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THE HOWLERS

DESERT ROCK REVIVAL IN EAST LONDON? MORE LIKELY THAN YOU’D THINK.

ADAM YOUNG OF THE HOWLERS TURNS TO TALKS OF HIS AUTISM DIAGNOSIS, GETTING SH*TFACED AT A THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS GIG AND SHARING A CREATIVE SPACE WITH EXTINCTION REBELLION.

THERE is something to be said for wanting to be unique in London. It is all together different to pursue it. And a tough mountain to reach the top of. However, The Howlers are embracing a new kind of music in a city, Adam Young, lead singer and guitarist, deemed ‘culturally and socially deserted’. Young, 23 years old, is one third of the London band, The Howlers; consisting of Tom Triggs (drums) and Guus ter Braak (bass) alongside Young. The Londonbased band met at university and started making music in 2019. They created music throughout the UK’s numerous lockdowns, blossoming out the otherside with a fully fledged EP followed by a UK tour in 2021. The music can be described as comingof-age movie soundtrack magic akin to Vampire Weekend. start- technology at its finest. No sound and a grainy picture- what an unwelcome throwback. Unfazed, Young jumps straight into it with an unorthodox take on his weekend. “I guess the first thing you should know about me is that I absolutely detest weekends- I have to be always focussed on things and the music industry just goes offline. I end up bombarding people with ideas on a Sunday night.”

As the singer sat tousling his brown, ear length bob, discussing school time antics he chimed in; “I never really applied myself [in school]. If you ask my teachers, they’d probably all say that I was a little sh*t. I had undiagnosed autism at the time which makes sense looking back now.” He continued; “a lecturer of mine turned to me in university and was like, “Are you autistic?”” The artist seemed open and content with his situation, sitting back in his chair

and explaining what he referred to as the ‘awakening’ that it caused him to have. He added; “I think of it as like a super weapon now. Yeah it affects how I am socially and how I understand situations but I can always apply it to music, which is something I always wanted to follow.” As we delved into the topic, Adam explained his experience with autism rationalising it as “like I’m a horse in a race. When they get those blinkers on and they’re so focused on that [the race] they can’t do anything else- that’s me.”

As we delved further into the music of The Howlers, Adam explained how they got where they are now. “Everything we’ve done in our time has always been blood, sweat, and tears. We were only a band for like six to nine months before the pandemic. We crammed so much in such a short space of time.” Moving onto the origin story of the band’s iconic genre- desert rock, Young explained. “When we first started the band, we had the iconography of Spaghetti Westerns and the soundtracks that were surrounding them and we became a bit of an Ode to that.” We got onto the topic of how desert rock translates into the London music scene- somewhere so far removed from the blistering heat of Joshua Tree. “London is so fast paced and so clique-y, it can be like a cultural and social desert. It’s so big. If you’re not in one of these little scenes, you’re lost in the middle.”

While on the topic of a barren London, Young jumped into his lockdown experience- writing music in an abandoned factoryturned-creative-space in North London. As Young explained, it was “absolute rat warren sh*t. Nothing worked. They built these spaces that you can go and use but they are just absolutely disgusting.” The artist went on explaining the interior of this so-called factory-turned-creative-space; “we turned up. No one’s about, it’s just Extinction Rebellion who were storing that big pink boat that’s usually in Oxford Circus. We were almost compact shoulder to shoulder in this box room. Super loud, super sweaty, super stuffy. No natural light. It wasn’t a