRONT

THE ROUNDHOUSE, LONDON, 2 MARCH 2024

It’s the sort of powerful, personal pop that creates superstars. → Renée Rapp makes bold, cathartic pop that doesn’t shy away from destructive melodrama (“As far as I’m concerned, they should burn the whole city down”) and certainly isn’t afraid of telling an ex-friend where to go (“Fuck you, you dumb bitch. Fuck you, fuck you”).

Debut album ‘Snow Angel’ infuses those big emotions with a flickering warmth as she searches for positivity in the heartache. Live, that spark quickly becomes an inferno, with Renée’s straight-talking lyrics screamed back at every opportunity with guttural enthusiasm.

Tonight’s gig at London’s Roundhouse opens with a series of home movies and photos of a young Renée alongside the promise that the seasons will change.

There’s sadness but resilient hope, which is very much the flavour of the evening.

The shimmering ‘Talk Too Much’ invites the audience to taste the blood in her mouth as she wrestles with her own happiness while ‘Poison Poison’ cuts venom with sugar. ‘Willow’ was written for her younger self, with sweet comfort shifting into abrasive fury via a snarling guitar solo before ‘Bruises’ showcases both vulnerability and fierce defiance. There’s the menacing ‘Swim’, the rain-soaked ballad ‘I Hate Boston’

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and ‘Gemini Moon’, which was written about feeling uncertain in a new relationship. There’s power to be found in every mood, and through it all, Renée creates a rowdy tenderness.

As much as tonight feels like a purge for both artist and audience, there’s plenty of joy to be found in that shared experience, too. The chirping ‘Pretty Girls’ sees the stage covered in Pride flags, while the snotty karmafuelled daydream of ‘Tummy Hurts’ sees support act Towa Bird take to the stage before the pair cover The Cranberries’ trembling ‘Linger’. After wrestling with so much pain and confusion, ‘Not My Fault’ provides a moment of sheer, swaggering triumph, with her fourpiece band handling Megan Thee Stallion’s verse with a scrappy enthusiasm that only adds to the glee.

The main set ends with Renée Rapp performing ‘Wedding Song’ in front of a burning chapel, as she bounces between elation and crippling sadness but never surrenders to either, while a one-song encore of ‘Snow Angel’ sees her step up the theatricality. Dressed all in white and performing in front of a giant pair of wings, with the stage doused in dry ice, Renée sings of trauma, addiction and hurt. She promises to endure no matter the cost, though, taking the audience on a wild, emotional ride that ends with a dash of confetti-strewn optimism. It’s the sort of powerful, personal pop that creates superstars. ALI SHUTLER

Photos: Frances Beach.

ROWDY TENDERNESS WITH RENÉE RAPP

DONOT MISS...

Tours and shows you should be checking out.

GOAT London, The Troxy (October 24), Bristol, O2 Academy (25), Manchester, Academy 1 (26), Norwich, University of East Anglia (November 14), Oxford, O2 Academy (15), Nottingham, Rock City (16)

WILLIE J HEALEY Exeter, Phoenix (May 1), Bath, Komedia (2), Cambridge, MASH (3), Tunbridge Wells, The Forum (5), Ipswich, The Baths (7), Leicester, O2 Academy Leicester (8), Hebden Bridge, Trades Club (9), York, The Crescent (10), Blackpool, Bootleg Social (11), Hull, Hull Central Library (12)

GLASS ANIMALS / THE BIG MOON Dublin, IE: 3Arena (October 30), Glasgow, UK: OVO Hydro (November 1) Manchester, UK: Co-Op Live (2), Nottingham, UK: Motorpoint Arena on (3), Cardiff, UK: Utilita Arena (5), London, UK: The O2 (7)

SON ESTRELLA GALICIA CELEBRATE NEW MUSIC WITH PANIC SHACK AND PLANTOID THE PRINCE ALBERT, BRIGHTON, 23 MARCH 2024

Tonight, the famous Prince Albert celebrates the new and necessary. → Oh we do like to be beside the seaside. That’s undeniable. Across the streets and sounds of Brighton is a buffet of artists and venues moving in boundary-pushing new directions.

With that in mind, there may be no better home for SON Estrella Galicia to touch down for its first excursion outside of London, serving up a microfestival that combines moreish food delights and a powerful measure of sustainable impact that includes a beach clean-up initiative. Tonight, the famous Prince Albert celebrates the new and necessary.

Openers Plantoid capture that in a set that revels in its ability to turn a room into their own joyful playground.

With debut album ‘Terrapath’ out for nearly two months, the Brightonbased natives deliver an opening salvo that refuses to let the sold-out crowd pause at any step. Fun thrives, with prog and math-rock turns delivered so infectiously that it’s impossible not to dive in. There are bongo drums.

There are maracas. More is what you get from a band celebrating that local homecoming feeling but clearly

aiming at something far, far bigger.

At a Panic Shack show, the bar on fun is already set high. From the moment they take the stage to headline tonight, that ridiculous level is moved even higher for a band who, with each step, become tighter and bolder in everything they do. With a formidable sense of release and thrilling punk energy, cuts like ‘The Ick’, ‘I Don’t Really Like It’ and ‘Jiu Jits You’ turn the stacked confines of The Prince Albert into a sweating tidal wave. Whether it’s the synchronised dancing of ‘Mannequin Man’, taking swigs of Brighton delicacy Tuaca between tracks or the call-outs in Welsh that bounce around the room – tonight is a visceral reminder of the immediate hook Panic Shack have at their disposal. Diving into the crowd for ‘Who’s Got My Lighter’ or setting fire to mosh-pits, their relentless touring has paid off big time. There may be no band you’d rather have in charge of a night out than them, and now the path is set for their next chapter. On this evidence, it’s going to be essential. JAMIE MUIR You can hear more from the show on our flagship podcast, Down With Boring. Grab it from readdork.com, in the Dork Radio app, or by searching ‘Down With Boring’ wherever you get your podcasts.

READDORK.COM 73.

MCKENNA DONOT DECLAN HIS MISS... REINVENTS OWN DISCOGRAPHY Tours and shows you should be checking out.

O2 CITY HALL, NEWCASTLE, 25 MARCH 2024 The indie icon returns with an experimental, indefinable era.

LAUFEY DELIVERS GRAND INTIMACY, DESIGNED TO BEWITCH THE ROUNDHOUSE, LONDON, 13 MARCH 2024

There’s a real sense of ragged community to Laufey’s performance.

Photos: Frances Beach.

→ “My name is Laufey, and yes, that is how you pronounce it,” grins the jazz-pop artist as she takes to the stage of London’s Roundhouse. Despite the rampant popularity of her delicate music over the past few years, it’s the only time during tonight’s show she acknowledges how fast things have changed. For the rest of the glittering performance, Laufey delivers grand intimacy with a real sense of comfort.

In recent years, a new generation has discovered and then reinvented musical scenes from the past. Everything from nu-metal and pop-punk to Britpop has been twisted into something new, but Laufey has gone beyond recent trends. Weaving together classical music with jazz, pop and a desire for theatre, Laufey has become an unlikely superstar.

Questions about why this odd combination is connecting can be quickly answered by listening to the music, though. Both 2022’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’ and 2023’s follow-up album ‘Bewitched’ deliver exposing, relatable emotion with staggering power. It’s similar to what Taylor Swift did with folk in the early part of her career, and we all know how that turned out.

Rather than getting lost in the echoing expanse of the Roundhouse, though, those quiet

74. DORK

reflections on love, loss and heartbreak have space to truly soar. The cheers of the sold-out audiences are quickly silenced as Laufey opens her set with the romantic vulnerability of ‘Fragile’, which is anything but. ‘California And Me’ is sweeping, grandiose and torn, ‘Dreamer’ channels a dynamic, twirling defiance, while ‘Beautiful Stranger’ brings a touch of Hollywood glamour to falling in love on the tube.

Backed by eight musicians, a guest appearance from her twin sister Junia and an audience choir of thousands who provide passionate harmonies and singalong to hushed piano movements, there’s a real sense of ragged community to Laufey’s performance that’s amplified by relatable narratives and shared catharsis. Add in the starry-eyed music that comfortably basks in spiky emotions, and there’s a whole lot of beauty in tonight’s gig.

“I grew up playing classical music and it was always a dream to bring these different worlds together,” Laufey says to the noisy crowd. “I didn’t know it was possible, but you guys have proved it is,” she adds before adding a punchline to the moment of sincerity. “I might even say you’ve ‘Bewitched’ me.” The feeling is very much mutual. ALI SHUTLER

CSS Manchester, New Century Hall (June 23), Leeds, Brudenell Social Club (24), Birmingham, XOYO Birmingham (25), London, O2 Forum Kentish Town (27), Brighton, Chalk (28), Oxford, O2 Academy Oxford (29), Bristol, Bristol Sounds (30)

CHARLI XCX Manchester Co-Op Live (27 November), London O2 (28), Birmingham Resorts World Arena (29), Glasgow OVO Hydro (2 December)

BODEGA Bearded Theory’s Spring Gathering, Walton On Trent, Catton Hall (23 May), Bad Dreams, Manchester, New Century Hall (24), Wide Awake Festival, London, Brockwell Park (25), Brighton, Concorde 2 (28), Nottingham, The Rescue Rooms (15 Oct), Leeds, Brudenell Social Club (16), Glasgow, Room 2 (17), Newcastle upon Tyne, The Cluny (18), Birmingham, The Crossing (19), Cambridge, Junction (21), Sheffield, Crookes Social Club (22), Bristol, Beacon (23), London, Village Underground (24).

→ In September 2021, Declan McKenna gave his rock opera opus ‘Zeros’ its belated UK tour debut a full year after sharing those songs with the world. Even back then, several years since the record’s inception, it was clear that the inspired songwriter was looking for something new. As it turns out, looking internally was his best bet.

The indie icon now returns with an experimental, indefinable era that gives us the most detailed insight into his inner psyche yet.

Before he lays himself bare, Declan loves to hype up his new favourites, and the magnificent Wunderhorse offer a raw, broody yet intimate set of rock tunes led by frontman Jacob Slater’s gritty presence. Having divulged in a side-project of vulnerable acoustics, he brings his songwriting prowess back to the four-piece as they test out new material on the road – if this is any sign of what’s soon to come, Wunderhorse are about to be another huge name Declan has helped push through the pipeline and onto greatness.

When the main man himself marches on stage, fans are desperate to spot him amongst the mountainous scenery of his new show. Returning to the same stage two years on, this is a performer with a transformed identity and, indeed, discography, with the wobbly vibe of ‘What

Happened To The Beach?’ taking its rightful place front and centre in the setlist.

Kicking off with the janky, outwardly mismatched sonics of ‘Sympathy’, a precedent is immediately set; Declan’s new ventures might not seem to make immediate sense as easily as his older releases, but give them a chance to play out and something special is sure to rise to the surface. Although he is certainly not afraid to whip out a banger on a moment’s notice – ‘The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home’ and ‘Beautiful Faces’ are easy crowd pleasers – there is a revitalised depth to his efforts that enrich an already momentous back catalogue. The latter of these cuts, in particular, seems to have undergone an instrumental reinvention since its release, with a heavy synth upping the tension.

It always takes a while to accept change, and change is Declan’s prime expertise. His adoring crowds have learned to trust that each twist and turn will bring new highs, and he delivers on that front once again. With a 100-minute show not running long enough to cover many gems old and new, there is always the promise of a certain DJ Darles Chickens popping up by the quayside later.

As his eccentric humour proves, some things do remain consistent.

FINLAY HOLDEN

Photos: Frances Beach.

BLEACHERSPICKAPARTSADNESS,SORROW AND RAGE TO CREATE SOMETHING JOYFUL O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN, LONDON, 20 MARCH 2024 Heartfelt euphoria from bruised uncertainty. → For those on the outside, it’s easy to dismiss Bleachers as a cute footnote in Jack Antonoff’s world-renowned career as a producer. Over the past twelve years, though, the urgent rock’n’roll band has slowly built the sort of dedicated following that’s taken them from a beloved underground act to a group capable of selling out Madison Square Garden. As Jack told Dork earlier this year, however, Bleachers still feel like a secret shared by thousands of people.

There’s comfort in that intimacy, which is reflected in the sort of music Bleachers make – big, bombastic, and delivered with plenty of heart. Across tonight’s 23-song set, they pick apart sadness, sorrow and rage to create something joyful. The snarling power pop of ‘Everybody Lost Somebody’ unites the room, ‘Rollercoaster’ is a giddy festival anthem about shutting out regret, while ‘I Wanna Get Better’ is ferociously vulnerable. “The only thing that everyone in the world agrees on is how grotesquely bored we all are of what they’ve done to us,” says Jack

before ‘Foreign Girls’. “Don’t take this the wrong way because I mean it with hope and love, not ‘I’m going to kill myself’ energy, but being with each other is literally all we have.”

There’s a tight-knit sense of community to Bleachers, but rather

than simply protecting what they’ve built, everyone involved wants to make it as big as possible. The From The Studio To The Stage tour is a beautifully ambitious set of gigs, and the whole thing is delivered with an urgent need for togetherness.

“The bigger the shows get, the more it makes sense,” Jack told Dork recently. “The more people that are in on [that secret], the more powerful that is.” ALI SHUTLER

the debut album out now

25 SEP LEEDS OPORTO 26 SEP GLASGOW GARAGE ATTIC 27 SEP NEWCASTLE THE GROVE 28 SEP MANCHESTER DEAF INSTITUTE 02 OCT LONDON THE GARAGE 03 OCT BRISTOL STRANGE BREW

2024 AUG 26 EDINBURGH LA BELLE ANGELE AUG 30 NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS AUG 31 NORWICH THE WATERFRONT SEP 02 LONDON O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE SEP 21 MARGATE BALLROOM AT DREAMLAND

DEATH

FROM ABOVE

1979

UK INVASION ’24 JULY 15 LONDON O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN JULY 16 MANCHESTER O2 RITZ JULY 19 LEEDS O2 ACADEMY JULY 20 BIRMINGHAM O2 INSTITUTE

JULY 2024 30 BRISTOL BEACON 31 FALMOUTH PRINCESS PAVILION (GARDEN) AUGUST 2024 02 MANCHESTER ALBERT HALL 03 GLASGOW KELVINGROVE BANDSTAND 04 LEEDS PROJECT HOUSE 06 BOURNEMOUTH O2 ACADEMY 09 LONDON O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN 10 LONDON O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN 19 DUBLIN 3OLYMPIA THEATRE

WED 15th MAY LONDON O2 Academy2 Islington plus special guests

DEATH BY DENIM

SUN 19th MAY BRISTOL The Louisiana THU 23rd MAY MANCHESTER YES Basement SAT 25th MAY BIRMINGHAM Rainbow An Academy Events & Greyline presentation by arrangement with Filter Music Group & Across The Road Music

SUN 1st SEPT EXETER GREAT HALL MON 2nd SEPT BRIGHTON DOME WED 4th SEPT BOURNEMOUTH O2 ACADEMY SAT 14th SEPT MARGATE HALL BY THE SEA, DREAMLAND SUN 15th SEPT BRISTOL BEACON TUE 17th SEPT BIRMINGHAM O2 INSTITUTE WED 18th SEPT GLASGOW SWG3 TV STUDIO FRI 20th SEPT MANCHESTER O2 VICTORIA WAREHOUSE SAT 21st SEPT LONDON ROUNDHOUSE SUN 22nd SEPT LONDON ROUNDHOUSE

19/5 Exeter The Cavern 21/5 Bristol The Louisiana 22/5 Manchester The Lodge (at the Deaf Institute) 24/5 Glasgow The Attic (at The Garage) 27/5 Leeds Hyde Park Book Club 28/5 Birmingham The Sunflower Lounge 29/5 London O2 Academy2 Islington

SEPTEMBER 2024 17 BRIGHTON CHALK 19 LONDON O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN 20 BRISTOL SWX 21 BIRMINGHAM O2 INSTITUTE 23 NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS 25 GLASGOW GALVANIZERS SWG3 26 MANCHESTER ACADEMY 2 27 LEEDS STYLUS

INDIE TIL I DIE ...

+ DJs SUNTAON / LET M E T P MES JA HALL

Photo by Gregory Nolan visit thiswasourscene.com

OCT 1 GLASGOW O2 ACADEMY OCT 2 MANCHESTER O2 RITZ OCT 3 LONDON O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN OCT 6 BRISTOL O2 ACADEMY

OCTOBER 2024 FRI 04 EDINBURGH O2 ACADEMY SAT 05 GLASGOW O2 ACADEMY FRI 11 NEWCASTLE O2 CITY HALL SAT 12 MANCHESTER O2 VICTORIA WAREHOUSE FRI 18 BIRMINGHAM O2 ACADEMY SAT 19 LONDON O2 ACADEMY BRIXTON

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS?

NELL MESCAL

Yes, Dear Reader. We enjoy those ‘in depth’ interviews as much as anyone else. But - BUT we also enjoy the lighter side of music, too. We simply cannot go on any longer without knowing that NELL MESCAL is very, very, very into Nando’s Perinaise.

What did you last dream about?

I had a dream that I was in a very life-or-death game of hide and seek; one of the players was Usher.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Olives make my skin crawl.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

Woolly mammoth.

What was the first record you bought?

Annie: The Musical soundtrack.

How tall are you?

5’6”.

What is the most irrational superstition you have?

I’m not sure if it’s a superstition, but if I see a magpie and don’t immediately see a second one, I freak out that I’m about to be hit with some bad luck.

If you were on Mastermind, what would your specialist subject be?

Gilmore Girls.

What strength Nando’s sauce do you order?

I can’t tell you how much Nando’s Perinaise sauce I go through, but that’s all I really care about.

What is the best present you’ve ever been given?

My mum surprised me with One Direction tickets when I was younger; I can still hear the scream I let out.

78. DORK

Have you ever won anything?

I won a trip to the south of France recently; still waiting to go.

What do you always have in your refrigerator?

Nando’s Perinaise.

If you could read the mind of one person, who would it be?

If I fancied someone, I would want to read their mind.

What is your earliest memory?

I feel like I have so many, but the one that came to mind first was sitting underneath a table at play school with my best friends.

If you weren’t a musician, what would you be doing?

Along the same lines, but my main focus would be musical theatre.

Who would play you in a movie of your life?

Rachel Sennott.

Have you ever been thrown out of somewhere?

This is not the answer you want, but I often get kicked out of the cinema for staying way too long after the credits.

What is your favourite time of day?

9 p.m.

“I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW MUCH NANDO’S PERINAISE SAUCE I GO THROUGH” NELL

people were pointing at me from across the venue and saying they loved me. I was like, “OMG, thank you so much,” and then they said, “Wait, are you ______?” and proceeded to say a name I do not remember but definitely was not me. I said, “Oh, sorry, no.” They hid so quick; it was so funny.

Would you rather eat 24 eggs in one sitting or never eat eggs again?

Eat 24, but I’m not happy about it.

If you could learn one skill instantly, without needing to practice, what would you pick?

Some form of dance.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

This is my entire life’s work.

If you had to hide something so nobody ever found it, where would you hide it?

Now, why would I tell you?

What’s your lucky number?

7.

If you had to get a tattoo today, what would it be of?

Nando’s Perinaise.

Who’s your favourite pop star?

Hannah Montana, and I am so serious.

If you could have a superpower of your choosing, what would it be?

I would just want to be magic, but if that’s too broad, I want to shapeshift or be invisible whenever I needed to be.

Do you believe in aliens?

Yes.

What’s the most drastic thing you’ve done to get out of something you didn’t want to do?

Moved to London.

What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?

Probably the gig story.

Have you ever been mistaken for someone else?

I was at a gig, and these two

What is your most treasured possession?

Childhood photos or the locket I wear.

How punk are you out of ten?

I would say 6?

If you could be best friends

MESCAL

with a celebrity you do not know, who would you choose?

Rachel Sennott.

What’s your breakfast of choice?

I love cereal so much. If I could only eat one thing forever, it would probably be cereal.

Have you ever seen a ghost?

I was convinced I experienced seeing a ghost with my brothers when we were younger, but the truth is they saw a ghost, and I was in the other room. But I felt left out and told everyone I saw it too.

I believe their ghost story; it is crazy.

How far could you run if your life depended on it?

If I’m in a game of tag, I will run forever. If I am not, I could do 5k, maybe.

If you won the lottery, what would you spend the cash on?

I’d take my mum and dad anywhere they wanted to go.

Are you good in a crisis?

Yes. What’s one thing people don’t know about you?

I feel like a lot of people know this, but I am fluent in Irish.

Have you ever lied in an interview?

No, never. 1000% no, not even in the slightest. No way, yes.

Nell Mescal’s debut EP ‘Can I Miss It For A Minute?’is out 3rd May. Nell play’s Dork’s Night Out at London’s 100 Club on 8th May. Get tickets and find out more on readdork.com now.