Dork, October 2020

DOWN WITH BORING

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IDLES LANY SAWEETIE MATE DORK’S ULTI E K-POP GUID TON GUS DAPPER GRIFF + MORE!

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ISSUE 48 · OCTOBER 2020 · READDORK.COM

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SUMMER HEART

FRANCOIS

Ambitions (EP)

Be Mine (EP)

6 November 2020

In partnership with

27 November 2020

October 2020.

THIS MONTH...

28.

Alfie Templeman He’s just seventeen years old, but seventeen year-old Alfie Templeman, 17, is already one of indie’s great new hopes at the young age of seventeen. (No, that joke will never get old - Ed)

38.

IDLES

Revolutionary punk-rock force, or 6 Music dad’s favourite band?

On album three, Idles are proving that maybe - just maybe - you can be both.

42.

Saweetie

Any preconceptions you have of Saweetie, throw them away. She’s here to stay.

46.

Gus Dapperton Already a fave in his own right, one TikTok megahit later and Gus Dapperton could be about to become a legit superstar.

50.

Dork’s Big K-pop Guide

You might know your BTS from your Blackpink, but let us take you by the hand through the mustknow world of K-pop.

Index.

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October 2020 | readdork.com | Down With Boring

Ø6 Intro 28 Features

readdork.com

Editor Stephen Ackroyd Deputy Editor Victoria Sinden Associate Editor Ali Shutler Contributing Editors Jamie Muir, Martyn Young

Scribblers Abigail Firth, Aleksandra Brzezicka, Charlotte Croft, Dominic Allum, Jack Press, Jake Hawkes, Jamie MacMillan, Jessica Goodman, Josh Williams, Liam Konemann, Steven Loftin Snappers Ben Brook, Hollie Fernando, Rick Clifford, Sarah Louise Bennett, Tom Ham PUBLISHED FROM

WELCOMETOTHEBUNKER.COM UNIT 10, 23 GRANGE ROAD, HASTINGS, TN34 2RL 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.

Ø6

22 Hype 58 Incoming

Editor’s letter

T

here’s a way we like to think about ‘this magazine’, Most Dearest of Readers.

While it would probably be easier to tick boxes, pick individual acts based on individual features and releases, and just let the winds take us in whatever direction the wider world wants us to travel, that seems awfully boring. Instead, we like to consider Dork a giant playground, full of characters, alliances and tribes. Friendships and conflicts reign supreme - a story that runs throughout each school year as different groups and collectives gain dominance and the right to call dibs on the backseat of the bus home.

There’s the core squad - the vibrant gang who we build at the heart of everything we do, there’s the slightly to cool for their own good crew, there’s the pop kids, the greebo rockers and loads more.

But in amongst this gallery of rogues, we have favourites too.

It’s no secret to anyone that one such golden boy is young Alfie Templeman. First appearing on our pages at the tender age of 16, one could legitimately say we’ve seen him grow up. Still a few months short of the big 1-8, he’s fast becoming indie’s new boy wonder.

With 4 EPs down, and a new single just dropped, he’s giving off the kind

1Ø of bright, ultra-prolific energy which screams future Dork icon from the rooftops. That’s why we’re delighted to bring him to our - or any other - cover for the first time.

From what we’ve heard, it won’t be the last.

Stephen

LANY

Mama’s boy is ready to rule the world: Paul Klein talks the band’s new album, vulnerability and pays homage to his hometown.

Fenne Lily

Fenne Lily has accidentally made a record that’s very onthe-nose for 2020.

12

Will Butler

18

Working Men’s Club

‘EDITOR’ @STEPHENACKROYD

Five years on from his solo debut, and Arcade Fire’s Will Butler is pondering his place in America, past and present.

Through line-up changes and delays, Working men’s Club’s debut album has had a bit of a difficult birth.

22

Griff

With an Ivor Novello nom already under her belt, Griff is one of pop’s bright new hopes.

24

Jawny

Introduce yourself to Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter/multiinstrumentalist/internet sensation, Jawny.

62

PVRIS

Lynn Gunn takes on our list of ridiculous questions. She’s Avril Lavigne level punk, ‘FYI’.

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Intro.

THE BEATING HEART OF P OP.

6. DORK

Intro.

MUM’S MUM’S

THE THE

WORD WORD

Mama’s boy is ready to rule the world: LANY’s Paul Klein talks the band’s new album, vulnerability and pays long-due homage to his hometown.

By: Aleksandra Brzezicka.

readdork.com 7.

Intro.

T

he popular music world ain’t an easy one to conquer in the era of a million bedroompop boys mixing beats that go viral overnight and fans being sick of wannabe Coldplay-meets-Tame Impala-inspired indie lads.

If you wanna make it, you need to hit the right notes on every track.

For the past six years, that’s exactly what LANY have been doing. Since their 2017 self-titled debut LP, the heartfelt ‘Malibu Nights’, to ‘mama’s boy’, they’ve mastered their sound and matured enough to dig back into the past.

“Here we are on a Zoom call. I’m sure you’d prefer to do this in real life, so would I, but we’re just taking what’s been given to us and making the most of it,” frontman Paul Klein opens.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In LANY’s case, if you feel a hometown-sized weight on your chest, while playing in front of thousands of fans, you break your ribs open and put your heart into your best album yet. Even if it hurts.

“I was challenging myself: how can I be vulnerable on this album like I was on ‘Malibu Nights’, but maybe in a broader spectrum that really covers the human experience?” Klein shares on the new record. Though written in Nashville, recorded in Los Angeles and polished over hours of online chats, it’s Tulsa that gave it its identity.

“To be honest, in the beginning, we didn’t really want anyone to know where we were from. We left our own town for a reason because we wanted something different, but as you go around the world and build this fanbase, it becomes a little clearer that maybe you should let people know where you’re from,” he admits.

Wanting to be real with fans, he escaped from LA’s benchmark ‘perfect’ realness to reconnect with his roots.

At least for a while. “I love Oklahoma, I’ve learnt to appreciate where I’m from and my upbringing. Do I want to go back? Hell no, I’m never going back. I’m proud that I got out,” Paul confesses on something that anyone leaving their small-town sceneries to follow grander dreams would relate to.

8. DORK

“I would say without the doubt that we are the most improved band on the planet” Paul Klein

HRRRRNK!

JAMES BLAKE HAS PROPERLY RELEASED HIS COVER OF FRANK OCEAN’S ‘GODSPEED’

James Blake has properly released his cover of Frank Ocean’s ‘Godspeed’. The stripped-down piano-led rendition - which has been doing pretty well on ‘the TikToks’ - was originally performed via Instagram Live. It follows on from Blake’s track ‘Are You Even Real?’, which was co-written by Starrah, Ali Tamposi and Blake, and released as part of Apple’s “Behind The Mac” campaign.

Great success requires great sacrifice, especially if you’re a touring musician.

For a chance to see the world and play on international stages, you get a half a year away from your loved ones.

This kind of pain is more challenging to pour into a song than a relationship drama. “I would say that the easiest album in the entire world to write is a heartbreak album, a break-up album.

You’ve got infinite emotions at your dispense. I mean you can write so many songs about getting dumped, but it’s not easy to be equally vulnerable about ‘Hey mum and dad, you’re not gonna be here one day. Like, one day I’m gonna have to put you in the ground’,” Paul’s voice cracks. “That sounds so crazy.

I know that families aren’t perfect and everyone’s got a different story, but I wanna end on good terms,” he finishes.

‘Mama’s boy’ was not only a chance for Paul to reconcile with family but with his past self and deep-down fears. In ‘cowboy in la’ he retraces his first steps in a city of angels. ‘I still talk to jesus’ and ‘you!’ are conceptually worship songs that preach the power of love and feature, for the first time on LANY’s songs, acoustic guitar. ‘Heart won’t let’ dwells on the inability to let go. ‘Good guys’ lets out the frustration of the moment when you realise that the person you’re dating values chase more than the connection.

“Obviously, I don’t fully believe that because it’d be really a short-sighted depressing life perspective, but I do think that giving somebody too much time, too much affection, or being too available for whatever reason pushes the other person away,” Paul comments.

Still, out of 14 tracks, it’s ‘you!’ that’s splendid on a larger scale. Both when it comes to poem-like lyrics and video for it, featuring band smashing it out in the middle in of the desert and Paul crying out words while rocking baby blue dress. “I wanted to write something that can be about anyone or anything. It just basically captured the essence of love and finding something that ultimately completes you; that’s the sun to the moon,” he explains.

LANY’s third LP sets the bar higher than anything they’ve recorded before. “In the past, we kind of let our limitations define our art. We fought really, really hard to be able to afford to make an album that we’d love to make and dreamed of making. The first album was made in the kitchen or the bedroom on the computer,” Paul shares.

Remembering cramped rooms they kicked off their careers in, LANY’s team wanted to use, now available, studio resources to the maximum. “Everyone came with one goal in mind, and that was to make a modern classic. Make a bulletproof album that existed outside of 2020. We wanted to make

something that ultimately gets better with every listen,” Paul says, continuing: “We have a bandana as our icon.

A sun-faded bandana. It gets better with wearing. It gets better with time. That’s really the album that we wanted to make. Music that gets just better and better with each listen.”

It’s a ballsy plan in pandemic-haunted times.

Especially when the music scene is overcrowded with thousands of potential new breakthrough bands, trying to steal your heart and streams.

Perhaps LANY will be able to deliver what we deserve the most right now: a chance to enjoy ourselves

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro.

and take a break from the mayhem outside. Even if for a while. “We need some life, some hope and some wholesome material and just some shit that feels good.

That’s what I feel called to do and bring to the table. To entertain and take people’s minds off how broken the system is,” Paul shares.

No matter if ‘mama’s boy’ will become a classic record or not. Paul is starting to realise that it’s the artist who foremostly should be satisfied with his work. “That’s one thing I’m learning this year – I can’t please everybody.

It’s impossible to. At the end of the day, I just really have to be proud of my own work and please myself. And if you

Deftones have announced (and released) their new album, ‘Ohms’. With only few weeks’ notice, the rock behemoth’s latest record landed on 25th September via Warner Records.

like it, you like it. If you don’t that’s fine too,” he says.

While perfecting his own art and learning to channel the inside voice outside, it seems like it’s not as easy for Paul to tune in to his contemporaries. “It’s been weird. I’ve been searching for some new stuff and looking for new artists to come on the scene to push the boundaries more, not even that. Just deliver. There are just albums made in the past that I consume and I think are great, just full of great songs that I’m trying to fill my mind and my brain with,” he says.

Though Paul’s willing to make an exception for a few of his favourite artists, like Lauv with whom LANY

mxmtoon has launched a new podcast, 365 days with mxmtoon. The project features daily instalments with Maia discussing interesting, weird, and funny events of that day in history.

recorded viral ‘Mean It’ last year, or Ed Sheeran. “I feel like he’s such a talented songwriter. It’s unbelievable.”

Paul shares that he’d love to write a song with the red-headed pop star, but underlining that he’s not really looking to ride on the coattails of people’s success.

There’s no need to do that, anyway. On ‘Malibu Nights’, the guys from LANY have proved to be well-rounded performers and professionals, and ‘mama’s boy’ only solidifies it. Now, they’re ready to rule world stages again, aiming for spring 2021.

Whether it’d be an online or real-life tour, LANY’s motivated to share new music with fans, and not to spoil the

surprise, but the fourth album might be coming sooner than we’d expect. “This will be a first time when we put out an album and have plans to start writing a fourth one, which feels bizarre, but like I said we have to pivot and take the cards that we’re dealt. If we can’t go on tour, we may as well keep on writing some great songs,” Paul reveals.

Many bands being in LANY’s position would’ve taken it as a peak of their career. When you’ve reached millions of people, saw the world and put out two well-received records, is there more to dream of?

According to LANY, yes. It’s their faith in what they do and determination to become the best version of themselves that took them this far.

Naturally, it’s hard to know when to stop.

“In the past, I’ve been obsessed with trying to be the best band in the world, but if you’d ask a 100 people what the best band in the world was, they’d all have a different answer. Really what I’m becoming more obsessed is becoming the most improved band in the world, and I would say without the doubt that we are the most improved band in the world and on the planet.

If you listen to the first EPs to ‘mama’s boy’ you could make an argument that it’s not even the same three guys,” Paul comments.

Despite coming off as immersed in their own world of sounds and visions, LANY’s obsession with mastering their craft comes as a response to their mass of devoted followers. “We’re signing tens of thousands of these albums. It really shows how amazing the fans are, how invested. I can’t say thank you enough. It brings me so much joy. It sounds dumb, but it brings me so much joy to sit here and just sign so many posters because each one is a person and that person is so important to me, and to this band. We fought hard for every single one of these fans. It means everything to me,” Paul says.

P LANY’s album ‘mama’s

boy’ is out 2nd October.

IDLES are taking their new album on the road next spring.

The jaunt, in support of ‘Ultra Mono’, will kick off on 7th May in Glasgow, culminating with several shows at London’s Brixton Academy.

Down With Boring.

EVERY MONDAY, YOU GET A NEW EPISODE OF OUR WEEKLY PODCAST DOWN WITH BORING. FEATURING SPECIAL GUESTS, THE BEST NEW MUSIC AND ALL THE LATEST NEWS, HERE’S SOME OF THE STUFF YOU CAN CATCH UP WITH FROM THE LAST FEW WEEKS...

CIRCA WAVES

Kieran ‘from the band’ joins us to talk new Alfie Templeman collab ‘Lemonade’ and how long it takes to freeze a cod.

PORRIDGE RADIO

At the ‘time of press’ they’re up for the Mercury Prize. By now, you’ll know if they won or not, but they’re on Down With Boring regardless.

BLOXX

‘Friend of the magazine’ Fee joins us to talk the band’s much anticipated, indie bop heavy debut album.

Search ‘Dorkcast’ on your favourite podcast platform, or listen in full at 8pm on Dork Radio via readdork. com or TuneIn on iOS and Android

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ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro.

The Cribs have booked a new tour in support of their upcoming album. ‘Night Network’ will be released on 13th November, with the band hit the road in June of next year.

Five more acts have joined the bill for Reading & Leeds 2021: Charli XCX, Yungblud, Sigrid, Neck Deep and Jack Harlow have been added to the August bank holiday event’s first lot of names.

Bon Iver’s UK tour has been rescheduled for next year.

Justin Vernon and co. will now play in Oct and Nov 2021, with nights in Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, Dublin and two in London.

LIFE’S A B EACH R

Fenne Lily has accidentally made a record that’s very on-the-nose for 2020. Before anyone had even muttered “oh my god, what does self-isolating mean??” she holed herself up to pen an album that focuses on loneliness and mental health.

By: Jack Press. Photography: Ben Brook.

10. DORK

Intro.

A

trip through the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the word ‘breach’ can be a bit of a slippery slope into a whole new world of wordplay. A breach can be

an act of breaking or failing to observe a law, and it can also be a gap in a wall or one’s defence. For the Bristol-based singer-songwriter Fenne Lily, the title of her new record is a little bit like a loaf of half-andhalf bread; the best of both worlds.

“It’s about being okay with being alone,” she explains, “but also recognising that I do need people. I love being around people, so I can’t just be by myself all the time.

It’s like loving being on tour but knowing I need to be home; there’s a lot of feeling opposites on this album. It’s accepting that when you go up, you have to come down.”

Acceptance is a concept that cuts through ‘BREACH’ like a knife, taking on every topic under the sun and putting that sunken, solemn singer-songwriter spin on it.

‘Alapathy’, for example, is a made-up word that merges apathy and allopathic and is inspired by Fenne’s experience of taking medication to improve her mental health, only to conclude that it didn’t solve her problems. It simply treated the effects of her discomfort rather than the reason for it. The song encompasses both the doublesidedness of ‘BREACH’ as an album and the theme of acceptance, wherein Fenne accepts that there are other ways to treat yourself.

‘Alapathy’ is also the album opener proper, following the hauntingly raw introduction of ‘To Be A Woman Pt 1.’, and showcases a side of Fenne we’ve not yet experienced. It’s lo-fi distortion, and punchy percussion see’s the singersongwriter shift away from Laura Marling-esque indiefolk towards a moe Soccer Mommy-inspired lo-fi take on bedroom pop. It’s a shift in sonics that slides through ‘BREACH’, and was a sum of all of its parts.

“What I was listening to when I was writing it and what I was listening to when I went to record it was pretty different. Quite a lot of stuff had happened in between life-wise, so I was in a different headspace. When I was writing it, I was in Berlin for some of it, and I listened to this record called ‘Afraid

of Everything’ by Harrison Whitford, and I listened to it every day walking around.

“Then when I was recording, I was listening to a lot of Modest Mouse and Pavement, and my guitarist Joe is big into post-punk, and we did a lot of travelling together and I kind of absorbed a lot of his music taste. I like to just latch on to a music taste and make it mine for a bit, it makes me feel like an imposter in other people’s tastes.”

If being an imposter in other people’s tastes was one aspect of ‘BREACH’’s creation, being an imposter in her own world was another for Fenne. Having spent much of the two years separating her cathartically raw debut ‘On Hold’ from ‘BREACH’ travelling the world touring her tunes, she, in turn, learnt a lot about what she wanted from the music she was making.

“I just wanted to make something that I like. I wanted to make a record that felt like it would be more exciting for me and an audience to watch and play live. The live element of my job is what I feed off.

I wanted to make it a bigger sound, because I wanted to include more musicians, and make it more instrumental and interesting in that way.”

As well as making an album that was far more fitting to the melodies she wanted to match, so too were the lyrical tales she wanted to tell. Having spent much of her career so far singing soberly about the breakups and breakdowns of past relationships, there was a part of Fenne that wanted to find a way out of being typecast in the role of the romantic balladeer.

“For once, I didn’t really have a lot of romantic emotional turmoil, so that was quite cool to be able to start writing about something that wasn’t based on a relationship breaking down or whatever, and to move away from that threat of relationships defining me.”

“I think this record does have some parts about relationships breaking down, but it also has the other side of that which is relationships being created. There’s a relationship which I didn’t really look at before which is my relationship with myself. It kind of makes it sound like I think it’s a selfish record, and well, maybe it is.”

‘BREACH’ isn’t as much selfish as it is indulgent, a display of affection towards the emotional effects of both

growing up and growing into yourself, understanding who you truly are and who you want to be. On the brilliant shoegaze-meets-dream pop breeze of ‘I Used To Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You,’ the storytelling songwriter set about telling a tale of two halves, or more importantly, two emotions.

“I had just been fucked around by someone, and I had a fever, and flu, and I was at home and I suddenly just got really angry. I was like, ‘I feel like shit, my nose is so blocked, and I’m just really, really angry’.

“I had one last verse to figure the lyrics out for the next morning, and I decided that I wasn’t angry anymore, and I appreciated that a good thing happened in the first place, so I wasn’t seeing it entirely as a bad thing. I was in two minds, I was angry, but I was also thankful that it happened.”

While writing her woes down on paper and putting them to her melodies is a natural occurrence, getting those melodies in order isn’t as easy as it sounds on our eardrums. That song, as well as the album that surrounds it, was the result of a lot of to-and-froing from writing to recording to mixing.

“I wrote it so fast in one night, and I recorded it all as a demo, and I finished it, and I loved it, but it was kind of a funny song. I never took it to be very serious. Then we started recording it, and it felt so natural to make it and so unnatural to be re-recording it that I fucked the pace of it so much, and I ended up doing a really, really fast version in Chicago. I got back to Bristol and started mixing it and realised I wanted it to be a lot slower, and then I slowed it down, and I was like ‘oh my god have I done the wrong thing?’ I should’ve just gone with how it was at the beginning.

“I’ve been recording more at home, and that’s something I’ve been really enjoying, so I want to get deeper into that.

There’s a song on this record that hasn’t changed at all from the demo, and that feels weird; it feels almost too private. It’s called ‘To Be A Woman Pt 1’.”

While the writing of ‘BREACH’ began in her bedroom, Fenne wasn’t quite as ready as you might think for the social paralysis a global pandemic brings with it, especially as someone whose tendency to create is often

likened to a Duracell battery.

In fact, it was a period of selfdiscovery that often drifted away from making music.

“It’s been really hard. As much as I think creativity is something that shouldn’t just be stopped because you don’t feel like it, it’s been a choice because it’s been difficult.

Sometimes time has been going really weird, and I’ve been like, ‘what did I actually do yesterday?’ It’s like we’ve missed an entire year.”

In many ways, for anyone working even remotely in the creative industries, it truly does feel like we’ve missed an entire year, and it’s something that’s left a bitter taste in Fenne’s mouth as she reflects on her experiences in comparison to what they could’ve been.

“I was meant to tour with Waxahatchee and Lucy Dacus, and then I was meant to start a headline tour, and that’s all been pushed, or cancelled, so yeah, it’s a weird feeling. It’s also weird to have written a record that’s meant to be enjoyed live, and to then not be able to do that. I realise everyone is having a hard time, and sometimes I feel bad for saying ‘I can’t fucking tour my record’, but it really is a bummer.”

She might not have been able to take herself out on tour, but she’s turned her

“I worry about a lot, and stress about a lot, but that’s not always who I am” Fenne Lily

frown upside down and taken to the bathtub to talk to her friends, which include the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Maltese and her would-be tourmate Lucy Dacus.

“I had this idea to get people I admired or had toured with or whatever to talk to me and ask me everything they have to ask, and I’d do the same. I shot myself in the foot calling it Bathtime, as I don’t like baths and I don’t have a bath in my house. I’ve been having to go to my boyfriend’s house for baths, and it’s become this weekly thing that I’m really enjoying, because I get to talk to Phoebe Bridgers, and Matt Maltese, and Lucy Dacus, and all my friends. I hate being in the bath, but it’s happening every week until someone says ‘this is boring and we shouldn’t do this anymore’, which I can then go back to having showers like a normal person.”

Whether it’s on record or on social media, being your typical average joe is at the heart of everything Fenne does, simply because it’s all she really knows how to do. As much as she likes storytelling, she struggles to create a persona to play, opting to play herself instead.

“I think sometimes there’s a weird crossover where you feel like you’re giving too much of your personality away, and it always feels like you’re doing your job or whatever. I haven’t been able to make a character for myself, so I guess my character is just me, which sometimes feels bad and sometimes feels like the easiest thing to do.

“I think you can be as serious as you want. I sometimes get the feeling I don’t have enough important stuff to say, so it’s ended up becoming this thing that I just kind of enjoy doing. I worry about a lot, and stress about a lot, but that’s not always who I am. My favourite people on social media are funny people, so I’m making what I want to hear, and I’m posting what I want to see posted, again, I sound so selfish, but it’s how it is.”

Whether she’s sharing her suds or her sins, Fenne Lily has well and truly invited us into her world on her sophomore effort, allowing us to ‘breach’ the boundaries she set up previously to expose the different layers bubbling underneath. P Fenne Lily’s

album ‘BREACH’ is out now.

readdork.com 11.

Intro.

12. DORK

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro.

Jack Peñate has released a new EP. The follow-up to his long-long-long-awaited third album ‘After You’, ‘Noetics’ is out now feat. three songs recorded at the end of last year.

DMA’S have announced a new show at Liverpool Arena.

They’ll perform at the M&S Bank Arena on 9th April 2021, with their October headline tour also rescheduled to the same month.

Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker has announced not one, but TWO new albums. Titled ‘songs’ and ‘instrumentals’, they were written during lockdown, and are both out on 23rd October.

The Next Generation Five years on from his solo debut, and Arcade Fire’s Will Butler is pondering his place in America, past and present.

By: Jessica Goodman.

“I

‘m at the crime scene,” Will Butler conveys. “I don’t know that I am – I didn’t murder anyone,” he elaborates, “but I am at a crime scene. I’m there, and the evidence is all around us. So what do I do?”

This setting is the backdrop to Will Butler’s new album, ‘Generations’.

It’s a setting that seems to resonate through society as a whole. We’re in the throes of a global pandemic.

There’s a worldwide cry of pain and of outrage in the wake of the murder of George Floyd that needs to be heard. Meanwhile, Trump is campaigning for a second term as US president. The evidence, as the musician describes, is all around us.

“The general shittiness and desperation of the last four years, three-and-a-half years, is the swamp from which a lot of these emotions took their shape,” Will portrays of the record. “I was trying to show some dimensions of that.” Drawing from his life, the New York neighbourhood he calls home, and their place in the world at large, these songs might not have been written in the current climate, but their dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them is an emotion that feels

“Are we going to burn this shit down?”

Will Butler

unshakably prevalent.

In the five years since the release of his debut album ‘Policy’, Will Butler has toured, released a live record, toured some more, released a record with Arcade Fire, toured again, and somehow found the time to earn a mid-career masters degree in public administration. It seems safe to say that a lot has changed since then. “The first [album] was kind of like trying to make a market fresh meal,” he portrays. For this new record, he wanted to do things differently, diverting from the “fast and furious” pace of his debut to take the time to let the songs grow.

“This was a bit more like, okay, what do we do if we’re making a world class stew?” he poses, laughing.

Born out of a process he describes as “boiling the bones and the onions and the carrots and everything,” with ‘Generations’ Will Butler explores the history – specifically his family history – that brought him to where he is today, and wrestles with a keenly-felt desperation for something better in the future. “There’s a nostalgia, but for a different present,” he portrays. “It’s not ‘I wish we were back here,’ it’s ‘I wish now we had made another choice back then.’ It’s

a nostalgia for an alternate future.” It’s an energy that prevails far beyond the context of this album. “Right now’s like, ‘I wish it was 2019, except 2019 was just utter shit, so I want it to be 2025, but only if in 2025 we’ve actually fixed a couple of things,’” he offers with a grim chuckle. “It’s this whole mess of emotions.”

This is the energy that flows through ‘Generations’, a record that balances between the realism of the moment and hopefulness for the future. “It’s been a batshit crazy world the last four or five years,” Will expresses.

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, New York, he might crack jokes about dreading a second Great Depression (if you can’t laugh… etc.) but the musician is in high spirits.

“There’s something about hope, about being hopeful, about being oriented towards something – like being oriented towards a better future,” he enthuses, “while keeping your eye out and seeing all the shit that’s going to destroy you before you make it to your goal…”

“I think the head and the heart are in different places,” he distils. “You’ve got to know those things, but you’ve got to point your soul in that direction.” He pauses,

thinking his words over. “You don’t have to,” he amends, “it’s just hopeful to point your soul in that direction.” That’s exactly what ‘Generations’ strives to do, shining a light to illuminate the shitshow of a situation we find ourselves in while offering hope for whatever comes next. “It’s a fine place to begin by acknowledging your power or lack of power and your position within the world,” Will conveys, “and then move forward from there.” As he sings on ‘Bethlehem’, “how does it feel to know the torch is in your hand?”

“Dark,” he offers in response to his own question, referencing events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as an explanation as to why.

“It’s embarrassing and shitty and terrifying, and you are probably doing something horrible.” He pauses and clarifies, “the ‘you’ is me in this.” The lyric – and song – in question is inspired by the (misquoted) poetry of William Butler Yeats. As he talks Will searches for one poem in particular – ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’ – and pauses to read the last stanza aloud: “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time; Arise and bid me strike

readdork.com 13.

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro.

a match and strike another till time catch.”

“There’s something in that moment, this desire to burn it all down, and then this idea of striking the match and blowing it out,” he expresses.

“Are we going to burn this shit down? Are we going to blow out the torch?” he asks.

“It’s that moment now.” There are no answers. No one knows what the future holds.

Instead, with ‘Generations’ Will Butler explores where he’s come from and where he hopes we’ll go from here.

“I keep saying, it’s a weird moment we’re living in right now,” he conveys. “It’s a powerful moment, but deeply bizarre.”

When he isn’t looking forwards on ‘Generations’ he’s looking back, delving into the history that brought him to where he is today.

“My great grandfather was the last son of a pioneer, a homesteader in Utah,” he describes. “He made his children be in a band. They’d drive across the desert – before there were roads in the desert – and play music in churches. Those kids grew up to be musicians in a jazz vocal group. My mom grew up in that musical family, playing music and playing shows.”

Performing in Arcade Fire with his brother, Win, and now readying to release his second solo record, it seems that music is in Will Butler’s blood.

This sense of tradition is most keenly felt on album closing track, ‘Fine’. “In some ways, it’s trying to be like a Kanye West folk song or something,” he laughs, quickly explaining that it isn’t hip-hop but rather “talking about important things in a crass way.” “There’s a genre of hip-hop where it’s like ‘I got rich selling drugs’,” he describes. “I’m like, ‘I got rich because my grandfather ran a small business’,” he laughs. “I got rich because generations of American policy have been oriented towards providing white men with a high standard of living that would be better than the generation before them,” he declares with a mock flourish. “How do you like me now?”

More than just reckoning

14. DORK

The Aces have pencilled in a new headline tour. The run - in support of their recent, very very good new album, ‘Under My Influence’ - will see them hit the road throughout spring 2021.

Tom Grennan is going to perform a virtual show from O2 Academy Brixton.

Utilising “groundbreaking live stream VR technology,” the gig will take place on Friday 2nd October.

Sea Girls have a big old tour planned for spring 2021. The run includes a few rescheduled dates, plus some new ones for April and May 2021, in support of their debut album..

“I think of the record as a complex and satisfying stew” Will Butler

HRRRRNK!

IDKHOW HAVE LAUNCHED THEIR OWN ONLINE STRESS TEST

iDKHOW have launched their own online stress test.

The retro, glitchy evaluation asks a series of rapid-fire, usually readable questions like ‘Do you get uneasy in tight spaces?’ and ‘Do you want to be left alone?’ before drawing its conclusion. Have a gander at tellexx.idkhow.com.

with his family history, ‘Generations’ sees the musician trying to find his place in it in the now. “I’m kind of the oldest millennial,” he states. “I’m born in 1982: I’m not 40, but I feel like an old man. People that are six years younger than me, I see them through a glass darkly,” he laughs. “Something about being a millennial who remembers the Soviet Union,” he chuckles. “It neither has the standing to be an ‘OK, boomer’ person, nor the standing to be like, ‘I’ve got my shit together, I’m a youth’.” Exploring the tension of bloodlines and identity – and where that goes from here – is the river that runs through ‘Generations’.

“I think of [the record]

as a complex and satisfying stew,” Will describes, in another culinary-inspired metaphor that gets more difficult to follow the longer he continues, “based off of some old family recipe that you did every goddamn step to make it into this very nourishing, very layered, uh, goulash.” He abandons that train of thought with a laugh. “My brain is so broken these days.” As for where Will Butler will go from here, your guess is as good as his [we mentioned there are no answers, right? – ed].

“Even before the pandemic I was like, ‘I’m putting out a record this fall, I’m going to play shows in America a month before the election, I’m going to go around the

world, meet people and figure out what’s going on and provide some release’,” he enthuses, plans which are currently just not possible at the moment. He has hopes for being creative with ways of sharing the record (“I’m curious to see if I get better at it, living on the internet”) and for making a new Arcade Fire record (“God willing, pandemic permitting”). The rest is open to possibility. “For people that care about music, music feels very important right now,” he asserts. “Music is so nourishing and comforting by its nature that it feels good to be engaged in that, as weird as it is.” P Will Butler’s

album ‘Generations’ is out 25th September.

Intro.

BUZZTASTIC

WHAT IS CURRENTLY 'REALLY GOOD', AND WHAT NEEDS TO GET IN THE CULTURAL BIN? WE DECIDE. BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY. IT'S OUR MAGAZINE. DO KEEP UP.

Wallows have a new EP coming later this year. Dork’s lovely September cover stars will release ‘Remote’ on 23rd October. Made during quarantine, it follows on from their debut album.

‘The bands’ might like to think they’re political, but they’ve got nothing on those true beacons of a that is good and right Jedward, who have been using Twitter to fight against awful. Some ‘famous’ anti-mask wearing idiots (we’ll get to them later) have already felt their fury. G’wan lads.

Well, isn’t this a nice surprise?

Marika Hackman is set to drop a brand new album. Titled ‘Covers’, it features her own takes on tracks

by Radiohead, Beyonce, Muna, The Shins and Elliott Smith, and is due 13th November.

2020 will forever be the year of Big Indie Number Twos. Latest off the block to just miss out on a chart topping album, Friend of the Magazine Declan McKenna, who lost out to noted shopkeepers and old men of the past The Rolling Stones. Still, what a result for Deccers. The people’s champion.

BUZZKILL

We may be sending this off to print before the result is announce, but let’s be honest - Sports Team didn’t win the Mercury, did they*? And while BIG CONGRATS to whoever did and all that, that’s a huge loss to our favourite pastime of winding up old boring muso types who want to deny anyone anything but their approved brand of critically safe anodyne bore-core on Twitter.

Dear ‘The Festivals’. If you have say, as a totally random example - six headline spots, and you can’t book a single non-male act, that’s rubbish. If you haven’t managed it for years and years previously, that’s even more rubbish. If you insist on ignoring this feedback EVERY SINGLE TIME - urgh.

We’ll be honest, Dear Reader - it’s quite bloody hard to work out which new bands to tip for 2021 when nobody has been able to play a gig for six months or more.

Next year could well be a solo pop star jackpot.

Ian Brown. Noel Gallagher. We know you’re old now - you’re probably struggling with remembering why you went into the kitchen in the first place - but this anti-mask bollocks is dangerous and stupid and needs to stop.

You’re both Definitely Maybe fucking idiots. Imagine making Liam look the smart one. Sort it out.

* NB: if by some miracle Sports Team did win, please disregard this message and enjoy the meltdowns.

readdork.com 15.

Intro.

ROSES ARE RED. VIOLETS ARE BLUE. HERE IS SOME POETRY! (WILL THIS HEADLINE DO?)

POETRY AND MUSIC GO HAND IN HAND, SO WE’RE TOLD. FROM LANA DEL REY AND ARLO PARKS, TO DORK FAVE SINEAD O’BRIEN, WHO HAS JUST DROPPED A REALLY VERY GOOD NEW EP ‘DROWNING IN BLESSINGS’. BUT ARE ALL MUSICIANS GOOD AT WRITING POEMS, OR IS IT A SPECIALIST SKILL? WE DECIDED TO ASK SINEAD TO JUDGE SOME EFFORTS BY SOME OF HER CHESS CLUB LABEL MATES TO SEE. ACTUALLY, THEY’RE NOT AWFUL. WHO KNEW?

Obvious Guy

SPACE

Not good at goodbyes And lost at seventeen What will be next for this tambourine dancing queen No he’s not from Abba But can sure hold a tune He’s also not obvious So don’t speak too soon He can feel numb But says it’s dumb Our best friend, Obvious or not, Makes our chess club roster red hot

Life is a black hole in space chasing you down like a race, there’s nowhere to run.

When your head needs the sun as a light on the darkness you face.

by Jess Coach Party

Sinead says: “Great crossreferencing of songs here, (‘My Best Friend’ by Alfie x Coach Party). I love a piece full of references and clues! Let’s see about dancing queen title, Alfie?

3/5”

Taking On Time (Quarantine edition)

by Phoebe Green

Everything here matters, except for the time Spagbol for brekkie with a glass of wine Fixated on the way in which the flowers are arranged But oblivious to when you’re supposed to get changed The sun has not yet risen, but you’ve been awake for hours Or maybe it’s been days, when was the last time that you showered?

You’ve tried to be productive but it’s useless and uninspiring Taking on time rather than taking on the ironing Sinead says: “I love the way, so many daily rituals have been threaded into this one and that sense of time stretching and slowing down during quarantine.

5/5!”

16. DORK

by Alfie Templeman

The stars are the moments that shine that stand out from miles and miles they sparkle with hope, when it’s too hard to cope, and assure you that you’re feeling fine.

Sinead says: “I appreciate the rhyming scheme here, nice form and ending with a positive message is a plus too! 4/5”

And the winner is...

Sinead says: “The winner is Phoebe, I really like her sense of using inspiration from her surroundings, and I can really see that environment and image she’s put together. ‘TAKING ON TIME 2.0’ - Wonder what it would sound like!”

RAINY DAYS

Intro.

London’s Be No Rain loves a great big, cinematic idea - and his debut album more than delivers the goods.

By: Steven Loftin.

Photography: Hollie Fernando.

H

is debut album’s not even out yet, but upcoming crooner Be No Rain, aka Sam Frankl, has already got his second in the bag.

“You know the old adage that it takes 25 years to write your first album, and six months to write your second? That has rarely been truer.”

‘Strawberry Backstory’ has now been kicking around for the best part of the year, with the usual 2020 reasons for not being released, which has been handy for Sam. Being able to look back

upon his first album, and understanding just what he’d put into it meant that it was easier for Be No Rain to set out on the next road.

“I felt a fidelity to some of the earlier parts of my songwriting and identity when I was doing the first record,” he says. “I was using quite a lot of source material from my adolescence in my early 20s and trying to fit that into a coherent whole.”

That “coherent whole” is, as Sam puts it, a “kind of collage”. It features heartbreak, humour, and most of all, lashings of personality. Coming from such a personal space, this mysterious second outing “was far more immediate, and I felt like I was writing from the more recent past, far more reactive with a more consistent voice.”

But without getting ahead of ourselves, ‘Strawberry Backstory’ is why Dork are chatting to a sleepy Sam, who’s just returned from a trip Sweden in the wee hours.

“Be No Rain is a kind of lovelorn, stuck at prom forever, character” Sam Frankl

This is truly the beginning of Be No Rain’s journey, with its striking aesthetic and icon - Sam himself immersed in it. Combed in grainy VHS footage and a youthful vulnerability, this all came from Sam wanting to, well, not be Sam. Referring to this process as “practically a wholesale reinvention at one point”, the idea behind Be No Rain, and its eventual first album, initially came to be “as a document about memory… this shadow of a singular experience.”

“In this case, [it was] heartbreak from my adolescence. It fractured at a certain point, and that was around the time we decided on adopting a nom-de-plume instead of using my birth name,” he says. “Which I had been using for some releases before, but I felt like I needed this character who could be kind of ambiguous and caught between this weird world between memory and renewal. So that’s why we came up with Be No Rain, kind of lovelorn, stuck at prom forever, character.”

Immersing himself in a world of his creation allowed Sam to be a lot “calmer”, he says. “We were able to suddenly start talking about these stories which are grown as structures off an original event. We could interact with [them] far better when this character existed, rather than some version of me. But it is, obviously, still just some version of me.”

The idea for the world itself came from the echoing and yearning ‘Call Back’ after someone commented that it “sounds like the soundtrack to a John Hughes film - Pretty in Pink, or something like that, and we loved that.”

Playing directly into the hands of Sam’s teenage, lovelorn experiences, the unabashed nature naturally led into that most frightfully important moment in a teenager’s life: prom night.

In this idea, Be No Rain sounds like: “This idea of a totally unrealistic high school band that might play at their prom.”

“While we were recording

the vocals, we started projecting scenes from movies onto the back wall of the studio for me to try and embody the feeling,” he says.

“I think our favourite was a scene from Carrie - before she gets covered in pig’s blood, obviously - when she’s slow dancing in circles. So we started really focusing on the prom aspect more and more.”

Having never been to one of his own, Be No Rain’s world is meant to portray Sam’s idea of the event. “I always thought of it as this magical threshold moment; the perfect place for a character to get stuck, frozen in time,” he says.

Now the ‘Strawberry Backstory’ memory excavation has been completed, and it’s back to the future for Sam. As for what this next album sounds like, given this eternal prom, is that it for Be No Rain?

To be shimmering in this forever-21 scene?

“It’ll take place in a different world altogether,” he chuckles. “I think of it as some kind of film franchise that I want to be able to draw upon. The character stays the same, but more or less every other reference point shifts around him. It’s like someone just hit scroll on the multiverse and there they are, inserted into this new world. It’s like the reactions remain the same because the character has been formed.”

Not wanting to anchor himself too far into this idea, Be No Rain is still a catharsis for Sam and a new way of dealing with the world as he grows up. “I don’t want to pretend these things are overly constricting or overly structured,” he says. “When it comes to sitting down and writing a song, I’m not trying to lean too hard on the narrative angle. The world which the second album has been created in, and in turn, created, is still being formed. It definitely won’t be a high school prom. But I can’t exactly put my finger on exactly what.” P Be No

Rain’s album ‘Strawberry Backstory’ is out now.

readdork.com 17.

Intro.

Work From Home Through line-up changes and delays, Working Men’s Club’s debut album has had a bit of a difficult birth - but it’s here now, and frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant isn’t short of things to say.

By: Jake Hawkes.

18. DORK

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Intro.

I

t’s been a bit of a bumpy road for Working Men’s Club to get to the release of their self-titled debut.

First, there was a complete line-up change, with frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant the only founding member left.

This shift led to a move away from traditional guitar music and more towards synths, drum machines and cowbell (lots and lots of cowbell, in their live show at least). With that upheaval dealt with, the band set about getting ready to release their debut album.

That was then derailed by the ongoing global pandemic, but now, months later, it’s finally time.

“I was pretty annoyed that it got pushed back, to be honest,” says Syd down a less-than-ideal phone line.

“I just had to put it on a shelf and forget about it to avoid it winding me up, but I was really happy with it and excited for the release.

Obviously, it was pushed back for good reasons, but I don’t think it was fair on anyone who had ordered it to get told they couldn’t have it for a few more months, when it was all ready to go.

“The one good thing is that it didn’t end up clashing with the Black Lives Matter movement, because I wouldn’t exactly have been happy promoting my work when something so much more important was going on. My main issue was someone who paid 20 quid for the vinyl 8 months ago is still waiting for it, which isn’t a great look. That’s one of the reasons we released that megamix a few months back [a 20-minute medley the band uploaded to YouTube in June], just to give the fans something to tide them over.

Well, that and to keep me from feeling depressed and sorry for myself whilst I was stuck at home.”

The megamix is an indication of the more electronic sound that Working Men’s Club have been veering towards as they develop, a trend that sits front and centre on the album. “I think it was just that nobody had encouraged

Blossoms have added two new shows to their UK headline tour: the band will play Lincoln Engine Shed and Stoke Victoria Hall on 17th and 19th March respectively.

“You need to have an opinion, don’t you?”

Syd MinskySargeant

Yungblud has announced his new album, ‘Weird!’. Due for release on 13th November, news of the record arrives alongside his new single ‘god save me, but don’t drown me out’.

me before,” he explains. “Then Ross [Orton, the producer] was keen on both the indie stuff and the electronic bits, so it helped me finally commit to moving over into that sphere.

That meant I was freer to express my ideas in the studio. There were less people in the studio a lot of the time too, which meant it was easier to bin the shit stuff and run with the good ideas. Less ego in the room meant less tantrums, and we ended up doing most of the recording in about 10 days.

“Because of the earlier stuff, I am worried that people will think we’re just fucking around with synths and that, instead of actually caring about the genres we’re moving into,” he adds.

“I love electronic music and whilst the album was being written and recorded I was listening to a load of African dance music, as well as what was going on in Detroit and Chicago in the 80s and 90s, the Sheffield stuff like Cabaret Voltaire too. I love the industrial stuff that all traces back to Kraftwerk, but people seem to assume we’re just a band from the Manchester scene who are doing a bit of throwback synth stuff.”

He pauses, before saying: “Honestly as brilliant as playing in Manchester is, so much of it is so bland and stuck in the past. Some people might think we’re the same, but I write the songs, and I know I’m not sitting here trying to bang out a Happy Mondays ripoff or whatever. I think a lot of writers are so hung up on recreating the past, and it’s really fucking sad, to be honest. If you want to go and make music that has already been made, just go and join a fucking covers band – make

your own music or don’t bother.”

His frustration at the lack of creativity isn’t just a dig at other bands on the circuit, it’s a way of vindicating what Working Men’s Club are doing, and the frustration clearly stems in large part from the band being lumped in with other acts who they really don’t have much in common with. “I just want to be blunt with people and say that we are not a post-punk band – at all.” He says in a tone that doesn’t offer any room for argument. “Maybe when we started out with the old line-up, we were a little bit that way, but we’re not now. It’s good to mislead people for a bit, but I don’t want us to end up so far down that path that we can’t come back.”

“Every four years or so you get a revival of something or other,” he continues. “But whether it’s good or not? That’s another question. We had psych a few years back, and now we’ve got post-punk, and all these bands are just doing the same thing, and it’s all just a bit shit really. It’s nice to see independent bands selling out bigger venues, and a lot of the music is good too, but I just don’t find it very interesting, basically. Again, they’re not doing anything new. So many bands are blatantly ripping off stuff from now even that long ago, with no character, no soul at all. These bands come from

Black Honey have released their new single, ‘Run For Cover’. The track - written with Mike Kerr from Royal Blood - arrives after months of lockdown, also following on from recent track ‘Beaches’.

these synthesised big cities where everyone’s telling them that everything’s great and there’s no struggle or pain.

Some guy gets on stage and starts singing songs about his fucking cat – that is literally what’s going on at the moment, because they’ve got fuck all else to talk about.

“This mundane turn in British music is the most annoying thing, however well you’re playing. You’ve gotta have a fucking purpose, otherwise what’s the meaning to your art? This focus on singing about what you’re doing just to fill space, make music and not analyse it at all is shit. That’s my opinion, anyway, and you need to have an opinion, don’t you? If not then what’s the point in doing interviews, or even getting up on stage? You’d be proper fucked. Half the time I read an interview and the band are just talking about how cool or intelligent they are, and I’m just sitting there like ‘I don’t give a shit!’” He laughs.

“I just don’t like reading all this bollocks where a band is completely up themselves about all this pretentious stuff.”

He stops and collects his thoughts, before summing up: “At the end of the day I’d much rather sit here and talk about how shit the world is, rather than wanking off about how great my music is – although the album is great.”

P Working Men’s Club’s

self-titled album is out 2nd October.

readdork.com 19.

Intro.

ST UF F YOU NEED TO KNOW T HIS M ONT H...

‘FYI’

Jamie xx and Metronomy are taking part in a gig series in aid of small venues at risk.

With tickets available via a prize draw, they’ll be held “as soon as real shows can happen safely”.

Django Django are back with their new single, ‘Spirals’.

Their first new material since the ‘Winter’s Beach’ EP in 2018, it’s described in a press release as a “glimpse at what’s to come”.

THE CHART

12

day life

a 9

in the

Are You Listening?

Festival has been postponed. The charity event raises money for Reading Mencap, and will take over multiple Reading venues on 24th April 2021.

THE CONSTANTLY SHIFTING LIST OF DORK'S FAVOURITE ALBUMS OF 2020 - UPDATED EVERY MONTH!

01. Rina Sawayama

SAWAYAMA

3

FROM DUSK TILL DAW N W I T H YOUR FAVOURI T E ACTS

6

‘They’ may have denied her her Mercury nomination on some bullshit nonsense, but that’s fine. We appreciate you Rina. A riser to Number 1!

YOU KN OW W H AT ' S EASIER T H AN FOLLOW ING AR OU ND YOUR FAVE U P-A ND COMIN G IND IESTROK E-POP STAR S , DAY IN, DAY OU T, TO SEE WH AT T H E Y ' R E UP TO? AS K ING THEM.

02. Declan McKenna

ZEROS

8AM

My dog Luna usually wakes up around 7am. She always puts her face on my bed and breathes in my face. I tell her to go back to bed and then she comes back at 8am.

I give Luna her breakfast and take her out for a walk.

I live very close to a school with a bunch of teenagers, and they always say awww when they see her. Everyone loves big dogs. I try to get away from the school cause I’m very intimidated by teenagers, and I don’t want them to see me pick up Luna’s poop. I know I was a teen literally two years ago, but I’ve always been scared of teens.

9AM

After walking Luna, I end my walk at one of my favourite coffee shops. I like to sit outside and just pet Luna, especially now that it’s getting a bit colder.

10AM

At 10am, my other favourite coffee shop open and I get lunch there. I love the staff

20. DORK

Girl In Red THIS MONTH...

there, and they always know my order. I used to get embarrassed about being there so much, but now it’s just nice. I bring my food back to my apartment.

1 2P M

After all my food and drink consumption, I usually have some meetings. I’m always planning what to do next and how I can make things

that mean something in a time that is very strange. I sporadically jump between different activities like playing piano and guitar.

Cuddling/walking with Luna and hanging out with friends. I try to write, but honestly lately my mind has been all over the place. I’m happy, but I’m just thinking about so many things I don’t have any sensible words

written down. It’s okay, though. I found some notes in my diary from 5 years ago where I was ranting to myself about how little I had been writing, and I’ve made a duzin songs since then, so I’ll be alright.

7 PM

I give Luna food around this time, and then we go for another walk. She’s with me every moment of the day, but it’s nice to have a longer walk. I’m terrible at cooking, so I either make oatmeal or order a pizza.

1 1 PM

It’s getting darker outside a lot earlier, so I’m pretty much inside watching Netflix until I go to bed. I’m so scared of walking outside in the dark. Anyways, GILMORE GIRLS yess, it’s so cute and just makes me happy. P

Fresh out of a chart battle, our Dec rises to Number 2 - because true legends always finish second. Big Dec Energy.

03. Run The Jewels RTJ4

04. Phoebe Bridgers PUNISHER

05. Taylor Swift FOLKLORE

06. The 1975

NOTES ON A CONDITIONAL FORM

07. Sports Team DEEP DOWN HAPPY

08. The Big Moon WALKING LIKE WE DO

09. Dua Lipa FUTURE NOSTALGIA

10. Haim

WOMEN IN MUSIC PT. III

Intro.

THE BEST NEW SONGS THIS MONTH.

Fickle Friends

«

renforshort

in Scott’s shoes and play his character for a brief moment.”

It sounds nothing like Greatest Fictional Band of All Time Sex Bob-omb, but it’s quite Scott Pilgrim-y, apparently.

The follow-up to upstart renforshort’s recent hits ‘i drive me mad’ and ‘fuck i luv my friends’, ‘nostalgic (luvsick)’ is a garage-y ode to reminiscing. “’nostalgic’ is a really important song to me,” she says, “I’ve been sitting on it for so long and it is truly one of my favourites!

It took a really long time to get it perfect for us but when we finally did we all felt really excited about the song.”

“This song is very visual for me,” she adds, “and it reminds a lot of Scott Pilgrim which is basically the backbone for the entire creative arc surrounding the song, the visuals and cover art are reminiscent of Scott’s character, I think that it’s really cool to be able to be

Alec Wigdahl

nostalgia (luvsick)

The Word

It’s his fourth single of the year.

We’re becoming fast fans of our Alec. His new bop ‘The World’ follows on from his own singles ‘Summer Is Over’, ‘Lipstick’ and ‘Cologne’ - all out this earlier year - plus a songwriting credit on Internet Money’s hit ‘Lemonade’, featuring Gunna, Don Toliver and NAV. He’s also not long had his track ‘Big Red Balloon’ featured on Bill & Ted Face the Music soundtrack. Not bad, eh?

Sunflower Bean

Moment in the Sun They’re back with their first new music since last year’s ‘King of the Dudes’ EP

Sunflower Bean’s first new material of 2020 is “about finally recognizing what is important in one’s life, the people you decide to spend it with,” the band explain.

“All of these things we distract ourselves with, the never-ending mountain of career climbing, the pursuit of financial success, and the hope that after all that trying you could finally be cool.

All of that is meaningless in comparison to one great day, hour, or moment with someone you really love.” It’s also a bop.

Rachel Chinouriri

Give Me A Reason It’s an emotional new track from our Rachel. “‘Give Me A Reason’ is about love and whether it’s enough to hold together a relationship,” Rachel explains.

“Can you leave someone you love without them giving you a reason? Can you fall out

What A Time

Shame Alphabet

They’re baaaaaaaaaaack!

After what feels like an age away - even if it actually wasn’t all that long at all in the grand scheme of things Shame are back! Back! Back!!!

And in ‘Alphabet’, they’re not holding anything back.

Though the band had been testing new material in a live setting for more than a year or two, the first taster of what presumably will be a second album chucks in the proverbial kitchen sink. Taut and tight, but rattling along like a runaway train, it’s a line in the sand to their peers. Though a whole scene of acerbic, postpunk luminaries have sprung up in the time Shame have been away, none of them have anything to lay a finger on this. Welcome back, lads.

of love without then doing anything wrong? Coming to terms with the idea of breaking someone’s heart, who has given you everything is incredibly difficult, but maybe there is more out there for you in this world.” Sniff sniff.

Cautious Clay Agreeable

There’s a much-anticipated debut album coming next year, apparently.

The first single front an upcoming debut album, expected to drop in 2021, ‘Agreeable’ is one hell of a bop. Cautious explains: “Agreeable is both a reflection on how compromise is a part of our daily lives and how the compromises we make, both big and small, can have an effect on personal growth; it is also a satirical look at our current media landscape and the divisive rhetoric certain outlets and people employ in order to argue their points of view.” So there we go.

It’s a Fickle Friends track. It’s a bop. What did you expect?

The lead single for new EP ‘Weird Years (Season 1)’ which is set to arrive next January - ‘What A Time’ is “an anthem for escapism,” according to Natti from the band. “With everything that has happened over the last six months, everyone has needed a little time away from the outside world. It’s felt like the world is going to shit, but you need to take some time out for yourself. Shut your bedroom door, turn your music up and dance around the room.”

Bring Me The Horizon Obey (with YUNGBLUD)

It’s an all star team-up that refuses to conform. Ooo edgy!

The latest track from Bring Me’s current ‘project’ ‘Post Human’ - which is apparently set to span four different records over the next year - ‘Obey’ sees the Sheffield rockers teaming up with enfant terrible Yungblud.

“We consider ourselves free but only because the chains are invisible,” Oli Sykes explains, “and we are controlled in ways we don’t even want to think about. They tell us how to live with a smile on their face, like shit aint fucked up, inform us of tragic statistics like its nothing… it’s a weird world.”

Yungblud adds: “We are being told to conform to a completely outdated idea that we don’t relate to or even understand.

They teach us to turn against each other and to fight against our differences rather than embrace and celebrate them.

They try to keep us divided because it makes us weaker.

Robots follow robots, because they feel nothing at all. But what they don’t realize is that to us, to be different is to be free and a world of fucking love and equality is a world we want to be part of. We will rise above the hate and the diversion. We will fight for the world we want to be a part of. We will not obey.”

Alright lads. You do you. readdork.com 21.

ES S ENT IAL NEW MUSIC

FACT FILE + From London, UK + Check out ‘Say It Again’ + So cial @wiffygriffy

HYPE HYPE NEWS

Boy Pablo is taking his debut album ‘Wachito Rico’ on a bumper 2021 world tour, including dates across Europe next March, kicking off at Birmingham’s O2 Academy2 on the 16th.

Phil Madeley has released his debut EP, ‘21st Century Witch Hunt’. Out in September via Nice Swan Records, the record “questions the current state of play,” he says.

Griff

S

uperstar in waiting, Griff is someone who knows exactly who they are and is striking out on her own and forging a path to pop stardom on her own terms.

Self-assured and bursting with confidence, Griff feels like she has been primed for success for years, but in fact, has only been doing this making music lark for a year.

What a year she has had so far, though, with three diverse bangers under her belt with many more waiting in the wings. The thing that really sets her apart is her desire to subvert convention and shake things up a little.

“When I got signed we were putting the creative together, and they realised I was quite particular about how I wanted everything to be,” she laughs. “The pop girl market is so saturated, and there’s a lot of sameness in it, so it was super important for me to have the visuals look like nothing else and feel like nothing else. The sound had to be minimal or do something different to what every other pop girl is doing. That’s the running theme I’m trying to achieve with everything.”

There’s no doubt Griff is striking in every way.

From her music which combines the exuberant boldness of big-ticket pop with the inventiveness and idiosyncrasies of minimal electronic production, to the strong visual aesthetic she is cultivating, Griff is an all-encompassing package.

“I’ve always had a love of clothes and making stuff,” she explains. “I just love making things, whether it’s songs or visuals. That’s the thread that runs through all my work. I’m quite a perfectionist when it

comes to that.”

You can see her creative streak in full effect on the string of singles and videos she has already released their year to ever-increasing acclaim - from the tender heartbreaker of ‘Good Stuff’, to latest track ‘Say It Again’s’ effortless cool featuring a lockdown-filmed video set on a fantastical seafront with some of the best choreography you’re likely to see all year.

“I managed to make a video during lockdown,” she says explaining the ways creative artists have tried to make the best of this most rubbish of years. “That in itself was a whole new thing.

I think it’s nice realising that you can get stuff done by yourselves. It’s shown everyone that sometimes all the big budgets and having a million people on set just isn’t necessary. I made my video just me at home, and I feel like it’s one of my favourites.”

Writing everything herself in her bedroom just outside London, surrounded by her big family of mum, dad, two brothers and the foster kids that her parents look after, Griff makes bedroom pop on a maximalist scale. Her love of music and entry into performing and songwriting came from her formative experiences as a child experiencing the joy of music.

“I was raised in church, and that had a huge impact,” she says.

“Every Saturday, you have incredible live music. You watch how music is used as a way of people connecting and finding an emotional purpose. That was a huge influence. From an early age, my parents gave my brothers music lessons, so I was like, I want that too. It was kind of

wasted on me though as my mum tried to do the whole Asian mum do-your-grades thing and as soon as realised I could play chords and play Taylor Swift songs I was like, I don’t need to do all this classical training, I can write songs! All I need are these chords, and I’ve got it.”

That independent streak was forged then, and it feels like Griff hasn’t looked back.

As she became more and more proficient the desire to write her own songs and express herself lyrically came to the fore. At their core, her songs contain an emotional resonance that anyone can connect with. “I like heartbreak songs, not that I’ve really experienced a romantic heartbreak,” she laughs. “I just tap into every relationship I have in my life whether it’s with myself or my own thoughts, but most of the time it’s friendships or seeing what other people close to me are going through. I try to write something that’s universal to everyone and that everyone can relate to.”

The importance of relationships, whether romantic or the valuable bond of friendship and family, are common themes in Griff’s music as best represented on her most successful song yet, ‘Good Stuff’. “’Good Stuff’ was the first song I released and that has done the best,’’ she says of her thrilling 2020.

“It’s incredible. I felt really nervous about releasing that one because it’s a ballad and people might be like oh it’s a bit too normal and not enough outside of the box, but it feels like it has performed really well because people do just love a classic sad song. It means loads to me, and even though it’s a heartbreak song I wrote it from a place of

Beabadoobee has announced a headline tour for September 2021; she’ll be performing in support of her debut album ‘Fake It Flowers’, due 16th October via Dirty Hit.

With an Ivor Novello nom already under her belt, Griff is one of pop’s bright new hopes.

By: Martyn Young.

“As soon as realised I could play Taylor Swift songs I was like, I don’t need to do all this classical training” Griff

Hey Griff. If you had to make a band of animals, who would you have in it?

I feel like a skunk comes to mind, aesthetically that’s quite cool. The tail is quite graphic on stage so the skunk would be good on guitar. I would like a fox.

I’m going down the furry animal vibe. A fox on violin would be nice. On drums, I would have a gorilla for some big energy on the drums.

thinking about my family and how foster kids come and go in and out of our house, they become like family and then you don’t see them. It’s a story about how every time someone leaves your life, you’re left with the best memories. and it makes you miss them way more.”

No matter how emotional her songs might be Griff always tempers the sadness with a precious glint of joy to offer hope and positivity.

“I try to build some sense of uplifting feelings. Even if it’s the saddest song, I’ll pair it with really major chords and make it sound happy,” she says positively. “There’s something about uplifting major-sounding pop that makes me feel good. I love it.

I hope when I play live people get an uplifting sensation by coming to my live show.”

Ah yes, playing live.

Nobody knows when that might be right now but be sure you want to attend a Griff show asap when gigs return. For now, though, the path is clear and simple. “An album will definitely come, and it will come at the right time, but right now my head is like let’s release singles until the end of the year and maybe do another EP and figure it out,” she explains. “When you pour that much into a body of work you want it to be received by the most amount of people, so I want to do it when it feels like there’s a real demand for it. At the moment, people are still figuring out who I am and discovering my music.” Somehow we get the feeling that it won’t be too long before almost everyone in the whole world will have discovered Griff and she’ll have everything figured out quite nicely.” P readdork.com 23.

HYPE HYPE NEWS

Dry Cleaning have rescheduled their tour to 2021. The South London band will now hit the road from 14th March, winding up at London’s Electric Brixton two weeks later.

Joesef has announced his EP, ‘Does It Make You Feel Good?’. Due for release on 9th October, the songs were penned after he got back together and consequently broke up with his ex.

Jawny

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omething we really enjoy here at Dork, you may have noticed, is when acts are a fun, enthusiastic and not afraid to poke fun at themselves, the world, us - anything and everything. It’s a

nice break from worrying about ‘the state of things’, especially when ‘the state of things’ feels so bloody bleak. Remember when we were all complaining about 2016? Little did we know.

One of the acts brightening up many a miserable corner, is Jawny - formerly Johnny Utah. His upbeat, personalitypacked songs are guaranteed to smack a smile on even the glummest of faces, a mission he’s already taken to millions with viral hits such as last year’s ridiculously catchy ‘Honeypie’. More recently, he’s been working on a longer project, ‘For Abby’ - out later this year.

Hi Jawny. What does a typical day look like for you at the moment, has the virus mucked up your routine much?

Honestly, my daily life has not been affected that much outside of not being able to go out to restaurants to eat.

For the most part, I stay inside and away from people 95% of the time. Now with COVID, I stay inside and away from people 100% of the time.

Growth.

What first got you into making music, was there a moment where you suddenly thought ‘this is what I want’?

I had first gotten really seriously into music at about 12, and at 13 I had that moment of, this is all I want to do with my life. Somehow I want to do this. I was obsessed. I would watch a live

24. DORK

“Keanu pointed at me and said, ‘You have one week to change’” Jawny

concert DVD of Green Day’s Bullet In A Bible movie every single day after school. By the time I had gotten to be about 15, I think all of the goals of being a rock star and a professional skater seemed to not feel like obtainable things, and I spent the next five years really having no idea what else I wanted to do with my life. At 20, after spending a couple of years producing music and getting pretty solid at it, I had a moment where I suddenly thought, “Why can’t this be an option? I’m good at producing. I think I’m ok at writing music. I know how to record. I have all of the tools sitting in front of me.

The only thing stopping me is me and myself.” Never looked back since… and here we are, hahaha.

How are you finding being a musician so far, is it living up to the hype?

I’m grateful for the position I am in and like a lot of my peers you find out it gets intense the higher you go, but that feels like the same story with any job. I’m happy with what my life is in this moment, but I also have more goals that I’ve set out to accomplish. I’m forever grateful to every person out there who believes in me and listens to my music as a fan, and I’ll continue to navigate

around this Wild Wild West world of artistry and learn more about where I stand in it every day.

What prompted the swap from Johnny Utah to Jawny? Do you like reinventing yourself?

I do like reinventing myself, and this name change gave me a chance to do that. I had based the name Johnny Utah from a character in a movie called Point Break played by Keanu Reeves. In December at a Spotify Grammys party in LA I was tackled to the ground, knocking me unconscious. When I finally

FACT FILE + From Los Angeles, US + Check out ‘Honeypie’ + Social @jawnyutah

Joe Keery has dropped a brand new single, ‘Keep Your Head Up’. Better known to most of us as Steve from Stranger Things, it arrives under the banner of soloproject Djo.

Introduce yourself to Los Angeles-based singer/ songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/internet sensation, Jawny.

By: Sam Taylor.

came to, and my vision made its way back, I was staring up at Keanu who pointed at me and said, “You have one week to change.” I immediately knew what this was in reference to so the next week I called a boardroom meeting with my label asking everybody in the building, even the interns, to come help me with this task. After 6 hours, we came up with the genius idea of knocking Utah off of what my Instagram and twitter handles are @ jawnyutah.

What can you tell us about ‘For Abby’, has it been a

long time in the making?

Ya absolutely. In technical terms, this project is a year in the making. I signed to a label with what I thought would be the backbone of my project and was beginning to work on finishing those songs. In February, I was asked to travel the world and showcase some of these songs to different countries to give them a taste of what was to come.

Very quickly, I learned while performing that I wasn’t connecting to them myself. I spent the next month playing shows in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Australia, Berlin, Oslo, and every time I got

HYPE to the part of the set where I would showcase new music; I would feel sad; almost as if I realized that I had made songs for the wrong reasons.

After the trip, I took a risk by basically going to my label and basically saying, “Yo what’s up guys! I know you just spent a lot of money sending me around the world showcasing these songs that we are about to put out. Would it be insane if I asked for some extra time and restarted my entire project from scratch. Square one?” That turned out to be the best decision I ever made and I now have a body of work that I can say with 100% confidence is my best work, and right now in this moment, I am proud. If in two months this changes my entire career or drives it into the ground none of it will matter because I know I gave it everything.

What do you make of the TikTok explosion this year, does the way people find music via platforms like that impact the music you want to make?

I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I don’t have anything negative to say, but it also feels really dystopian to me to know there are boardroom meetings for giant artists revolving around figuring out the best way to get their song going on TikTok. What I can answer is that it does not impact anything I make at all, hahaha.

My entire reasoning for going back to square one on my project was to make a body of work that did not have the radio in mind, did not have playlisting in mind, and did not have any apps of any sorts in mind. If they come naturally, I will welcome it with open arms and be very grateful of it, but I want to always make music that I love so when I give it to people who support me they know they aren’t being handed a vinyl titled “ME. Selling Out. An Album by Jawny”.

What inspires you?

I’ve been on this kick lately of trying to change my mindset into waking up every day and striving to be 1% better. Just every day, trying to wake up and recognize maybe one thing that I can do differently or maybe change a thought pattern to something more optimistic. I feel like this isn’t fully a correct answer to the question, but I love you Dork, don’t hate me. P Jawny’s

project ‘For Abby’ is out 27th October.

The lifestyle is secondary and is totally not what it looks like from the outside – at least not for us. Here are some truths from behind the scenes of a tour/band life:

When did you first start working on the album?

What was the timeline like?

FACT FILE + From Hobart, Tasmania + Check out ‘Connect To Consume’ + Social @ASwayzeTas

A. Swayze & The Ghosts It’s debut album time for the raucous punks..

By: Sam Taylor.

Photography: Rick Clifford.

A

Swayze & the Ghosts are a noisy bunch.

Working their way towards debut album ‘Paid Salvation’, they’ve spent the past however many months dropping garage-punk-laden hit after garage-punk-laden hit, calling out modern vices like social media, harassment, big business and such along the way. The Tasmanian band’s leader, Andrew Swayze tells us more.

Hi Andrew, how’s it going?

Are you lot coping okay with all this pandemic business?

I’ve been okay during the pandemic, the other guys have been fine too. Being an island, our home state of Tasmania has had a less complicated time slowing down the spread than other places. I lost my hospitality job but didn’t want it anyway so now I have all the time in the world to wake up late and play my guitar.

“I knew music was going to be a life-long obsession” Andrew Swayze

When did you first realise you wanted to be a musician, was there a ‘eureka’ moment?

I’ve loved and connected with music since I can remember, although I don’t come from a musical family. When I was a kid, I used to fantasise about playing guitar and performing in front of people, which I’d emulate with air-guitar performances of Elvis songs for my folks.

Toward the start of high school, I was given the saxophone to play, which I hated because I wanted to learn guitar. During religion class and lunch breaks, I’d sneak into the room where the nylon string guitars were kept, and I’d hide in there trying to learn stuff like Seven Nation Army and Eric Clapton.

As soon as I could play a few chords and riffs, I became

obsessed with writing songs.

I think at that point in my early teens, I knew music was going to be a life-long obsession.

What attracted you to band-life, as opposed to going solo?

For me, music has always been fun to make with other people. I love what can be made out of a simple idea like a melody or drum pattern just by sharing it with someone and listening to how they respond by adding to it or changing it. Inside my head, I’m constantly hearing little melodies or tapping away a rhythm, so songwriting never really rests, but even after transferring those ideas to instruments I rarely finish them. Having musicians I respect to help turn those ideas into something great as well as share their own ideas is the beauty of having a band which doesn’t exist for me as a solo act.

Is being a musician living up to the hype so far?

The hype is bullshit. It’s not the Hollywood biopic that we grow up expecting. I love music for its expressive qualities, same as visual art.

We started pre-production in August 2018, and It’s taken until recently to get it completely over the line.

Everything was done in Melbourne, so we (and especially I) spent a lot of time back and forward on planes. We actually only spent four days tracking instruments because we chose to record the bulk of it live and in the same room, It was my vocals that dragged the process out. As I mentioned earlier, I struggle to get things finished - and vocals, given their need for true conviction and the importance of lyrical content can take a while to get right.

What do you most enjoy writing songs about? Is there a particular vibe you aim for?

I don’t have a hard and fast answer for ‘what’ I like to write about. I tend to drift toward just giving my opinion of things I consider to be negative or worth questioning. I feel a kind of obligation to write about issues that affect the people around me or those I observe, rather than focusing on little personal anecdotes or weird metaphors for something only I understand. I would find it easier to describe what I don’t like to write about or listen to - I’ve been described as a stick in the mud and out of touch when it comes to the contemporary fashion of irony.

Do songs find you, or do you usually have to find them?

Both. Often melody and rhythm come to me very fast if not instantly, I don’t have to work for that. On the flip side, though, I’m not a technically skilled instrumentalist, and the intricacies that make a song go from being good to great can take a lot of work and patience. I tend to write dozens of revisions for my lyrics too, which when you look at it, is quite a bit of work.

What do you do for fun?

Nothing. I only do serious things. P readdork.com 25.

HYPE

First On...

Ailbhe Reddy

Viji

Austrian-Brazilian Londonbased singer-songwriter Vanilla Jenner - aka Viji - was a multi-instrumentalist by the age of seven after an early introduction to music from her instrument builder father. Now, she’s just signed to Dirty Hit and has a debut EP on the way. The first taste from it, ‘Cherry’, is a total bop. “The lyrics are about a crush, when you like someone else more than they like you but don’t see it,” she explains.

Relationships through the prism of alt-folk.

By: Sam Taylor.

Delilah Montagu

There’s something about Delilah Montagu. The Sussex newcomer - who frequently records in Los Angeles ‘FYI’ - channels all her worries about growing up and finding herself into incredibly assured, laidback pop songs that are both a bit 90s but also timeless. Her latest, ‘Loud’, is about the hardfought, newfound confidence that’s come hand-in-hand with perfecting her craft.

keaton dekker

Arriving with his debut EP ‘the unwelcome series’, East London bedroom pop newcomer keaton dekker puts his own, personal spin on a coming-of-age narrative for Gez-Z - tackling modern topics like relationships in a time of social media with a flourish.

26. DORK

D

ublin newcomer Ailbhe Reddy is about to drop her debut album, ‘Personal History’.

It’s an autobiographical record that reckons with break-ups, social media, loneliness, independence, coming out - all the ups and downs of modern life and growing up - via sensitiveyet-uplifting alt-folk.

“While I was writing this album I was delving into the world of psychotherapy and attachment theory a lot,” she says, “different things that shape a person will ultimately affect their relationship with you. Every track on the album is talking about my relationship with another person and the final track is about my relationship with myself, so the title ‘personal history’ felt right.”

Hi Ailbhe! It’s been a bit of a weird year hasn’t it, how have you found the past few months?

It’s been really weird for everyone. Luckily it’s just been weird for me and not too scary. I think anyone who has loved ones who are at risk or are frontline workers have had a scary year!

We’ve had a lot cancelled, SXSW, a few Irish and UK festivals and a tour in the USA that were all cancelled.

Hopefully, we can see a return to a few gigs in the next few months though!

Your debut album is nearly here, when did it come together?

I’ve been writing the album for a few years. Some of the songs are about 3 years old; some were written just before we recorded last year. I’m so excited to get it out into the world because we finished recording it last August. We delayed it a bit because of everything that was going on in the world, but I was keen to get it out before the end of 2020.

How would you describe the record’s vibe?

I’m not great with genres or anything like that. I suppose it’s a mix of indie rock and some folk elements too.

I’ve been told there’s quite a mix of sounds within the 10 tracks so I’ll take other people’s word on that!

What’s your new single ‘Looking Happy’ about?

‘Looking Happy’ is about the classic experience of viewing someone else’s life through their social media posts.

I think most people have foolishly scrolled through

“I’ve got a little bucket list of venues I’d love to play” Ailbhe Reddy their ex’s Instagram and then felt like shit afterwards. Even though we all know in theory that people only present their happiest moments online, it’s sometimes hard to take that on when you’re hurt.

It all stemmed from having that experience myself and strumming the chords of the chorus on my guitar and singing “I see you looking happy, on my telephone screen”. It was kind of a jokey thing at first, but then I thought it was kinda catchy!

It always strikes me as funny that we put on happy faces for photos even if people aren’t enjoying themselves in truth, so that’s what I was trying to capture in the music video. Although the music video was extremely fun to shoot, so it was so hard to keep a straight face!

What led to you wanting to become a musician?

I used to sit in the back of

my mum’s car and sing along to whatever she was playing (Don McLean, Queen, Bowie or Thin Lizzy usually) and singing just felt so good. I loved music and still derive great joy from singing and playing music.

Can you recall your first break into the industry?

I do! I shared a Soundcloud link to a demo I had recorded on an old 8-track in my bedroom. Someone from a radio station came across it and used it on an ad. So I figured, I should write some more.

Where would you like your debut album to take you?

I just want to keep writing and recording for the rest of my life and make a living from that! That would be my base level needs. Beyond that I’d love to tour around the world a bit more, you always meet the best people. I’ve got a little bucket list of venues I’d love to play and things I’d like to do. I’d just love for lots of people to hear the record and connect to it.

What are your plans for the foreseeable?

To release ‘Personal History’ and get to tour it and get started on my second album!

P Ailbhe Reddy’s debut

album ‘Personal History’ is out 2nd October.

HYPE Fresh new popster Lucy Deakin is about to release a new EP. ‘i got bored’ is due 16th October via Scruff Of The Neck, following earlier tracks ‘be alright’, ‘bad in love’ and ‘we could be’.

HYPE NEWS

Pixey has signed to Chess Club Records, and shared her fab new single, ‘Just Move’. The track was written, recorded and produced in Pixey’s bedroom in Liverpool at the beginning of lockdown.

Lucia & the Best Boys are gearing up for a new EP. Super on-point four-track effort ‘The State Of Things’ will be released on 9th October via Sweet Jane Recordings.

Omega Sapien Meet one of Korea’s rising stars.

By: Sam Taylor.

C

urrently working his way towards new solo album ‘Garlic’ - due later this month - Omega Sapien from up-and-coming K-pop collective Balming Tiger has launched his new single, ‘Serenade for Mrs. Jeon’. It’s a confident step

from an act who isn’t afraid to push in any direction that takes his fancy, experimenting with his own playful take on alternative rap and pop. “[It’s] a self portrait,” he says of the full-length, “capturing myself from the past to the present.”

Introduce yourself to one of Korea’s rising stars.

What first sparked your interest in music.

Did you have a musical upbringing?

Well, my parents are far from you know, artistic personnels.

My dad is a salesman in a Japanese company. My mom is a professor. I feel like the internet really sparked my interest in music. I had a lot of free time as a kid, so surfing around you naturally encounter good music and I feel like that’s how I got into it.

How did you get involved with Balming Tiger, have you known each other long?

I joined Balming Tiger in 2018, June. At that time, I was a college student in Japan, China, you know, doing my own thing. I wasn’t really planning on being part of any team or label because I’m more of a solo person.

But I was searching on YouTube, and I found this dope-ass mixtape in Korean.

At that time, I didn’t really realise there’s a lot of cool music going on in Korea; that was the first-ever project that really struck me. I was

grinding it on my own at that time, so I contacted the producer of the mixtape and the producer, No Identity, he was in Balming Tiger then, and he was like, ‘yo you should DM Balming Tiger’. I DM’d Balming Tiger, ‘I’d like to work work with one of your producers’, and San Yawn got the DM. He heard my music, and he thought, you know, I was pretty cool. So we got to talking. We were just talking online for like a month, I fly to Korea to meet him, and on the first day, I decided to join his label. First day.

How did you break into the music industry? Was there a steep learning curve?

I think it came natural to me close. I’ve been doing rap shit since like fourth grade.

Not seriously, though. And of course, the songs I made back then are pretty trash. But, I was just doing it; I wasn’t really thinking deep into it. I didn’t know I was gonna be a rapper.

So, you know, elementary school, middle school, I was just doing it for fun. In high school it really grew in me and around freshman year, I started to think about my career path, and that’s when I decided to go full time involved.

But yeah, I mean, nothing was tough, though. I just did what I like to do, and it just happened. I’ve still I got way more to show and way more achievements to get.

What’s like being part of a K-pop collective at the moment? It feels it feels to be an exciting time for the genre.

It is the best time to be an artist, especially a musical artist in Korea. Ever. I think it’s the best time right now, with so much attention to K-pop and nowadays

the recognition is just not limited in Kpop scene. Bong Joon-ho who directed [2019 film] Parasite, he’s getting recognition too. So I feel like overall Korean artists are getting the spotlight. So I think a very exciting time and I’m very, very, I feel very, very lucky to be in that right now.

What’s been the highlight of your time in music so far?

La Magnifique Society Festival in France. That was in Reims. We were very nervous because we’ve never performed in a Western territory, nobody knew us.

Our stage was in front of some hot dog booth, and people are lining up and all that shit - definitely not a good environment to perform.

But as soon as we got on, a lot of people showed up. We started with like five people standing in the front, and at the end of the show, there were 500 people mosh-

“I feel like in order to create something, you need a lot of different experiences” Omega Sapein pitting. A country I’ve never been to before, and they’ve never seen me, but I feel like music connected us all, and the energy was there. It was a blissful moment, and I can’t wait to have that experience again.

Does your solo project give you space to explore other sounds, and work with new people?

Yeah, this upcoming album ‘Garlic’, this is nothing like what I’ve been showcasing to people, to the crowd. And yet this album is the epitome of exploring other sounds.

And you know, I just tried to do something that I didn’t do before. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been very challenging

Is being creative in more ways than just musically important to you?

Yeah, of course. I feel like in order to create something, you need a lot of different experiences. So, you know, creativity, creating something different - it could be a sculpture, a painting, or music; it could be stand up comedy, I don’t know - I just try to I try my best to do all the chances that are given to me. I feel like that’s been impacting my music career positively. P

Omega Sapien’s solo album ‘Garlic’ is out on 22nd September.

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“IT’S LIKE I WAKE , UP HAVE SOME BREAKFAST… AND THEN

GAIN A MILLION FANS!” INDIE’S BOY WONDER. ALFIE TEMPLEMAN MIGHT STILL BE ONLY SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD, BUT HE’S ON THE RISE. By: Jamie Muir. Photography: Sarah Louise Bennett.

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ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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O

ver an hour and a half from London, tucked away in the heart of the British countryside, is the village of Carlton. It’s a quiet place;

one where the daily routine can involve popping into the sole village shop that doubles as a Post Office, taking walks across vast fields and woods, checking in to one of the two pubs, or popping by the local village hall for a community catch-up.

But, Dork isn’t here for an idyllic, touristy detour. It just so happens that in Carlton’s ranks, there’s someone who knows a thing or two about dreaming. Dreaming big, that is.

“Oiii Oiii,” laughs a figure from the window of a nearby house. Scoffing down a bowl of cereal and beaming from ear to ear, it may seem like a stretch that Alfie Templeman would call a village like Carlton home. In the space of two years, his cosmic blend of genres and immediate pop has set him apart from the indie pack as a bonafide magician pulling out all the tricks and flourishes. Big lights shine on everything he touches, and things are only just getting started.

“Let me finish my breakfast, but head ‘round the back!” he shouts out.

Five minutes later, he comes bouncing out with a cup of tea in hand and his phone playing a track from the 1970s which includes so many swear words, Dear Reader, that our eyes are watering (“the aim is one day to have as many streams as this,” Alfie proudly declares).

“Welcome to my house, this is it!” he smiles, pointing around the garden, his cat Max taking up prime position under a tree and the open fields out the back basking in a calming countryside day.

It’s this house that Alfie has called home his entire life, his mum and dad first meeting in a makeshift pub that his dad built in his family’s garden, before moving just over the road together a matter of years later. His grandad lives just down the road, his friends not too far either. It’s an oasis of sorts, cut away from the rest of the world, where everyone knows everyone.

“The thing is, you kinda go unbothered here,” he admits. “It’s each to their own and really respectful of one another. The good thing about where I live is that everyone’s

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close to one another so you’re incredibly familiar. The downside of that is that it can get a bit boring and repetitive, which is why sometimes it’s nice to get out and go somewhere to write a song.

But I always find that, y’know, as repetitive as it can be - it’s just a really great place to grow up.”

It’s the sort of upbringing you may not expect from an artist sitting squarely on the cusp of something much bigger. Yes, it can be easy to simply throw out lines about someone soundtracking a generation, or capturing what it means to be growing up in a world that right now is unlike anything seen over the past however many years but with Alfie Templeman, it makes sense. The pop prince making the music world try to fit in with him rather than the other way round, the past few years have proven to be the most eye-opening. He stares off into the fields and shuffles in his seat. “Really rock and roll around here, isn’t it?” he laughs.

2020 has been a year of two sides for Alfie. In ‘Happiness In Liquid Form’, his latest EP, he set apart his grandstand intentions in the clearest manner possible.

A bold, bright and eclectic collection of tracks that featured his biggest and best work to date, it signalled a fact that now can’t be questioned. Alfie Templeman is an artist unlike any other, freewheeling and bouncing between genres in a way few have done before, but also with an insatiable thirst for fun and energy.

Millions of streams, hundreds of thousands of followers online, universal acclaim. It’s stepped up a notch in 2020, but Alfie has found himself squarely stuck in one place. “It’s felt really weird because there’s so much going on, but I’m surrounded by the same thing every day, y’know?” he reflects. “Maybe if I was touring, I’d be able to see the impact of everything that’s going on, but because I’m stuck in my room, it’s been so interesting to see that things have got so much bigger, but I haven’t actually moved at all. It’s really cool, but it almost feels undeserved because I literally have done nothing! It’s like I wake up, have some breakfast… and then like, gain a million fans!”

Setting up shop in his bedroom for practically the whole of the past 7 months,

it’s found Alfie stuck in a moment of limbo. The recent diagnosis of a childhood lung condition has meant that Alfie has been carefully shielding from the world as the months have passed.

Where one life was set to morph into another, now he physically sits on pause. The van which has taken him and his mates across the UK sits on the driveway, a physical manifestation of a summer that could have been, and the adventures currently on ice (“I wouldn’t open the door and smell it,” cracks Alfie).

It’s the perfect visual take on where he finds himself, with the whole world ready and waiting for what he does next.

It’s been time to take stock, because even with a global pandemic - there’s no slowing down Alfie Templeman.

The success and attention feel surreal, especially as he spends another day sitting in his back garden. “That’s it, like sitting here and just…” he begins. “I’ve never taken myself seriously or anything, and everyone at school used to joke like, ‘oh I love your music so much!’ All sarcastic

and stuff. I still feel like I’m at that age where everyone takes the mickey a bit. When someone says they’re a fan of my music, I almost feel like they shouldn’t be. I feel like the whole room is playing a trick on me, and I can’t believe it. It’s been amazing to see that.”

Alfie finishes up his tea and claps his hands together with a grin. “Shall I show you a few of the sights? There are a few places to go around here…”

Less than two minutes down the road is Alfie’s primary school. By the

age of six, he admits, he was already enamoured with music, the result of growing up in a household where his dad would surround the place with guitars and progressive rock. He’d pick up and play around with those guitars whenever he could, and it quickly became all he could think about. He’d regularly have to dash down the long alleyway that leads to the school’s main entrance because he’d been stuck in daydreams at home thinking about different sounds and

tracks. By the time he had moved on to secondary school in the nearby town of Harrold, his attention was purely fixated on just one thing: playing music.

Alongside his childhood friend Jos (who still plays with Alfie in his band), the two would go back and forth writing songs and burning off CDs, starting from the age of nine and refusing to look back from there. There were bands (try Marble Apes out for size - “we basically tried to copy Arctic Monkeys with the name,” cracks Alfie).

There were countless sessions in school music rooms, which would eventually lead to Alfie getting kicked out for disturbing nearby lessons. There were hours of assurance to one another that music was the best thing they could be doing in their lives. “Jos is a really great footballer, and I think I kinda converted him badly to come and play music with me,” Alfie recalls.

All the while, Alfie was picking up more and more instruments where he could - drums, piano… anything.

ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

“YOU CAN’T LIVE IN A PARADISE WHEN SO MANY OTHER PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN HELL” ALFIE TEMPLEMAN “I just wanted to be able to record everything myself because, well, why not?”

By the age of 13, Alfie was loading tracks to Spotify for the world to hear. “They would get no plays, but I didn’t care at all. It was all trial and error, one-upping yourself each time.”

“To be honest nobody at school really knew who I was until I got signed by Chess Club. I wouldn’t really talk to anyone,” admits Alfie. “In lessons, I would daydream all the time about music and making music and how I was going to make this new track I’d been working on when I’d get back from school. At school, I was just failing at everything because that’s all I’d care about. But I did manage to pass English, Maths and RS - that’ll do!”

Without any distractions, Alfie embraced his surroundings and his ability to confine everything he did into sitting in his bedroom and creating the vast sounds that influenced him. Whether it was prog rock, jazz, indie, or pop - it’s a motto that lives on with how he creates music to this day. “The fun thing about making music for me is I try to make every type of song for every type of person, so it’s not like I’m sticking to just rock music, for example. I’m trying to make something where even if you

hate everything else that I’ve made, there may be one song that you really enjoy.”

One look at Alfie Templeman’s catalogue to date backs up that mantra entirely. Whether it’s the funky grooves of top pop-bop ‘Obvious Guy’, the slinking 70s soul of ‘Stop Thinking (About Me)’, the blissful songwriter swoons of ‘Yellow Flowers’ or the tropical scrunch of ‘Things I Thought Were Mine’ - Alfie doesn’t so much as switch lanes but switch entire motorways with ease. He’s embracing being an artist from a generation where “genre” is a word that doesn’t fit into the new dictionary.

“Exactly that!” states Alfie, “and everyone starts off experimenting, too. I grew up on progressive rock, then moved on to jazz, and now I guess it’s a bit more indie, but I don’t want to pin what I do as indie particularly. I don’t mind it, what I’m doing now has this indie touch to it which I guess is why people say it, but I think there’s a lot more 70s soft rock and 80s pop in it now.

“I think now’s the time for me to go really creative and do the sort of things you have to do to lay a groundwork for who you are. It’s why I put out these little EPs, because each one is a kinda recap of the past half a year in my life. It’s no different to when I was at readdork.com 31.

“ONE WEEK I PLAYED BRIXTON ACADEMY AND THE NEXT I WAS IN A HALL DOING MY RS EXAM” ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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“THE BIGGER THINGS HAVE GOT AND THE MORE PEOPLE LISTEN, THE MORE SHY I GET” ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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school: ‘this is what I’ve learnt, and here’s an EP to show it’.”

Further down the road from his primary school, sits a vast allotment space.

All sorts of vegetables grow in the sprawling field - a place that Alfie would sneak off too when he had some spare time with his mates.

“Olives are my favourite food, y’know,” he exclaims, drawn in by the vegetables growing around him as he checks out the sheds and digs that make up what has become a true community asset. The kids nearby would come to the allotments from time to time, cheekily nicking a couple of raspberries. Standing on top of a wooden pile, he clicks and smiles. “Oh, this is actually where I shot one of my first music videos!” he remembers, referring to 2018’s ‘Like An Animal’. “I would be running around here being filmed by my mate. Not sure if we were allowed to be here, though…” Soon enough, we’re told to move on. “We’ll get out, I reckon!” he laughs.

After uploading track after track online, Alfie made a decision to try and package something together around ‘Like An Animal’ and ‘Yellow Flowers’, songs that would grab the attention of a certain Chess Club Records and in turn, change Alfie’s life entirely. If ever there was a pivotal moment, this was it. Let’s just say, secondary school was a little different after that. “People actually acknowledged me at school because of the signing. Before that, nobody gave a shit. All of a sudden, on the first day of school about two years ago now - that was when I got signed - I was just being asked, ‘HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU MAKE?’, ‘GET ME TICKETS TO AMERICA!’ Which I couldn’t even go to!” he laughs. “It was nice, though. I was lucky to be somewhere supportive. My friends would come down to my gigs and my teachers actually too were really supportive. It didn’t feel like I was being pushed into anything, though. There are so many artists who come out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly, and my biggest worry for ages was becoming one of them. I wanted to be the opposite of that.”

The response was immediate - no surprise there.

‘Like An Animal’ on release took Alfie far beyond Carlton in a matter of moments. “We

didn’t have time to adjust at all, not joking! One week I played Brixton Academy and the next I was in an exam hall doing my RS exam,” he remembers. “I dunno, it was really weird because it went from 0 to 100 in such a short time. I only started properly gigging last year when I was 16, so it was amazing. It set me up, and I learnt so much so quickly.”

A car suddenly rings by the village green. “Wow, that’s more than one car today you’re in luck,” cracks Alfie as the scenic route back around the village ends up back at his home. The quiet streets and general greetings that ripple around the village seem like a million miles away from an artist boasting millions of video plays, adoring fans and the sort of feverish response that has comments streaming in around every move he makes. Yet it’s that exact idea which makes Carlton the perfect hub for him to grow from. The quiet normality, if you will.

“I try not to look through comments. If I see a mean comment, it makes me sad,” he admits. “Sometimes I’ll look at the top comments because they’re usually quite nice. I like not being fully aware of how things are going because I think if I had a moment of realisation, it would intimidate me to the point where I’d be even more shy. Just focusing on what I do. At the end of the day, whether you have one fan or a million fans that shouldn’t affect your art.”

A quick five-minute ride up the road takes us to Harrold.

Standing outside the local centre, a family friend comes up to talk to Alfie, spotting him from across the street and wanting a catch-up.

“You know what, it’s weirdly become like big news for people around here,” reflects Alfie later. “Honestly, you come back, and everyone around the village is talking about it, and everything going on. Bumping into everyone is really nice, though.”

Statue incoming, then?

“Yeah, I want a big Carlton statue,” he cracks. “Naaah, I hate all of that!”

Like the villages he grew up around, Alfie Templeman remains grounded. Instead of

heading straight to the clouds and running away with ideas and visions of what he can go on to do, he’s more focused on nailing the music he’s creating

ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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and having fun with those around him. At the heart of it all, Alfie Templeman wants to enjoy the happiness this whole experience can bring, all while pushing himself through any boundaries that stand in his way.

“I don’t think I’ve become more confident,” notes Alfie, looking at his journey across four EPs over the past two years and where he finds himself now. “I actually think the bigger things have got and the more people listen, the more shy I get and the more I actually want to steer away from being out there. At the start, even to put out an EP at 14 is quite scary. So I was definitely confident in putting stuff out. The reason why I like doing that is I can put it out there and close my eyes, not look at how people are taking it in, and I’m on to the next thing. That’s what I like about it. It’s why I’m not sat looking through Twitter and looking at whatever people comment because I get kinda, y’know… It shakes me up a bit. I’m a bit scared. So, I like closing my eyes. Putting it out there. Seeing what happens.”

The only people who should be scared are those trying to keep up with him.

Maybe that comes from a unique writing style which

Alfie admits, is weird. “The thing is, I honestly can’t tell you, I honestly can’t remember writing any of my songs. It’s like I blackout or something when I do it! It’s weird for me because when I listen, it’s like, it isn’t me?

Like I have fresh ears to it.

I only spend four hours on a song, but the other day I was listening to them, and I realised I’d let out all my feelings without consciously knowing about it. I find that really weird. It literally is my escape because I don’t even know I’m doing it.”

While Alfie may find solace in the escape that music provides him, and comfort in growing up surrounded by support and space to explore, it’s not to say that his newfound voice and following has been lost on him. One look through Alfie’s social media will find him speaking out about a whole range of issues, from politics and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, to the Black Lives Matter movement and sexual abuse within the music world.

Alfie sees the attention he’s receiving as a chance to change the dialogue.

“You can’t live in a paradise when so many other people are living in hell. That’s what I live by,” he states, pointedly

getting across how important it is to him. “Like, say you’re buying fancy clothes and the latest technology, then you’re a bit of an asshole for not looking out for people who are struggling. I want to make sure that I’m helping in whatever way I can. The Yemen situation, for example, is awful - they shouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

The least you can do is give some money to help where you can.

“And it doesn’t mean that the 100,000 people on my Instagram are going to right away be like, right we’re going to share this, but it’s just knowing a percentage of them are going to see it and want to make a difference too. That’s so important, even if it’s like 0.001% of the total support given.”

It’s reflective of a generation not willing to put up with injustice anymore.

“We’re the ones who are going to be living and leading the next few decades. It’s our duty to tell those people who are screwing things up to make them realise that this planet has a lot of people who are growing up into it. It’s not right to be so destructive.

In general, and thanks to the internet too of course, I think people’s ages are disregarded

“I TRY NOT TO LOOK THROUGH COMMENTS. IF I SEE A MEAN COMMENT, IT MAKES ME SAD” ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

36. DORK

a lot more.”

While those topics are yet to fully form their way into Alfie’s songwriting (“I would love to, but I want to be able to write about it in a completely opposite way to how I write now. Instead of not thinking about it all, I want to really think about it and make it clear in what I’m saying”), what comes next looks set to be yet another step up.

New single ‘Forever Isn’t Long Enough’ signals an exciting new chapter for Alfie, flexing his creative muscles as the first track from his sharpest bop-filled collection to date. Melding dance, R&B, cinematic pop at its finest, electronica and much more - there’s a new neonsized statement about to be made. Yet underneath that, lies Alfie’s darkest and most personal collection to date, the result of a tough end to 2019 that forced him to take a moment to recover. It’s yet another snapshot, drenched in defiant modern pop.

“I started it in October last year after I got out of hospital, because I was in there for ages,” he explains.

“I was writing heavily about that. This whole thing is basically more of an album than an EP, it kinda says, let’s take away the indie for a bit, and let’s go to the 1980s. It’s all about making a disco-pop album, but for some reason, it came out sounding really dark if you listen closely because most of it was written at night and during a time when things were hard.”

Usually used to moving swiftly on with his eyes shut when releasing music, it’s a new collection that Alfie feels really happy with and it’s clear to see why. There are touches of The 1975 at their shimmering best, collaborations with Tom from Jungle, songwriter extraordinaire Kid Harpoon and newcomer April, tracks that sound like they should be played late at night with the windows all the way down and glorious hooks galore. To say that this will make a mark would be wildly underestimating how much it will be played on repeat.

Trust us.

“Every record I put out I just want it to be different.

To all the people who listen to me, I think they’re pretty much aware though judging from the last four EPs, things are going to change up a bit - and this is no different,”

he smiles.

Spending time in the company of Alfie Templeman can be many things. Hilarious?

Yes. Silly? Yes. More than anything, it’s inspiring. Yeah, that may sound a bit much, but it quickly becomes clear that Alfie isn’t just eyeing up the trodden paths countless acts have gone down before, rather thriving in the fun and bright sparks that light up when you throw yourself into something you love. Those around him and those who believe in him are what matter the most, and he can’t help but be happy about that.

“This whole time, of lockdown and everything, it’s made me appreciate everything I have a lot more,” he acknowledges.

“Anything small to you a couple of years ago becomes so much bigger now, in the bigger picture, the further away you get from it. It weirds me out how so much has changed. We’ve gone from being the most social world to being the complete opposite.”

The future is something that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of his mind. “One of the most fun parts of doing this is that I look at the future in the same way that I don’t look at YouTube comments - I think it would scare me, or put me off.” Alfie laughs and pauses, looking out on the quiet high street that he’s called home from day one. “I dunno, I kinda want to stick around here in general. To be honest, my ideal future is staying around here, making more music, and if the time comes where I want to properly go anywhere else, then it’ll happen.” Suddenly his phone vibrates. “Oh, I think I’m going to be Annie Mac’s Hottest Record!”

He grins again, a sense of bashful modesty mixed with joy. “For now, though, I’m just comfortable as a kid, making stuff in my bedroom, y’know?

It feels alright.”

At the heart of it all, that’s the most important point. Alfie Templeman heads back home, the streets of Carlton rushing past him. The rest of the day?

There’s the small matter of eating a load of food, seeing what inspiration hits him (“after today, I’ve probably got loads that could inspire me”) and spending some time with Max and his family.

What awaits? A new pop revolution? You’d be a fool to bet against it. But for Alfie Templeman, it’s all about the ride. What a fun ride it’s going to be. P

ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

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IDLES

THEIR LAST ALBUM SAW THE BAND TAKE OFF IN A WAY NO ONE EXPECTED - SO WHAT’S NEXT FOR IDLES?.

By: Jake Hawkes. Photography: Tom Ham.

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N

obody expected IDLES to do as well as they have. Their

debut ‘Brutalism’ kicked in the door for a whole wave of post-punk inspired bands, whilst follow-up ‘Joy as an Act of Resistance’ proved they had the staying power that so many fast-rising, much-hyped bands didn’t.

But with the element of surprise gone and a global pandemic preventing the band from connecting with their fans in a live capacity, how do IDLES make the same impact as they have before, without falling back on tried and tested methods?

‘Ultra Mono’ is their attempt to answer that question, whilst still remaining true to their fans and themselves. As we catch up with the singer Joe Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen (mercifully not wearing his stage uniform of ‘just his pants’) in a Shoreditch conference room on the hottest day of the entire year, they’re reflective about the chain of events that led to a headline slot at Ally Pally.

“Sold that out in half a day, bosh,” says Joe, cracking open a can of water (water comes in cans in Shoreditch, apparently).

“That was the crowning glory of two very intense years. 190 shows in 2018 and 197 in 2019 – a pretty brutal schedule, and one that didn’t leave us much time for writing. So even though we started ‘Ultra Mono’ as a concept as soon as we finished the last album, life got in the way pretty quickly. I’d say it probably took us about two months to write, all in.

“I’m always trying to be as transparent as possible,” he continues, referencing the fact that they’re in a very different position as a band to where they were a couple of years ago. “My writing is always about not only our circumstances but also where I am personally at this point. So yeah, if my situation changes, my writing changes. Always the same subject, which is a kind of existential awareness and progression in conflict with circumstance and trauma as a political platform – being aware of your surroundings, being

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aware of how you fit into the world and how you can progress to be as you as possible.

“With that in mind, ‘Ultra Mono’ was written at the time when we were reacting against people’s reactions. ‘Joy’ was almost overly self-aware of where we were and where we’d come from, and this was about the battle between being too self-aware and being true to what you actually feel. So that’s where the conflict started, but eventually, we came out of it with a sense of purpose and achievement.”

“I think sonically these songs fit with where we’re playing live now,” Bowen adds. “I don’t think the new album would necessarily work that well in a small room, but it does, or it should, work well in larger venues where you can make these huge walls of noise without losing everything.

We had the option of either becoming U2 with these big wide guitars, or pulling everything in and trying to make it as chaotic and caustic as possible,” he grins. “You can guess which one we went for, probably even without hearing the album.”

“The violence of tone that we’ve always gone for needs to be even more impactive and concise in a bigger room,” says Joe. “We’re trying to create less noise, but more volume. We also have to be more concise lyrically to protect our message. It’s easy to think that the bigger the venue the less you have to worry about being considered, but we’ve found the opposite, to be honest. It was always at the back of our mind that this album absolutely has to sound good in venues with a few thousand people in them, rather than a pub with 25 people there.”

Despite planning the album around a completely different live experience than they have before, and despite a lot of pre-album hype about how hip-hop influenced ‘Ultra Mono’ would be, the end result is still very clearly a collection of IDLES songs. There are no synths or expansive detours into parts unknown, a choice Joe and Bowen acknowledge as a necessary restriction which keeps them grounded, rather than

something which chafes.

“It’s a conflict we have, definitely,” Joe says, quickly adding: “Not for our audience’s sake, for our sake. There is never a conversation where we say ‘oh we can’t write this because our audience won’t like it’, but everything we do has to be within the lines we’ve drawn around the theme of the album. So everything about this album stems from the title – ultra mono, the momentary acceptance of the self, I am I. We decided the best way to capture that was to write every song around a single part, with every element of the song fitting, elevating and driving that part. It’s a continuation of how strict we are as a band,

“I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO A BILLIE EILISH TRACK, THEN AN IDLES SONG; IT FEELS SMOOTH” MARK BOWEN

IDLES

“WE’RE TRYING TO CREATE LESS NOISE, BUT MORE VOLUME” JOE TALBOT

because the five of us are so different that without these boundaries we’d lose direction pretty quickly.

“Having said that, the album initially started from us thinking about our purpose and relevance to our audience, which isn’t a healthy place to be. The more you consider your audience, the less honest and the more contrived you’re being. The hardest thing with this album was learning to unthink and unconsider, and that takes practice... and a lot of bad songs along the way.”

“I think the other thread we were conscious of was that we wanted this album to sit in the contemporary pantheon in a way that the previous two maybe

don’t,” adds Bowen, leaning forward in his chair. “I want you to listen to a Billie Eilish track, then an IDLES song comes on, and it feels smooth, like they’re from the same era. If you do that with Billie Eilish and a track from ‘Joy’, I don’t feel like our track sounds as impactful, as current.

So there was definitely a conscious decision to take lessons from people like her.

Kanye’s ‘Yeezus’ was also a big driver, not necessarily in the sound itself but in seeing what that album does and how it does it, then doing it ourselves, but with guitars. “’Ultra Mono’ has subverted the idea that we’re a nostalgic band far more successfully than our other albums have. I would say ‘Grounds’ is a hip-hop song, I would say ‘Reigns’ is an electro or techno song, but both have rock instrumentation – if nothing else, we’re pushing ourselves to not stagnate, to not stand still. We also didn’t have the time to rehearse like we used to, what with me and Joe both having children, which contributes to the album sounding very momentary.

“A lot of Joe’s lyrics were written in the studio, and a lot of the songs were written a couple of days before we recorded them.

That means when you’re listening to the album, that’s the first time any of us in the band are hearing it in its entirety – and that’s important for us. The album says something honest and of the moment. That also ties into us sticking with guitars.

There’s something ‘visceral’, to use that horrible word,” he says, pulling a face.

“Something visceral about physically playing an instrument that synthesizers just lack for me.”

“It’s just part of our language,” explains Joe. “The challenge isn’t guitars, it’s how you use them. It’s just like a paintbrush, look at the difference between Pollock and Caravaggio – that’s how I feel about guitars, the possibilities are endless. The limitations that we set ourselves make us flourish, so the challenge excites me more than anything else. If we remove those limitations then we’ll just be kids in a candy shop with no idea where to start, and in the end, we’ll

just make ourselves sick.

Plus we want there to be a specific IDLES sound, so even if Bowen and I decided to make a synth album, we’re sure as fuck not doing it as IDLES, because that wouldn’t make any sense.”

The IDLES sound isn’t just about which instruments the band play, though. A large part of their identity as a band hinges on their openly social and political ideals, something which continues to be the case on the new album.

“I would say we’re more aligned as a band than ever,” says Bowen. “Because we live in each other’s pockets and we’ve had so much time to discuss things amongst ourselves, we’ve really evolved together, both politically and socially.”

Joe nods in agreement whilst chewing a free biscuit and trying not to get crumbs all over the table. “We’ve always been left-wing, obviously. I’ll be voting Labour until the ideals I love have any political clout, because they’re the most closely aligned people to my views that have any chance of getting into a position where they can make real change. But having said that, we aren’t a party-political band, we’re a group of humanists. It’s all about the human condition from the perspective of empathy, which is the antithesis of right-wing politics. From that perspective, we’re trying to normalize politics as the culmination of individual choices that you make.

“There’s a reason why people in certain contexts are angry and scared and lean towards right-wing politics, because they’re given lies as answers to how to change their circumstances and told who they can blame. So we’re just trying to open the conversation from the other end, from a human perspective with empathy and compassion. We want to show that it isn’t black and white, and people on both sides saying ‘eurgh, you’re stupid’ doesn’t help, because the human condition is very fluid.

Setting binaries of good and evil just means people don’t want to be on the wrong side, so they align themselves with what others around them are doing to

feel comfortable.

“I’ve made loads of mistakes and been an absolutely horrible cunt in the past, and if life was a binary, I’d still be that person. But instead, I’ve had the opportunity to explore how to sustain a sense of sanity and joy, to create a safe place to feel different, which is a deeply political act. I’d do the Steve Coogan thing and get out there for Labour if they asked, but I am absolutely not going to put it in our songs, because that’s not what we’re about as a band.

“I think that can be seen at our shows, as well. As we’ve grown as a band the crowds have become more aware of the people around them, as well as more mixed in terms of gender, race, everything really. I like to think people are more conscientious than they were in the past and have more respect for each other.

There’s still loads of room to improve obviously, but I think that’s true of any group of people, it becomes a living mass of its own.

“Our show at Alexandra Palace was the first time we’ve had more than a handful of complaints, specifically about men at the show.” He says, referencing the criticism the band faced after reports of a less than caring crowd in places. “So our response was to go and write a song about it (‘Ne Touche Pas Moi’), because it isn’t acceptable, and we don’t want anyone at our shows to think it is. But no matter how good we get at this kind of thing, a crowd is a living organism and can create chaos very easily.

One person can trip on a bag and fall into someone else, and suddenly there’s a whole lot of pushing and shoving going on. We’re the masters of the ceremony so we need to be as on it as we can be, but I do think our track record is pretty good.

He pauses, finding the right words. “As a band, we like showing compassion and allowing people to feel safe and look after each other, but we’re going to do that through empathy, rather than beating the shit out of someone for stepping out of line.” He flashes a smile and adds: “I’d say that sums us up pretty well.” P IDLES’

album ‘Ultra Mono’ is out now.

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SA D

SAWEETIE

AWEETIE DREAMS MULTI-PLATINUM RAPPER EXTRAORDINAIRE,

SAWEETIE ISN’T ABOUT TO BECOME A SUPERSTAR SHE ALREADY IS ONE. By: Abigail Firth.

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SAWEETIE

A

ny preconceptions you have of Saweetie, throw them away. She’s spent the

last few years proving she’s more than a pretty face, more than a viral hit, and more than just another Instagram girl.

With debut album ‘Pretty Bitch Music’ on the way, Saweetie – born Diamonté Harper in California’s Bay Area – is more determined than ever to prove she’s here to stay.

We ‘meet’ Saweetie in Los Angeles, where she’s used her quarantine to time fine-tune the record, reconstructing an album that was finished a while ago.

“The songs just keep getting better and better’, she tells us from her LA home, where, like a true pop star, she’s just finished shooting a music video and now sits in front of the camera in giant, pink, Gucci sunglasses. “There was just so many great songs that I haven’t released, so that was gonna be my body of work. But when it came to finally picking what this project was going to be, I was like, I need to take it serious.”

Every decision Saweetie’s made in her career so far has been a learning curve – and she’s the first to admit that.

Being part of a generation of artists who rose to fame after a viral hit, she’s made career moves in the spotlight and had to figure out who she was as an artist along the way.

Back in 2017, she posted a video rapping over Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’ to her Instagram, which became her first breakout hit ‘ICY GRL’. Her debut EP ‘High Maintenance’ followed shortly after, but she felt the pressure to be on the same level as other rappers at the top of their game.

“I had a lot of weaknesses when it came to rapping. For one, I had to learn how to record, I had to learn how to execute. I’m a very chill personality, but as a rapper, you need that extra energy, and a lot of people don’t know this, but I have a speech problem, so sometimes it’s really hard for me to say certain words. I’ve had to work through these things to perfect myself.

“When you come out as a rapper, people are automatically expecting you to execute, to deliver, to perform like the rappers who are out right now who are the people’s favourites, so I

was being compared a lot. I thought I was a premature artist that got all of this attention too quickly. But, you know, I learned from my mistakes, and that’s why I say I do inspire myself and I inspire myself in the sentiment of I’ve just made so many wrong choices, and I can only do better from learning from my mistakes.”

Facing criticism for her rapping abilities, her looks, her use of samples, the fact she went to university – trial

by Twitter isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s something Saweetie is learning to take in her stride. She’s extremely business-minded (she does have a degree in business and communications after all), and seems to take any bit of flack thrown at her and uses it as an opportunity to grow.

“I’ve had very embarrassing moments on the internet when it was tough to read my Twitter account, tough to read my comments. I remember I didn’t touch Twitter for like a month because it was just a lot of people saying negative things about me and I couldn’t process it mentally.

“You really have to be mentally tough to be able to sift through the comments if that’s what you choose to do. I feel like a lot of artists who are a part of my generation, like that’s what we do, because we’re very involved and interactive with our fans. It’s great when you have people support you, and the more I win, and the more great content I put out, I noticed that my fan base gets stronger and stronger.”

Despite the pressure, she’s thankful for the internet and her social media roots. Tracks like last year’s ‘My Type’ and recent single ‘Tap In’ both blew up on Tiktok, and she’s right when she says that’s just how artists break through these days. She notes that the recent surge in female rappers hitting it big is down to social media and how it’s allowed artists to take control of their own careers – something she’s relishing in as a self-confessed control freak.

“From my perspective, I felt like social media allowed, not only just women, but a plethora of artists to kind of break through on their own, and to kind of prove that we were able to create our own strong fanbases. So I think from the internet, we’re slowly shifting into a music industry where the gatekeepers are

“MUSIC IS MORE THAN THE FAME, IT’S MORE THAN THE MONEY IT’S HELPING PEOPLE” SAWEETIE

no longer the labels and management, it’s the people, and the people gon’ listen to what the people want to listen to.”

Anything Saweetie’s come under fire for over the past few years has been flipped on its head and reclaimed on debut full-length ‘Pretty Bitch Music’. The title itself is an ownership of the ‘pretty privilege’ label she’d been slapped with at the start of her career. On earlier tracks, she’d shied away from discussing it, but lately, it’s something she owns.

“Growing up, I felt like the perspective of what people have of a pretty girl often hindered the judgments that were placed upon me. I would try my best to kind of stay away from that stereotype, but at the end of the day, what’s great about being a woman is we’re very unique or multi-layered. I feel like pretty comes in many different ways, shapes, fashions, and I feel like the way people have kind of taken pretty and made it negative connotatively, I wanted to kind of take it, reclaim it, be proud of, you know, my look, cuz I mean, I’m very confident in my own skin, and I am a pretty girl, so if people are intimidated by that, then that’s their problem.”

Outside of music, multiple fashion and beauty ventures, including a quarantine collection with Pretty Little Thing and a collaboration with Morphe, have helped keep the Saweetie brand alive in the year between last Summer’s ‘ICY’ EP and ‘Tap In’. It would’ve been easy to push out any old tracks in the interim, but that’s not what Saweetie is about. She took some time out to switch

managements (“I had to take care of business first and then get back to creating because I always have to make sure the business is straight”) and improve as an artist, then quarantine came and gave her more time than she probably expected to polish up her album.

Throughout our chat, she keeps mentioning how critical she is of herself and her own work, so much so, she’s not really listening to other artists right now.

Finding the Saweetie sound has taken some time because she has something specific in mind, and striking a balance between “talking of substance and getting ratchet” is what she’s aiming for.

After the release of ‘Tap In’, which features a sample of fellow Bay Area rapper Too Short’s ‘Blow The Whistle’, and following the success of ‘My Type’ which sampled Petey Pablo’s ‘Freek-A-Leek’, it was up for speculation if she’d be able to make a hit with an original beat. Slowly she’s coming into her own though, working with iconic producers like Timbaland and Danja for ‘Pretty Bitch Music’.

“I’m kind of like replaying my album to see what I can perfect and also seeing what’s missing, because for the first two EPs I felt like there was always something missing from it and I don’t want to feel like that this time around. How it sounds is how it sounds, but I’ve inspired myself. From my mistakes, I became a perfectionist. I’ve made a lot of mistakes business-wise, publicly, that in that moment, hurt my brand and hurt my image. So when I say I inspire myself, I just know what I don’t want to do.”

So while she might still be learning on the job, she remains grateful for the victories and support she’s gotten so far, and says she hasn’t had her big ‘I’ve made it!’ moment yet. With plenty of achievements under her belt already, it’s still only just the beginning for Saweetie, and with so many viral artists – and female rappers – constantly coming up, she’s definitely determined to show she isn’t replaceable, and she isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

“What motivates me is when girls tell me that I help them get out of unhealthy seven, nine year relationships, when I motivate girls to go to class, when I motivate girls to want to start their own company, when I just motivate people to do better in life, I feel like my music has purpose. For me music is more than the fame, it’s more than the money, it’s more than the fashion, it’s actually helping people out in their daily lives.

“I think I represent a woman who’s confident, a woman who’s unapologetic and a woman who’s about her business and who’s going to do whatever she wants to do. So when I mean pretty, it goes beyond face value.

It’s how you carry yourself, your energy, your aura. I think because I make music that makes women and men feel confident, I’m calling this project ‘Pretty Bitch Music’ because I aim to make my listener confident, beautiful, I make them want to get to the bag, I make them want to hustle. So I’m taking pretty and making it my own meaning.” P Saweetie’s new

project ‘Pretty Bitch Music’ is coming soon.

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46. DORK

GUS DAPPERTON

POST HUMOROUS ON HIS NEW RECORD, GUS DAPPERTON EXPLORES HUMAN PAIN AND SUFFERING, BUT ALSO HEALING AND REDEMPTION. By: Aleksandra Brzezicka.

readdork.com 47.

B

ack in 2017, Gus Dapperton (aka Brendan Rice) broke into the charts with ‘I’m Just Snacking’, with many a fan falling in love with his soppy 60s synth-pop tunes on debut LP ‘Where Polly People Go to Read’.

Indie kids hopped on his dreamboat going through a landscape of heartbreaks and highs. Quickly this greenhaired, sci-fi-meets-Wes Anderson looking, New York singer-songwriter has become a human-size symbol of blurring lines and exceeding limitations for the new generation. Today, his iconic bowl cut went buzzcut and his collab with Benee on ‘Supalonely’ are TikTok viral, and his new album ‘Orca’ sees him confronting his old self and locking away his demons.

“I wrote it when I was on tour,” he says. “Basically all of it is me reciting on the trials and tribulations of us being on tour for so long and leading the unhealthy lifestyle in terms of eating habits, drinking habits and not getting enough sleep. Just having these huge emotional highs and touring also having huge emotional lows.”

Gus speaks volumes on the often tuned out another side of ‘making it’ in music showbiz; the side that sometimes reminds more of a survival camp or a prison than any musician’s ultimate fantasy. The image of a caged orca and its yearning for freedom became for Gus a recurring analogy for not understanding the mental state of something.

“I’m relating that to humans and how depression makes you feel like you’re sort of trapped in your own mind, in your head. It’s supposed to be a metaphor for the consequences of trapping everything you’re feeling and then finally getting out of your comfort zone,” he shares.

“His name is Bren, don’t forget,” sings Gus in ‘First Aid’, the first single from the new album. His moniker, Gus Dapperton, rose from Brendan’s need to break through his own mental barriers and have an outlet to be his most authentic self, with no compromises. “I’m not really missing my old self, but it’s talking about how I was as a kid, how I am now and how I’m merging the two. Maybe I’ve trapped parts of my youth away in my head,” he explains.

As any small city kid

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“DEPRESSION MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’RE TRAPPED IN YOUR OWN MIND” GUS DAPPERTON

growing up, Gus had to pave his own way. “I was feeling a little discouraged by adults from pursuing art the way I wanted to. I resented that, and I really wanted to prove it to everyone that I can do something that is far greater than what we’re taught to do,” he says.

Greatness it is. Gus is that miracle kid who went beyond the bedroom pop box and keeps on shedding artistic skin, as soon as we get used to it. On ‘Orca’ he adds dreariness to his dreamy state of mind, writing on an acoustic guitar and drawing inspirations from the 90s and early 00s giants like Radiohead and The Smashing Pumpkins. Spike Stent, a Grammy-winning producer who mixed for Lady Gaga or Frank Ocean, gave the record a dry, organic feel that Gus was after. “It was a dream come true. I’ve never had someone mix my music before. I’ve always just done it out of necessity because I didn’t really have the budget to get it to mix, so I would do it myself. It was really nice to hand it over to someone. I’ve never had my songs sound like that before,” he says.

If Dapperton does team up, it’s always with someone special, like Stent or recently Benee on ‘Supalonely’. This time, he wanted collaborations to hit even closer to home. “I love working with people I know,” he says. On starship ‘Orca’, he found space for the whole crew, his sister on back vocals, friends playing

instruments and Chela, who supported his Australian tour, performs on ‘My Say So’. “It just makes it even more personal because they were around a lot of these experiences that I’m writing about,” Gus shares. His newest video for ‘Post Humorous’ was made with a bunch of his mates, like Remi Wolf and Cruel Santino, bouncing and fooling around before webcams to his beats.

Besides bringing his squad together online, Gus hasn’t pushed himself during quarantine and set music aside, ignoring outside voice preaching toxic productivity on social media. “I found it a good time to reflect and just step away from the music for a bit. Luckily, I had finished the album, and I didn’t have too many commitments to things during this time. I think a lot of people were encouraged to be really productive during quarantine and get a lot of work done, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the best case. I think that if it’s not an inspiring time, I don’t think anyone should force themselves to make art unless they feel like it,” he explains.

Stepping aside creatively, he’s been staying in touch with followers. “I love connecting with fans, I love talking to everyone at the shows. It’s hard to connect with everyone over social media in an organised way, but I think there are new ways to start doing that. I want to give back and do music

workshops, but we can’t all connect right at this moment just because of COVID,” he says. Stay alert, online gigs are on the way.

Releasing new stuff right now is tricky. You can’t tour it; you can’t promote it properly. Gus is aware that not everyone might have the headspace for checking out new tracks in the middle of the pandemic, although for many art can help keep us sane. “I think that after the reactions from the first song I put out and seeing that the kids were saying that they really needed music in this time and they thought that this was helping them and did make them feel like one, I felt like I have a responsibility to keep releasing music now.

Especially the music that talks about new subjects,” he shares.

New subjects he talks about in the album, struggles with depression and identity, anxiety about future and death, have been particularly prevalent during the last few months. “I think that just the fact that I’m locking these demons away, I’ve already got a lot of people who’ve reached out and been able to relate to them. I always try to be as honest as possible so people can also relate to these songs and hopefully find them therapeutic like I did when I was writing them,” Gus explains.

‘Orca’ takes us to dark places where raw lyrics match raw sounds. At the heart of this emotional

GUS DAPPERTON

storm is Gus stripped from protective mental barriers and at his most vulnerable.

“It’s definitely been difficult, but it’s really rewarding at the end of the day,” he shares.

Showcasing the solitude of depression, Gus brought his community together.

“That’s all it takes for me to understand that what I’m doing is somewhat important.

That’s all I need, just one person reaching out and saying that it’s helped them and changed their life. That’s just solidified that music is so much more powerful than just like something you hear,” he says.

Despite that, we won’t be able to experience magic of Gus’ music live for a while. Asked for his dream gig destination, he doesn’t hesitate - he’d rush to his hometown of Warwick, New York. “I feel like this album is me kind of coming to terms with everything that’s happened in my life and it feels like I’m forgiving everything that’s happened in my past. I’d want to come back to Warwick and play in front of these people that I grew up with,” Gus shares, ready to make peace with past. All it took was a world tour and an album.

Grown-up Gus might’ve swapped stylistics, but he’s still here for blurring all the lines and bending the walls, inside and outside. “With fashion, it’s kind of sad. I understand why, but it’s sad that everything is separated by women’s and men’s clothes.

I just don’t really care about that; I would rather not have those boundaries,” he says.

Gus Dapperton has come a long way from Warwick.

He’s been ours, in and out of love, next-bedroom pop boy, Generation Z indie sensation and finally emo-influenced demons slayer. No matter how many faces he has, foremost, he’s a seriously skilled musician who found a way to tell his story and create his own universe, nostalgic and exciting at once, through art.

“Art shouldn’t be differentiated by any particular genre or era; it should live universally between everything. Music is categorised in genres, but there are not many boundaries. Anything is possible,” Gus says. Tune in to ‘Orca’ to see how many boundaries he’s crossed this time. P Gus Dapperton’s

album ‘Orca’ is out now.

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**OMG, IT’S DORK’S...***

BIG K-POP BIG K-POP BIG K-POP THE BEST OF THE BIG ‘UNS (YES, WE’RE PRESUMING YOU’RE AWARE OF BTS BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT THAT SHELTERED ARE YOU DEAR READER? NO. NO YOU’RE NOT)

NCT

BLACKPINK

In your areaaaaaaa – they absolutely are. You can’t get away from Blackpink as these four girls dominate the industry globally. Smashing streaming records at every turn, it’s unbelievable that they don’t have a full album out yet.

That’ll all change in October, but for now stream teaser single ‘How You Like That’ or 2019’s ‘Kill This Love’ to have your socks knocked off.

Words: Abigail Firth.

MONSTA X

This six piece might be a member down this year (after losing now solo Wonho), but they haven’t stopped working hard. Known for their clattering electro tunes, powerful vocals and snarling rap verses, Monsta X have pushed out two albums this year – one Korean (‘Fantasia X’) and one entirely in English (‘All About Love’) – and when ‘all of this’ is over, they’ll be kicking off a world tour.

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Where to begin with NCT… This boy group recently expanded to 23 members(!!) who are split into three different units: NCT 127, the ‘main’ unit who have a couple of albums and a world tour in their arsenal, NCT Dream, the members under 20 (this doesn’t apply anymore though, so it’s currently just another group), and WayV, the Chinese-based unit.

There’s also a rotational unit, NCT U, who release songs whenever they like with different members each time. All sounds a bit intense right? It kind of is, but the more really is the merrier with NCT. While the NCT 2020 project release is imminent, get acquainted with their 2018 album ‘Empathy’ for a taste of it all so far.

GUIDE GUIDE GUIDE

K-POP

KEEPING UP WITH K-POP IS NOT EASY AT THE BEST OF TIMES, AND IF YOU’VE ONLY JUST TUNED IN, IT CAN ALL GET A BIT OVERWHELMING. SO IF YOU’VE FOUND YOURSELF THINKING “OOH I QUITE LIKED THOSE BTS BOYS”, AND YOU’RE WONDERING WHAT ELSE IS OUT THERE, HERE’S A GUIDE TO EVERYTHING GOING ON (THERE’S A LOT), INCLUDING WHO’S ABOUT TO BREAK, WHO’S ALREADY ON TOP, AND SOME LINGO THAT MIGHT BE HELPFUL.

GOT7

RED VELVET

TWICE

SEVENTEEN

Unsurprisingly, this boy group has got seven members, however they’ve also got shit loads of tunes. While their recent releases veer on the sexy side (hello ‘You Calling My Name’), they’ve got a rich history of dramatic ballads and big club bangers. In between their group schedules, GOT7’s members keep themselves busy as solo artists, producers, actors, radio DJs – multi talented kings!

Arguably the biggest girl group in Korea, Twice recently celebrated their 100th(!!!) win with latest comeback ‘More & More’, and there’s no wonder – these girls have an ICONIC catalogue that’s made them one of the biggest selling groups of all time in just five years. Charming, catchy, cheeky, it’s impossible not to fall for. Look up last year’s ‘FANCY’ or earlier hits ‘What is Love’ and ‘Yes or Yes’ to see for yourself.

This super cool quintet can pull off anything – that’s thanks to Red Velvet’s group concept, where their ‘red’ (pop and electronic) side and ‘velvet’ (R&B and ballads) side collide.

They aren’t afraid to go super experimental (‘Zimzalabim’), super sultry (‘Psycho’), or just bonkers fun (‘Umpah Umpah’), and that’s just last year’s singles. Whatever’s going on, we want a slice.

Thirteen-member boy group who just celebrated their fifth anniversary, and there’s SO much to celebrate. They’re pretty self-made, boasting one of the finest discographies in K-Pop (mostly produced and written themselves) and some of the most complex choreographies out there. Their most recent comeback ‘Left & Right’ is immense fun, but if you fancy something darker, try last year’s ‘Fear’.

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CRAVITY

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TWO ALBU

WONJIN, M

SEONGMIN BY: ABIGAIL FIRTH.

K-POP

UMS IN, AND SERIM, ALLEN, JUNGMO, WOOBIN,

MINHEE, HYEONGJUN, TAEYOUNG AND

N ARE UNSTOPPABLE

W

hen Cravity made their debut earlier this year, they became one of the first to do it virtually. A world

on lockdown meant the nine boys couldn’t step out for the first time to hoards of cheering fans; instead, those fans were behind screens and putting all of their efforts into granting their idols a successful start.

So not all was lost – if anything it was a huge gain. Their debut album ‘Season 1 Hideout: Remember Who We Are’ hit number one on Gaon’s album chart, making them the best selling rookie group of 2020. They’ve since snatched a New Artist gong at Korea’s Soribada Awards, and simply couldn’t wait to make a comeback.

Already proving their unstoppable nature, we asked the boys – Serim, Allen, Jungmo, Woobin, Wonjin, Minhee, Hyeongjun, Taeyoung and Seongmin (phew) – some questions about their new album ‘Season 2 Hideout: The New Day We Step Into’, their lives since debut, and the future of Cravity.

Hi boys! First of all, what can you tell us about your new album?

Our new album talks about the experiences and emotions we face after stepping into the new world back when we made our debut. It’s an album we worked really hard on in order to show more of a mature side to us as people and artists. We want to show our fans, Luvity, that we’re constantly improving and striving for the best at all times. The title track ‘Flame’ is a powerful track that reflects our passion to test our limits, and to embrace freedom. Through this album, listeners will be able to see the improved teamwork of us who’ve matured since our debut album. We hope our fans like our new, a bit dreamy concept that we’ve tried out.

What are each of your favourite tracks on it?

Serim: I would say ‘호흡 (Breathing)’ because I usually enjoy listening to sentimental, moody songs. I’d recommend you to listen to it right before you fall asleep!

Allen: My favourite track on the album is “Ohh Ahh” because it’s a funky groovy track that makes me excited and want to dance.

Jungmo: My favourite one is ‘Believer’. It talks about faith and

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“WE STILL FEEL THAT IT WOULD BE A DREAM TO PERFORM IN FRONT OF OUR FANS OFFLINE” CRAVITY belief that we have for each other, which reminds me of the relationship between Cravity and Luvity.

Woobin: It would be ‘Realize’.

The lyrics are very sad, and I think people can empathize and relate it to it well. It is a powerful, emotional ballad with a combination of bass, drum, and piano sound. I think it also expresses the story of Cravity as well.

Wonjin: ‘Sunrise’, I love it because it suits perfectly with the summer.

Minhee: I would recommend ‘호흡 (Breathing)’. It is an emotional ballad and the whole mood of this track feels awesome. It’s a song that I would like to play for Luvity along with our title ‘Flame’.

Hyeongjun: My personal pick would be ‘호흡 (Breathing)’.

It is very emotional, and the vocals, our voices are very soothing.

Taeyoung: I love all of the songs, but if I had to pick out one, I’d say ‘Believer’. The melody is already so good from the beginning, and all of our voices sound so great in it.

Seongmin: It is ‘호흡 (Breathing)’. I really like listening to calm, tranquil ballad songs, and it just fits perfect with my taste.

Why did you decide to come back so soon?

The biggest reason was that we really wanted to come back to our fans as fast as we could. While doing a promotional activity for our debut album, we also prepared and worked very hard on this album too. Since it was our first comeback, we were all eager to meet Luvity

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with better music. Honestly, we all spent very busy days because the preparation period was quite short. But we were all so excited to meet Luvity that we prepared in joy.

Serim and Allen - you had a hand in writing ‘Believer’ and ‘Realize’, can you tell us a little about what you were thinking about when writing those songs?

Serim: I wrote it thinking about Luvity! Especially for ‘Realize’, reminiscing about the time before I met our fans and how I feel now with them beside us inspired me a lot in writing the lyrics. It is similar in a way that the main character in this song feels lonely and empty at first, meets someone whom he/ she can rely on and becomes the ones giving strength to each other.

Allen: When I wrote the lyrics for ‘Believer’ I thought of the trust between us and our fans, and that I would devote all of me for Luvity in order to pay back the tremendous amount of love and support we receive from them. I also had them in mind when I wrote the lyrics for ‘Realize’ After realising each other’s existence, Cravity together with Luvity would face and endure the realities of this world and our story would be just like those in the novels.

Are any of the others interested in helping with songwriting in the future?

Jungmo: I learned a little bit about songwriting, and I hope to try out in the future.

Woobin: I’m slowly learning about it, and I do try to write

songs these days. I hope that one day, I could make a song that we could all sing together.

Wonjin: If I get the chance, I would like to make one that contains my own message to the fans.

Minhee: I do have interest in it, but I know that it is not easy. I haven’t tried it yet, but I want to participate in it if I get the chance someday.

Hyeongjun: I’m interested in songwriting, especially in writing the lyrics, I want to express my emotions through the lyrics.

Taeyoung: I’m the person who likes trying out different things, so I would definitely want to participate in songwriting in the future.

Seongmin: As a person who likes to express emotions through writing, I would love to try out for making lyrics.

It’s only been a couple of months since your debut, but how do you feel like you’ve grown or changed since then?

Serim: I feel like the colour of Cravity has become more distinct, and that we’ve all matured and improved our skills through this album.

Allen: I feel like I’m more adapted to the new environment, this “new world” that we stepped into after debuting. Throughout our debut promotions, I learned a lot about myself and how to interact with others on and off-screen. I definitely feel like I’ve matured and made some improvements in my skills as well.

Jungmo: I felt that difference when we first did the stage for the music TV shows.

Woobin: The first and second promotions feel different for sure. I think you can look

forward to seeing us with great improvements!

Wonjin: I think we’ve definitely grown a lot compared to our debut album doing a lot of researching and practising. Our constant ambitions to show better also helped. We’ll continue working hard!

Minhee: It seems that all of us have improved noticeably on our vocal and dance skills.

Hyeongjun: I felt like I wasn’t good enough when I made my debut, so I practised even harder from then. Now, I can confidently say that I can show you a better side of myself this time.

Taeyoung: We’ve experienced so many things at once and in just a few months. I still feel that we are far from being perfect, but I do think we all have grown up.

Seongmin: There are some parts that I’ve gotten

K-POP

accustomed to, and all of the past experiences are helping me greatly.

What was it like to debut during the pandemic? It must have been a pretty different experience to how other groups have debuted!

There was one time where we got a chance to perform in front of an audience. We still feel and think that it would be a dream to perform in front of our fans offline, and we are desperate to do so. It feels sad because we feel like we are missing each other more and more as time goes by. But, at the same time, we are always trying our best thinking about the love and support that our fans are giving us despite this pandemic situation. We hope to meet our fans once this pandemic gets settled down.

Because your debut went so well (congratulations on the number one!), were you nervous about following it up?

While preparing for our second album, we each had different feelings and emotions but one thing was the same for all. We all enjoyed the whole process of making this album. For the debut album, it was more like being nervous all the time, while for this album we tried to enjoy the tension by focusing more. The whole journey and the processes were precious, and it could not have been done without love and support from our Luvity.

Was there anyone who inspired you to become an idol?

Serim: I dreamed of becoming an idol while watching BTS. Allen: SHINee’s Taemin inspired me to start dancing.

I was mesmerised by his smooth moves and beautiful lines that I started copying his dances. To this day he is my biggest role-model, and I would love to meet him one day.

Jungmo: Yes, it was BTS. Woobin: TVXQ inspired me to become an idol.

Wonjin: I think I got inspired by all the senior K-pop idols, and the genre of K-pop itself made me dream of being an idol.

Minhee: MONSTA X. My first impression was like “wow, they are so cool” and I

think that was an inspiration for me.

Hyeongjun: For me, it was EXO. They made me dream of becoming an idol during my school days.

Taeyoung: The stage.

Showing the performance and getting all the cheers and applause from the audience was a great happiness.

Seongmin: I remember watching a music program on TV when I was young.

I was curious about the artist on the stage, and I think inspiration just came to me naturally as I grew up watching them.

Are there any artists you really look up to now?

Serim: V of BTS. Allen: I really look up to Ateez. Their stage presence and performances are on the other level. You can really feel their energy even just watching it through a video, and it makes me just as energetic as they are.

Jungmo: V of BTS. I’m a fan of him, and I try to learn a lot of expressions such as facial expressions by looking at V on stage.

Woobin: Lauv.

Wonjin: Jimin of BTS! I want to be an artist like Jimin, who shows a powerful side on stage.

Minhee: As Kihyun [Monsta X] showed us, I want to be a kind, generous, and cool artist to my juniors.

Hyeongjun: It’s Joohoney [Monsta X]. I fell in love with you because your stage presence was so wonderful.

And he’s a great artist as well.

Taeyoung: Minhyuk of Monsta X. Seongmin: Moonbin of Astro!

The first album was titled ‘Remember Who We Are’ – how would you like to be remembered?

Serim: I want to be remembered as a leader of Cravity who is good at performing.

Allen: I’d like to be remembered as an artist whose music is genuine, and as a performer who commands his stage with ease and charisma.

Jungmo: Legend rookie.

Woobin: All-around vocalist.

Wonjin: There’s a lyric from the first album that says “Get nervous, Boom” Like that, I want to remember you as a rookie who makes everyone nervous.

Minhee: An energetic rookie.

Hyeongjun: A growing man.

Taeyoung: I want to be remembered as the ‘first’! I want to do things that no one else has ever done.

Seongmin: I hope I can be remembered as a person full of bright energy.

What have been some of your proudest moments since debut?

Serim: I was most proud when we won the Rookie of the Year award.

Allen: Being nominated for 1st place on music shows, and winning the best new artist award at the Soribada Awards has been some of my proudest moments since debuting.

Jungmo: When we met Luvity on Soribada, that time I was proud.

Woobin: When we sing on stage and our fans like it.

Wonjin: When we finished our first album. Looking back on the past performances, I was very proud.

Minhee: When we won the Rookie of the Year award, I feel most proud and memorable.

Hyeongjun: When we won the Rookie of the Year award, I felt most proud and happy. I was very grateful to Luvity because I thought it was an achievement made together.

Taeyoung: I was proud when I felt that I’m giving hope and strength to someone.

Seongmin: When we won the Rookie of the Year award.

If you weren’t an idol, what would you be doing instead?

Serim: Maybe I’d be working on sports or fashion.

Allen: If I weren’t an idol I think I’d be a dancer/ choreographer for an idol.

Jungmo: Cabin crew?

Woobin: I would have become a cook or a composer.

Wonjin: If I were not an idol, I would have run a cafe.

Minhee: If it weren’t for idols, I would have worked as a model.

Hyeongjun: I think I’d just be an ordinary student.

Taeyoung: I would have learned how to make clothes or became an idol badminton player.

Seongmin: I think I’d have a job related to art.

What have you been getting up to outside of preparing for your comeback?

We tried to communicate with our fans a lot. That was our number one priority besides preparing for a comeback. Each member shared their daily lives on SNS [social media] in their own way, or communicated with fans in real time through V LIVE. Other than that, we exercised or shared our leisure time with each other.

You guys are often described as Monsta X’s little brother group, do you feel any pressure to achieve the same success as your seniors?

We are happy to debut as a junior group of Monsta X. We are always grateful to follow the path that our seniors took first. We are working hard and doing our best to be their proud juniors. We really want to be a great group that seniors

K-POP GLOSSARY

COMEBACK

When an act returns with a new single/ album (not like ‘over here’ where comeback means a pop star is redeeming themselves)

CONCEPT

The theme and styling of the comeback

DEBUT

An act’s first release, usually comes accompanied with a stage show and is very hyped before it happens

IDOL

K-pop word for a pop star

MINI ALBUM Just an EP, really

ROOKIE IDOL / GROUP Idol or group in their first year

TRAINEE

Person hired by an entertainment company where they’ll become a fully-fledged star ready to debut

UNIT

Smaller group of members releasing music within a group

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“WE TRIED TO COMMUNICATE WITH OUR FANS A LOT” CRAVITY can be proud of.

We’re from the UK (hi!), when’s the world tour coming?! We want to see you!

Thank you so much! When the pandemic subsides, it’s only a matter of when and where before we get to meet our Luvities in the UK! Of course, as much as we want to meet our fans in England, we can’t wait to meet our fans all over the world. The world tour is the dream of all of our members, we will try to show our growth until then.

What can we look forward to in the future from Cravity?

We will continue to try out new concepts and cross boundaries testing our limits... so please keep your eyes out for us, and you won’t regret it! Please look forward to Cravity’s upcoming songs and performances.

Much of your group’s concept is based on how strong you are together - do you have any messages of motivation for your fans during this tough time?

Serim: Luvity! We can’t meet in person right now, but let’s wait a little longer! And I want you to be healthy all the time.

Always take care of your health. I miss you.

Allen: Luvity!! I hope you guys are doing well. Please

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remember that we are always with you and that we would get through these hard times together. There’s a beautiful rainbow waiting for us at the end of the storm. Please take care and stay healthy!!

Jungmo: Let’s believe in each other. Cravity and Luvity.

Woobin: At times like this, we have to go through this together and overcome it.

Everyone, be a little more careful and cheer up. Fighting!

Wonjin: Luvity. We’re apart, but we’re always together.

Don’t forget that. Please wait and be healthy. I love you.

Minhee: It’s a shame we can’t meet you in person, but we Cravity will wait until we can see each other! Please wear a mask.

Hyeongjun: I want to share my hardships and pains with the Luvity and give comfort and encouragement to each other. I want to communicate through music as well as SNS. I hope many of you can cheer up by listening to our song.

Taeyoung: As the saying goes, “We are strong when we are together,” I hope that Luvity and Cravity will get together and overcome difficult times! I love you.

Seongmin: As time goes by, I’m sure this moment will pass, so let’s get through it together! P

Cravity’s album ‘Season 2 Hideout: The New Day We Step Into’ is out now.

THE NEW WAVE

STRAY KIDS

Debut: 2018 Fan name: Stays Stream: God’s Menu, Easy, Miroh Who? JYP’s wonder kids who’ve been hitting it big with their ENORMOUS bangers, tonguetwister raps, and storylined mini-album series. Since their debut, Stray Kids have released seven EPs, featuring major tunes ‘Miroh’, ‘Double Knot’ and ‘My Pace’, as well as showing off their deeper side (‘I am You’, ‘Levanter’), all leading up to their debut album this year. ‘GO LIVE’ is their biggest and best project yet, and it’s almost entirely self-produced. They cooked up a storm with ‘God’s Menu’, and if it wasn’t for the ‘rona, they’d be smashing up Wembley Arena now.

ITZY

Debut: 2019 Fan name: Midzy Stream: WANNABE, Not Shy, TING TING TING Who? The highest-awarded rookie group of all time who exploded onto the scene early last year with bombastic self-love anthem ‘DALLA DALLA’. Their girl power pop bops have kept ITZY firmly on every stan’s radar since they debuted, already snatching some iconic moments with ‘WANNABE’ (look up ‘Ryujin shoulder move’) and subsequent album of club bangers, ‘It’z Me’.

Their most recent comeback ‘Not Shy’ sees them hit the wild wild west – they may be small, but they are absolutely mighty.

TXT (TOMORROW X TOGETHER)

Debut: 2019 Fan name: MOA Stream: ‘CROWN’, ‘Fairy of Shampoo’, ‘New Rules’ Who? Not BTS’ little brother group (they’re from the same company) but still with the potential to go massive. Parked right behind ITZY as grand slam rookies, TXT debuted with the bright and playful (and dare we say, perfect?) ‘CROWN’ last year.

They’ve since delved into darker and more dramatic territory with the Harry Potter inspired ‘9 and Three Quarters (Run Away)’ and more recently, coming-of-age tune ‘Can’t You See Me?’. Keep your eye on these, because with a comeback announced for October, seeing where they go will definitely be interesting.

K-POP

LOONA

THE BOYZ

(G)I-DLE

ATEEZ

EVERGLOW

CIX

Debut: 2018 Fan name: Orbits Stream: Love4eva, Girl Front, So What Who? Members of LOONA were revealed month by month starting in 2016, with them releasing their first track (‘favOriTe’) together in 2018. Each girl displayed her own talents in a solo track, but they’re at their strongest together, with a discography spanning bad girl bangers (‘So What’), soft and dreamy slow jams (‘Butterfly’), and giddy crush anthems (‘Hi High’) TO NAME A FEW. The story continues with upcoming mini-album ‘[12:00]’.

Debut: 2018 Fan name: Neverland Stream: Oh My God, LION, LATATA Who? High-concept girl group making waves with just a few singles and EPs under their belt. They’ve done saints and sinners realness (‘Oh My God’), 90s hip-hop bangers (‘Uh Oh’), and a ‘Senorita’ song better than Shawn and Camila’s, AND referenced them all in ‘I’m The Trend’. They’ve just released ridiculously catchy summer bop ‘Dumdi Dumdi’, another self-produced smash.

Welcome to Neverland!

Debut: 2019 Fan name: For Ever Stream: Bon Bon Chocolat, Adios, LA DI DA Who? If you’re a fan of big, no-bullshit bangers, Everglow have quite the discography. They ‘arrived’ early last year, bags of attitude and a smash hit in tow, a girl power wrecking ball that hasn’t stopped swinging yet. Changing up the pace with some retro-futuristic vibes for latest release ‘LA DI DA’, they’re on top of their game. Obvs they’ve got a softer side too (‘Hush’), but it’s the NANANA refrains of their singles that make the biggest impact.

Debut: 2017 Fan name: The B Stream: Reveal, Salty, No Air Who? Riding high off the release of their debut album in February, The Boyz really proved their chops when they competed on Road To Kingdom (think battle of the boybands), eventually taking the crown. After spending a couple of years doing fun and bouncy tunes, they went super sexy and sultry in 2020 with ‘Reveal’ and haven’t looked back. Find them stealing hearts on latest EP ‘CHASE’, their boldest move yet. Insert boyz to men joke.

Debut: 2018 Fan name: Atiny Stream: THANXX, WONDERLAND, Utopia Who? Unstoppable boy group from humble beginnings (they were the first group to debut from their company!) taking over the world. Bringing perky, cheeky rap verses and high notes to die for, pirates and soldiers have never looked cooler than in ATEEZ’s ‘TREASURE’ series – a set of four EPs and an album that spawned dark and moody club hits like ‘HALA HALA’, and big summer tunes like ‘Wave’. Dive in now as they kick off their ‘ZERO’ series.

Debut: 2019 Fan name: Fix Stream: Movie Star, Numb, Imagine Who? These dramatic and sexy boy groups are everywhere, but few do it as flawlessly as CIX. They introduced themselves to the world last summer with a glossy, could-be-high-fashion-ad music video and the words “I wanna play with you, you wanna play with me?” (HOT IN HERE INNIT), and who could say no? Two pretty damn good EPs of slinky retro-tinged tunes later and they’re about to put out their third.

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Incoming.

AL L THE NEW RELEASES YOU N E E D TO H E AR ( AN D SOM E YO U D E FI N I T E LY D O N 'T )

The ‘Details’ Release date: 25th September 2020 Label: Partisan Tracklisting: 1. War 2. Grounds 3. Mr. Motivator 4. Anxiety 5. Kill Them With Kindness 6. Model Village 7. Ne Touche Pas Moi (feat.

Jehnny Beth) 8. Carcinogenic 9. Reigns 10. The Lover 11. A Hymn 12. Danke

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ome people think IDLES are a shouty-shoutyangry-angry band that are almost perfectly designed for 6Music Dads (and Mums) to fall back in love with music to. And

IDLES Ultra Mono

eeeee It would take a brave person to bet against IDLES.

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there’s a lot of truth in that tbf. But that’s only telling half a story. Because somehow, somewhere, in between the ‘being hit with a car’ brutality of, erm, ‘Brutalism’, and the lightning-in-a-bottle-holyshit-this-is-amazing-ism of ‘Joy As An Act Of Resistance’, they smashed any box they were being put into by the doubters into a million pieces and became one of the most exciting bands around. Mad innit.

Now, on their third album, they have to face all the challenges that come when

you have lost that element of surprise. They sure don’t mess around to begin with, the opening ‘War’ sounding like five angry bears who have woken up to find that not only has Goldilocks eaten their porridge, but she’s nicked their fridge and crashed their car too. Shoutyshouty-angry-angry. But, dig a little deeper, and the anti-war message contained within the blitzkrieg of noise shows a band thriving in life’s messy contradictions, a thread that runs through much of the record. With singles’ Grounds’ and ‘Mr Motivator’ following swiftly in its destructive wake, it is an exhilarating start - even if it is a pace that they ultimately can’t keep up.

It’s not a flawless record by any means, the very

nature of some of the social commentary can’t help but feel a bit too on-the-nose at points, and there are moments that in truth sound like sequels to previous songs. But the endearing self-awareness (and self-deprecation) in Joe Talbot’s lyrics, always happy to poke fun at himself and his love of killer catchy slogans (while still delivering killer catchy slogans) always makes them swerve the cliches.

Most importantly, when ‘Ultra Mono’ hits, it hits hard. The Jehnny Beth-featuring ‘Ne Touche Pas Moi’ in particular is searing, a righteous rage of a song about consent and invasion of personal space that you know is going to be at the heartbeat of IDLES’ live shows, whenever they may return. It is a record firmly written for the live experience,

where much of it will take on a new life altogether.

But the record remains at its best when it is moving them into new territory, none more so than on the still-stunning ‘A Hymn’, a song about a need to be loved. And that, ultimately, is the power behind ‘Ultra Mono’. Because for all of the ugly rage and fury at modern life on display here, it is also a celebration of the beauty that can happen when people come together in love and unity to face the turmoil and traumas of an increasingly angry, shouty, scary world.

In many ways a love letter to the online fan culture that fuels the band ever onwards and upwards, it would take a brave person to bet against this from firing IDLES to even more ridiculous levels. Jamie

MacMillan

Incoming.

Gus Dapperton Orca eeeef

Though his debut ‘Where Polly People Go To Read’ might only have arrived last year, if anything Gus Dapperton might feel even more like a man riding the zeitgeist now than he did then. A featured spot on Benee’s ‘Supalonely’ has added a new TikTok sparkle to a sound that already fit that hazy, alt-pop aesthetic like a surgical glove. Finding a juxtaposition between dark and light, heavy inspiration, mental health and difficult emotions sit at odds with breezy, bright accompaniment. While ‘Grim’ has a certain brooding, bratty rawness, ‘Bluebird’ sparkles and shines with an optimistic bounce. With a sound that lives in the moment, but substance built for longer stays, there’s more to Gus than just a briefly trending topic. Stephen Ackroyd

Be No Rain

Strawberry Backstory eeeef A name from a Gil Scott Heron lyric. Quirky, multidimensional pop music crafted from a South London studio. A decade of ideas pulling from diverse, disparate places. Be No Rain’s debut album ‘Strawberry Backstory’ is every inch the self-made wonderland.

Taking personal experiences and crafting them into oddball gems, it’s a record with a sense of groove and texture that feels both current and timeless in the same breath. ‘Know Better’ is infectious and smart, while the seemingly pertinent ‘Holding Hands in Plastic Gloves’ shimmers like a glitter-ball at the end of the night. A record that speaks to both heart and head, ‘Strawberry Backstory’ is the kind of album to fall in bittersweet love with. Dan Harrison

mxmtoon Dusk EP eeeee

If any ‘scene’ was going to flourish in these times, it was surely always gonna be the world of bedroom pop. Vibing like a midnight drive at the tail end of summer, ‘bon iver’ sets the tone for an EP that seems to perfectly capture the transition between one thing and the next. Leaning back into the simpler folk-pop structure of ‘masquerade’, themes of isolation and hiding away from the world can’t help but emerge. Rather than becoming weighed down in melancholic thoughts however, mxmtoon’s ‘Dusk’ feels instead like a warm hug. By the time Her Royal Pop Majesty CRJ drops in on ‘ok on your own’, it doesn’t feel like an overstatement to say that it seems like a baton being passed from one Certified Legend to one in the making.

This is pop of the very highest order. Jamie MacMillan

Shamir Shamir eeeef

A lot has happened since Shamir’s 2015 debut ‘Ratchet’, and his new self-titled feels the most in-tune with that album - an accessible blending of the journey he’s been on ever since, distilled into a spiky and urgent return to the spotlight. Drenched in that lo-fi edge he’s been dipping across over the past few years, tracks spark to life with a full intent. ‘On My Own’, ‘Running’, ‘Paranoia’ and ‘Pretty When I’m Sad’ spin with garage-pop mentalities, ‘Other Side’ leans on bluegrass and country, while ‘I Wonder’ transports into glitching electronica and stuttering PC blimps. For any other artist, the idea of all these ideas colliding may seem too much, but Shamir pulls it into a coherent whole with that insatiable knack of melody and songcraft. Sounds great to us.

Jamie Muir

Cults

Host eeeff Four albums in, so what now for Cults? They could be forgiven for deciding to stay firmly in the retro-tinged indie-pop lane that has served them this well so far, but ‘Host’ instead marks the start of a whole new era for the New York City duo. In many ways though, ‘Host’ is the Air album that the French duo forgot to keep making, that same everso-slightly psychedelic haze and electro noodlings making for an electrifying start. There is something intoxicating and delicious about tracks like ‘Spit You Out’, while ‘A Low’ is simply beautiful even in its portrayal of hitting rock bottom. Though the record seems to run out of ideas (and steam) towards its end, it still throws open so many potential new doors for Cults that you had feared were closed forever that it still manages to feel like a win. Jamie MacMillan

Thunder Jackson

Thunder Jackson eeeff Opening the record with ‘Institution’, the walls that may have surrounded Thunder Jackson in the past are demolished, as the singer bares all, opening up about his time on misprescribed medication during his youth, and its impact on his mental health. If the album suggests anything, however, it’s that there is always a way out of the dark. ‘Find Yourself’, a 1975-esque anthem, details the daily human search for identity and self-love, while on tracks such as ‘Caroline’ we get to see his full range, his heart-aching falsetto crying out alone over a minimalist piano. One of several ballads on the record, the melodies at time do lean close to formulaic (think Irish pop-rock band Kodaline). However, it is a formula executed to perfection.

Dominic Allum

Will Butler Generations eeeff

The younger Butler brother of Arcade Fire is often recognised for his antics onstage with the Canadian indie troopers, but as we found out on his solo debut, 2015’s ‘Policy’, Will is actually a very good songwriter. Now he’s back out on his own with ‘Generations’, with its funky songwriting and exploratory synthesisers.

‘Bethlehem’ is a high energy rocker which makes us miss live shows (bloody rona!) with its wild guitar and loose drums.

Recent singles ‘Close My Eyes’ and ‘Surrender’ are so catchy yet heartfelt that it’s easy to dive into the sonic waters and swim in them for almost eight minutes exactly. ‘Not Gonna Die’ feels like it should be the joyous closer of the record, but then ‘Fine’ pops up and slightly ruins the mood. Still, Butler’s second solo album shows that he knows his way around a good fun tune. Josh Williams readdork.com 59.

Incoming.

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T R AC K BY T R

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We wrote this song towards the end of 2018, and since then it’s been a joy to play live and finally realise into a recording. Much of the EP was recorded in Glasgow at Thomas McNeice’s studio, and he is responsible for making this already over-the-top guitar solo even more ridiculous.

We also added some more guitars and metallic samples (including the huge SOPHIE sample at the start) at our own studio.

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CUT YOUR HAIR

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Have you heard the good news? Walt Disco are here to spread the queer indie gospel.

While the glam turbo-banger that is ‘I’m What You Want’ beckons the listener closer into Walt Discoworld, it’s EP opener ‘Hey Boy (You’re One of Us)’ that is the real statement of intent here. The band throw open the church doors and beckon in all the people like them, to dance in the pews and drink all the sacramental wine.

This is the underlying theme of ‘Young Hard and Handsome’ - defiant joy, and a refusal to be afraid of difference. Walt Disco aren’t looking to be an exclusively queer band, but it’d be foolish to claim that isn’t part of it. With this EP, they carve out a space for queer culture in the more commonly straight indie world, and bring in the best of both. Liam Konemann

Y

Shouty post-punk influenced bands are everywhere now – go on, check down the back of the sofa, we bet you’ll pull out at least one of The Murder Capital, or a couple of members of Do Nothing. With that in mind, how does a band stand out in such a crowded field? If Working Men’s Club are anything to go by, the answer is a drum machine and a hell of a lot of synths.

Hailing more from the Fat White Family tree than the IDLES contingent, their selftitled debut is sweaty, grubby and completely unforgettable.

It’s rare that a band who seem so geared towards chaotic live shows manage to capture the same energy on record, and even rarer for them to manage it on their debut, but Working Men’s Club seem to pull it off without even trying..

Jake Hawkes

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Working Men’s Club eeeee

Young Hard and Handsome EP eeeee

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Walt Disco

ARTIST GUIDE

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Working Men’s Club

We tried to mix Welsh choral music, Glam and heavy metal with this track, and I think we did a good job if I’m honest! The cheering sample before the first chorus drops is from a fan video of a gig we played in Bristol at the start of year - we couldn’t stop watching the video back on Instagram after the show as it made us laugh so much, so we had to incorporate it into the song when we recorded the EP the following week!

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T R AC K * * T R

HEY BOY (YOU’RE ONE OF US)

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Touching on politics, immigration, consumer culture, hate, human rights and much more A. Swayze’s debut ‘Paid Salvation’ thrives best when tight and catchy hooks meld effortlessly with a sense of urgent power. ‘Connect To Consume’, ‘It’s Not Alright’, and ‘Cancer’ are just select examples from an album full of confidence and feverish fun. At times sounding like FIDLAR at their lungbusting singalong best, at times boasting a levelled whip of Rolling Blackouts C.F, and at times roaring like The Ramones on a tripleshot of whisky - what ‘Paid Salvation’ does best is not try to be anything that it isn’t. It’s the exact dose of punk ferocity that makes you want to pour out those frustrations again and again.

Jamie Muir

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Paid Salvation eeeef

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A.Swayze & The Ghosts

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HERE’S A GUIDE TO WALT DISCO’S NEW ‘YOUNG HARD AND HANDSOME’ EP FROM THE BAND ‘THEMSELVES’

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Pillow Queens In Waiting eeeee

When a band or a record hit the hardest, you get something truly special.

Nipping away at the world around them, there’s always been a hint of that with Pillow Queens. But, with ‘In Waiting’, it feels like they’ve been waiting for this moment. Packing in a potent message of emotional meaning, they’ve created an album of defiance and jaw-dropping alt-indie that deserves to sit amongst the best this year has to offer. It’s grunge meets alternative music at its finest; where swooping melodies meet post-rock blowouts. ‘In Waiting’ sits perfectly within it all, constantly switching up and shifting gears while underpinned by earnest songwriting and a rough-around-the-edges charm. Jamie Muir

I’M WHAT YOU WANT

This is the most glam track on the EP; we were definitely referencing Iggy Pop and early Bowie when writing this. This track also features the second ridiculous guitar solo of the EP, alongside a poem James wrote which was translated into Korean, fed into a text-to-speech programme and then autotuned. Our friend Theo from WOOZE kindly transcribed this for the inside sleeve of our vinyl.

HEATHER

A big pop song to close out the record. This has secretly been our favourite song on the EP for a wee while now, sadly we only ever played it live once before the world turned upside down, so it feels great to finally be putting it out for everyone to hear! Sonically, ‘Gone’ by Charli XCX and Christine & the Queens was a big touchstone.

Walt Disco’s EP ’Young Hard And Handsome’ is out 30th September.

Fenne Lily BREACH eeeef

The follow-up to Fenne Lily’s debut collection of vulnerable tales woven through sweet melodies, ‘BREACH’ shows strength and self-assurance through sturdier vocals that depict an acceptance of being alone - learning to enjoy one’s own company. Lead single ‘Alapathy’ highlights Lily’s uncertainty towards treating symptoms instead of fixing the problem, while ‘How To Be A Woman Pt.1’ is a sombre start, but doesn’t set the tone for the rest of the album.

‘Berlin’ sees Lily document her life pre-isolation, touring Europe and living in Berlin for a month solo. The cherished relatability of Lily’s lyricism continues in ‘BREACH’ and sees the singer-songwriter leaning into a realm. It seems we’re only just scratching the surface of Fenne Lily’s storytelling prowess.

Charlotte Croft

Incoming.

The ‘Details’ Release date: 2nd October 2020 Label: Polydor Tracklisting: 1. you!

2. cowboy in LA 3. heart won’t let me 4. if this is the last time 5. i still talk to jesus 6. paper 7. good guys 8. sharing you 9. bad news 10. when you’re drunk 11. anything 4 u 12. sad 13. (what i wish just one person would say to me) aka happy for you 14. nobody else

A

s they debut their third album, LANY may seem somewhat of an enigma. A

Lany

Mama’s Boy

MAKE SURE YOU CHECK OUT THESE ALBUMS FROM THE LAST FEW MONTHS.

RELEASES

RECOM -MENDED

eeeee

band with a bustling fanbase, their first two records certainly made an impression - but equally, it feels like they’re an act with potential still to realise. Just south of 10 million monthly Spotify listeners, 3.5 billion streams; when it comes to numbers alone, they certainly pack a punch, but ‘Mama’s Boy’ brings something altogether

different: heart.

Tethered in a world of belonging, focused on family, friends and the memories that shape us, it’s a world apart from the sheen of the big city and bright lights.

Opener ‘you!’ still shimmers with the same neon haze that envelops a whole generation of modern alt-pop, but instead of a cold, wipe-clean cool, it’s packing a warm embrace. ‘a cowboy in la’, on the other hand, deals with the disconnect of being an

Oklahoma boy living in the glitz, glamour and palm trees of the City of Angels.

“If there’s a heaven I hope that I get in, but I probably won’t,” offers ‘i still talk to jesus’, an intimate confessional that speaks of a “past more stained than the glass”, while ‘when you’re drunk’ is more accusatory and assertive - a conflicted realisation of a relationship that may not be for the long haul.

In reconnecting with

Ackroyd

Troye Sivan

The Magic Gang

Taylor Swift

Aluna

An exploration of emotions, it’s a showcase of one of the most inventive and vital minds pushing the creative edges of mainstream culture.

As everyone else rushes by, The Magic Gang are a band who take a moment to stop and consider. We should cherish them for it.

There’s more honesty and sincerity than would be found in most so-called ‘alternative’ releases. A surprise, but in the best possible way.

Aluna rips up the rulebook on ‘Renaissance’ and shows anything is possible when you march to the beat of your own drum.

In A Dream EP

Death of the Party

Folklore

his heritage, frontman Paul Klein finds an effortless sincerity that provides a new dimension; a transformative authenticity that makes LANY a more organic, believable prospect.

What was once promise and potential now packs substance far deeper than surface aesthetics. Finally realising the band they want to be on their own terms, these mama’s boys are welcome any time. Stephen

Renaissance

readdork.com 61.

This month, it's...

Lynn Gunn, PVRIS 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 if Lynn from PVRIS is a morning person. So we asked her. See?

fall asleep.

Do you believe in aliens?

Absolutely. When I think of humans and try to imagine us as the most intelligent form of life in the entire UNIVERSE, I can’t help but laugh hysterically. Nature is way too smart, and the universe is way too big for us to be the only and most intelligent life.

What did you last dream about?

This will sound really weird, but I’ve been having this series of dreams with an unidentified mystery woman in them. I don’t know who she is, but I can process from dream to dream that it’s the same person in each dream. My last dream took place at some crowded event, not sure what it was, but the woman kept appearing in the crowd and then vanishing.

What is your favourite time of day?

I’m a huuuuuge morning person. When I’m home from tour (bus bunks are traps and you may never wake up from them, beware), I wake up with the sun most days. It’s my quiet time, coffee/tea time and journaling time. If I ever have a busy morning or that time gets interrupted, it takes me a second to adjust throughout the day haha. I love to sit outside in the grass with a morning tea and people-watch everyone in my neighbourhood first thing when I get up.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

The Dodo or Tasmanian tiger

If you could win a lifetime supply of anything, what would you choose?

Money. *puts on sunglasses*

What was the first record you bought?

Honestly, I think it was Ricky Martin’s self-titled album, hahahaha. I was probably 5 or 6, and I accidentally bought the Spanish version. My grandpa had to take me back to the store to switch it for the English version. I really should have kept the Spanish version and learned every word.

What’s the biggest learning experience you’ve had?

I am constantly trying to stay on a learning journey, so I really feel that one specific learning experience is pretty hard to pick! If I had to pick one in my life so far, I would definitely say navigating through my vocal struggles.

Our entire second record touring cycle, I could only sing with about 20% of my voice. I learned to appreciate so much throughout that journey. It changed my relationship with being on stage and performing as well as provided me with

What is your earliest memory?

Crying in my crib, stressing my mom out and her playing Enya to quiet me down and help me 62. DORK

endless gratitude for being able to tour the world and see so many amazing places and people.

Have you ever been thrown out of somewhere?

When I used to play ice hockey, my defence partner and I both got thrown out of a game for body-checking another player on the opposing team… (We played women’s ice hockey, so checking wasn’t allowed.)

If you weren’t a musician, what would you be doing?

Creative directing or branding/ designing.

What was the last thing you broke?

My favourite coffee mug while doing the dishes… my soapy hands couldn’t handle the slippery surface, and it flew out of my hands and smashed in the sink. So maybe the last thing I technically broke is… my heart?

break so many things that I think I’ve desensitized myself to my possessions haha. If I had to pick the coolest thing in my possession, it would be an authentic autographed portrait of Albert Einstein that my grandma’s friend gave me.

Have you ever had an imaginary friend?

Not that I remember… but my cousin when she was younger had so many, and they turned out to be the ghosts of some of our relatives who have passed.

What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?

Oh boy… the other day I waited behind a parked car for a few minutes and was so confused why it wasn’t moving and then I realized…. I dont think anyone saw and it’s not insanely embarrassing but that’s the most recent thing I can think of.

Have you ever sold your own CD or merch on eBay? No, but maybe it’s a new side hustle I should look into?

What’s one thing people don’t know about you?

I am an 80-year-old grandma named Gerdy living inside the body of this 26-year-old artist/ musician… when I’ve drained all of the life from her body, I will find another vessel to take over and continue to live forever. My soul is INFINITE.

What is your most treasured possession?

I am not super attached to anything I own, I lose and

How punk are you out of ten?

“I’m not a punk rocker, I don’t make punk music.

Maybe I have some punk

What’s the furthest you’ve travelled to attend someone else’s gig?

New York to London.

characteristics about me… did I say that properly? Yeah, maybe I have some punk characteristics about me, but I don’t walk around calling myself “punk”. It’s more punk to tell people you’re not punk than to sit there and say that you are punk… and… whatever.

If you wanna know what I think that I am? I think that I’m just a rock chick and… I like to rock out, I like to throw shit around, I like to go nuts I like to lose myself on stage. I like to scream, I like to break things I like to holler I like to YELL?!” Avril Lavigne What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to try?

Interior design/curating concepts for cool bars and restaurants. I’d love to open up a restaurant with my brother someday (he’s an amazing chef). I’m determined to make it happen in this lifetime.

How do you take your coffee?

I can’t have coffee at the moment due to some health issues but when I can have it… I’m a classic almond milk/ oat milk latte type of gal. I make an annoyingly complex coffee whenever I’m home (and can have it) that has pea milk, almond creamer, ghee, collagen powder, monk fruit sweetener and a pinch of sea salt and it’s sooooo good. P PVRIS’ album ‘Use Me’ is out now.

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