upsetmagazine.com Editor: Stephen Ackroyd (stephen@upsetmagazine.com) Deputy Editor: Victoria Sinden (viki@upsetmagazine.com) Associate Editor: Ali Shutler (ali@upsetmagazine.com) Writers: Alex Lynham, Danny Randon, Jake Richardson, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Goodman, Rob Mair, Sam Taylor, Steven Loftin Photographers: Danny Payne, Ryan Johnston, Sarah Louise Bennett Cover Photo: Sarah Louise Bennett 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. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Upset or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally. P U B L I S H E D F RO M
THE BUNKER W E LCO M E TOT H E B U N K E R.CO M
IN THIS ISSUE... RIOT!
ABOUT TO BREAK
04 PV RI S
26 YO N A K A
08 K A M I K A Z E G I RLS 09 WAT E RPA RKS 10 STO N E SO U R
28 Z E A L & A RD O R
FEATURES 30 H EY V I O L ET
13 RO C K DJ
38 R AT BOYS
14 C O LO R F I L M
40 RI S E AG A I N ST
15 S LØT FAC E
44 ROZ W E L L K I D
16 T H E O N E H U N D RE D 18 FA N G C LU B 19 A RCA N E RO OTS
RATED 46 PA R A M O RE 49 S I N G L E M OT H E RS
20 D O N B RO C O
50 ROYA L B LO O D
22 NOTHING BUT THIEVES
51 T RI C OT
24 P L AY L I ST
52 S L A M D U N K 2017
EDITOR’S NOTE The last month has seen a multitude of difficult challenges for our community, but if any message has come through, it’s that we can get through anything as long as we stick together. Live music is brilliant, and nothing should stop us enjoying it. As long as we watch out for and respect others, nothing’s going to stop us embracing it. Since our last issue came out, we were shocked to hear the allegations regarding our previous cover act, PWR BTTM. We stand with all victims. Our scene can make no exceptions.
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E V E RY T H I N G H A P P E N I N G I N RO C K
E V E RY T H I N G H A P P E N I N G I N RO C K
PVRIS ‘DO’ LONDON!
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BIGGER BETTER BOLDER
PVRIS ARE BACK. AS THEY LAUNCH THEIR NEW ALBUM ‘ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN, ALL WE NEED OF HELL’ WITH LIVE SHOWS IN LONDON, THEY’VE STEPPED UP THEIR ALREADY IMPRESSIVE GAME. WORDS: ALI SHUTLER. PHOTOS: SARAH LOUISE BENNETT.
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ands like to shock. And heck, we like to be shocked. The first taste of a new album is the perfect landscape to toy with expectations, but sometimes a band is more concerned with story than single. Sometimes a band comes back like PVRIS. Subtle and with plenty of space, there’s a relax to ‘Heaven’ that sets things up rather than burning them down. “We were just thinking of what would make the most sense with the record,” starts Lynn Gunn backstage at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire fresh from offering us a handful of skittles. “We have been calm and confident,” she offers. There’s belief in what they’re doing and for good reason. “You have to. If you don’t, you have to invent a gimmick to make it work, and we don’t want to have to do that. The music speaks for itself.” The band, as always, know more than they let on. They know there’s a joy in the discovery and they’re never out to spoil that. At one point Lynn accidentally reveals the band will be returning to the UK for a big headline tour (“oops”), but apart from that, their secrets remain between the three of them. They want everyone to experience the adventure. They’ve been watching the reaction to ‘Heaven’ - a song that “felt so good to put out because we had no clue what to expect” - carefully. “I try not to expect things,” admits Alex Babinski, before Lynn adds: “But you always want to hope. It’s all been so positive. We’re all super proud of this record. We’re stoked, and I’m hoping it can translate to other people. I have a feeling it might,” she adds with a glint in her eye and a knowing smile. After years on the road trying to keep up with the whirlwind their debut ‘White Noise’ created that left the band with “no time ever to collect ourselves or just exist as humans,” PVRIS now feel replenished and rejuvenated after taking a step back. They saw family, friends and unwound. “I had a hard time adjusting, but I’m in a good place now,” explains Lynn. They haven’t returned empty handed though. As always, PVRIS have been scheming, and there’s a new album ‘All We Know Of Heaven, All We Need Of Hell’ on the horizon. Created in two and a half months in a renovated church in Utica, the band spent every day making use of the grand pianos, the organs, the hundred of amps and pretty much anything you can imagine. “It was the opposite of what the recording experience for our first album was like,” explains Alex, and
DON BROCO
“WE JUST WANT TO GET THE ALBUM OUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”
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DON BROCO ARE BACK WITH NEW MATERIAL, AND PLANNING THEIR BIGGEST HEADLINE SHOW TO DATE. WORDS: JASLEEN DHINDSA. edford lads Don Broco have just finished off their first ever tour in America supporting State Champs, and if fan videos from the shows are anything to go by, it seems like attendees didn’t go just to see the headline band.
E V E RY T H I N G H A P P E N I N G I N RO C K
“During [support] shows I find it quite interesting to do a quick shout out to get a feel if people have heard of us before,” frontman Rob Damiani explains. “It’s a pleasant surprise that people seem to know about us in the US now. We didn’t know what to expect when we came out, we thought maybe it’d be like it was in the UK when we were first playing shows;
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playing to this crowd who have no idea who you are - but people do, which is awesome. There have been a lot of people who discovered us years ago when we were doing our first album, so it was great to meet all of them.” As well as being a relentless touring band, the four-piece constantly churn out new music, releasing at least something every year since they started in 2008. Their latest release is the gargantuan ‘Pretty’, featuring their signature lyrical style of problematic love mixed with humour, but sonically the track steers away from the funk driven indie of 2015’s ‘Automatic’, and focuses more on the post-hardcore roots of their first two EPs. Paired with a music video featuring the band cutting off each other’s faces, and wearing them as masks at bassist’s Tom Doyle’s fake wedding, the track is
Don Broco at their finest. “We worked on [‘Pretty’] towards the end of last year. We got off the Bring Me The Horizon tour in November, and we kind of just started writing over Christmas, working on the next album. We just wanted to get as much headway as we could over the holidays, and it’s pretty much one of the first songs that we wrote, and recorded it straight away. When we were coming out to tour, we thought rather than waiting for the full album to finish and going through the whole process of that, that it would be cool to shoot a video and get music out to play on the [US] tour. I’m glad we did because it’s been a lot of fun, we’ve been playing it at the last few shows, and it’s just been one of the most fun songs to play live. “We didn’t think about the video too
DON BROCO
much at first to be perfectly honest. It started with [previous single] ‘Everybody’, we wanted to make something different to our other videos, something we hadn’t done before. We put out this vague email to a load of directors, saying: ‘Do you want to make something fun and weird?’ and like, ‘Surprise us’. We got ‘Everybody’ back [directed by Dominar Films], which was this weird cowboy cult dance move weird as fuck video, that reminded us of Twin Peaks or The League of Gentlemen. We just loved it. “After that video and having such a good experience, we went back to the same guys, and we said, ‘We’d love to create another video within this weird world where no rules apply’. It doesn’t have to make sense. We wanted it to be a little bit shocking. [‘Pretty’] came back pretty much as it is now, and we just loved it from the start. It was our goriest video and our darkest, but it’s got that sense of fun and humour to it that we really liked.” ‘Pretty’ is the first single from the band’s upcoming album, a concoction of posthardcore and R&B; it’s the weirdest and heaviest material that they’ve put out since their EPs released nearly a decade ago, most comparative to the infamous fan favourite ‘Thug Workout’. “I’d say yes and no,” Rob says about whether the rest of the album follows the same suit as ‘Pretty’. “What we’ve done so far [on the new album] is still quite a wide ranging eclectic mishmash of everything we love
about music, and we try and wrap it all up and turn it into an album. “Every song has a distinct vibe, so I wouldn’t say there’s going to be ten other ‘Pretty’ sounding songs on the record. It’s got a heavier feel; I think it just came about from touring loads last year and the year before. We’ve definitely been the busiest as a band; ‘Automatic’ was the album that allowed us to get out and tour the world and see loads of countries. We’ve pretty much constantly been on tour since it came out, and we just enjoyed playing so much; it’s the most fun part of being in a band, there’s no doubt about it. The louder and heavier you play, the more fun it is, especially for us, so when it came to writing the music, it was the first time we ever thought, ‘Oh I wonder what this would sound like in a live environment’. “[With] ‘Automatic’ we wrote it as a studio album, and we would consciously do what we want in the studio, write the best songs we can and worry about it later. A lot of the live versions can tweak and change which is cool as it brings it to life in a different way. But with this record, we were like, ‘No, what do we want to hear? You’re at a show you want to mosh, what’s going to make us feel good?’ “It’s hard to say, but I think we’re only a few months off [finishing the album] really. After this tour we’re spending a little bit of time in New York when we’re
finished, to chill out and do some touristy stuff and relax and wind down. Then basically for the rest of the summer, we’re going to be doing European festivals all over the place, during that time is the time we’re planning on finishing off the album and getting everything wrapped up so we can have new material as soon as possible. “We hope to be bringing out new stuff and having an album at the start of next year or sooner. We just want to get it out as soon as possible; we probably will follow a similar line of ‘Pretty’ and ‘Everybody’ in the sense that if we’ve got a song were digging, we just want to put it out and get a video done, not worry too much about deadlines. If we’ve got music, just get it out.” The band are playing their biggest headline show to date at Alexandra Palace later this year. “We wanted to do something special in London, London being not quite our hometown, but almost like a hometown show for us. It feels like it’s been a long time coming since we’ve done a proper Don Broco show, I guess the last time was Brixton Academy two years ago. We wanted to do something special; we wanted to wait and do the full tour once our album’s actually out. It’s for our fans, a big party blow-out before we start the new album cycle properly.” P Don Broco play London’s Alexandra Palace on 11th November.
ABOUT TO
BREAK THE BEST NEW BANDS TH E H OT TEST NEW MUSIC
YONAKA BRIGHTON-BASED FOUR-PIECE YONAKA ARE DOING THINGS A BIT DIFFERENTLY... WORDS: JASLEEN DHINDSA. PHOTO: DANNY PAYNE.
onaka frontwoman Theresa Jarvis grew up in a small town in Kent, which didn’t exactly cater to her burning desire to play music. “It was ridiculous. In my [music] class there were four of us, I don’t know how we made it work really. It was shitty; no one was even good,” she laughs. “I was always writing music, I had 26
this little songwriting thing with my friend when I was younger, and we started doing covers, but we wrote like two songs! Then I moved to Brighton, and it helped loads because everyone’s doing music and everyone’s really good. It was great to be surrounded by people who wanted to do the same thing. None of my friends were into music.” “We’ve all been friends for about seven years,” she says of her fellow bandmates. “Not good friends, but we met and were all doing our own thing,
doing our own projects, but nothing was clicking. Then we got together, and it was weird how good it was. We were like, ‘Wow this is it!’ So we’ve been together for about three years now and gigging for two and a half.” “The best thing [about being in Brighton] is it’s a very small place; it’s easier than London to get your name around the town a bit. Everyone knows what’s going on. The bad thing is that there’s a type of music in Brighton, and I think everyone’s doing the same thing, so it gets a bit samey.
It’s rocky, grungey, psychy kind of music; there’s very little dance music.” Yonaka meanwhile have a distinct tribal dark pop sound. “It just happened,” she explains. “We all have different influences; I feel it was a mashup of that. It’s quite tribal and a mixture of pop… we just sat down and started playing, and the sound happened, and we were like, ‘Wow this is really good!’.” This summer, Yonaka are set for big festivals, including Reading & Leeds, despite only having a handful of singles out. “[We’re] so excited about that,” she says. “We’ve got three songs out, but we’ve got so much recorded. It feels great and playing with [bands like] Drenge… we’re really good friends with them now. It’s nice making the connections and friendships through it. “We feel like we’re a bit of a slow
burner,” she laughs, “but we feel like it’s a good slow burner and collecting the right fans for the right reasons. We don’t want to be a quick buzz band; we want to be there for a long time, we’re in it for the long haul! I believe in it. I’ve never felt like that in anything else I’ve done.” “We’ve been recording so much; we’ve got like fifteen songs already,” Theresa continues. “We’ve been working with two different people, Ross Orton who does Artic Monkeys, and we’ve recently started working with someone called Rodaih McDonald [The xx, Savages, The Horrors], and he’s awesome. They’re both different ends of the spectrum with how they work, but they’re both incredible. “Before we went on tour [with Berlin’s Gurr], we did like four weeks in the studio, and we’ve been back and forth from Sheffield recording with Ross. We
want to do a music video as we’ve never done one before, getting all our artwork together. It’s a progression. ‘Ignorance’ was one of the first songs we wrote, and then ‘Drongo’, and ‘Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya’ is more recent, but it still keeps a theme throughout. There are lots of different sounds, it all works together, but they all sound like their own thing.” And as for the future: “I hope that we achieve success, we want to do this for a living, and we are so passionate about what we do. It’s been so weird on this tour, the people that have been coming, they’ve been singing along to the words, and it’s such an incredible feeling; you’re just so in love with every person in the room. It’s so lovely that all these people are there, and they believe in what you’re doing. We just want to get an album out, want to get more songs out, we want to be doing what we can and living the dream.” P
GENRE BOUNDARIES ARE DEAD. NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR DEATH EATER STYLE PURE BLOOD TENDENCIES, GRANDAD. THE REST OF US ARE MIXING THE STREAMS, FINDING SOMETHING NEW AND EXCITING. ARE HEY VIOLET STILL ROCK? WERE THEY EVER? WHO CARES. THIS IS A BAND WHO
BANG DEAL IN ONE CURRENCY. HUGE, GIGANTIC...
GERS ... AND WITH THEIR DEBUT ALBUM ‘FROM THE OUTSIDE’, THEY’VE HIT THE MOTHERLODE.
WORDS: ALI SHUTLER. PHOTOS: SARAH LOUISE BENNETT.
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here are far more interesting stories to be told than the one asking if Hey Violet are a rock band. For over a decade the likes of Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park have been taking a little bit of everything the love and making it their own. More recently, Twenty One Pilots and PVRIS have been more focused on the art, than what colours they’re allowed to use. It’s 2017, and anything goes. Hey Violet aren’t wasting their time worrying about how the rest of the world views them because they’ve got stories of their own to tell. Questions of authenticity are shrugged off - “Any artist getting up on stage and doing their own thing is authentic if they feel their music” - and instead, a sure-footed confidence reigns. The core trio of Rena and Nia Lovelis and Miranda Miller have been in bands together for nearly a decade. “We’ve grown up together. Miranda was twelve when I first met her,” starts Nia. “Rena is my sister so I couldn’t really avoid that one.” They’ve always shared a similar idea of where they wanted to go. “Miranda, Rena and I are on the same page, and we’ve always taught each other things. I know I’d be a completely different person without them.” Alongside Casey Moreta and Ian Shipp, all five of them are very similar people. “We’re different ends of the same soul,” continues Nia, with Rena adding: “Everyone adds something special. In the beginning, we were these lost kids not knowing how to connect. Being friends but not really understanding each other’s emotions, and in the process of this band, we’ve got closer and gained a lot more understanding in each other. We’re really solid right now.” This isn’t overnight success or easy riding though. It’s been a hell of a trip. First came Cherri Bomb, a snotty rock band with arena ambitions, that saw Rena, Miranda and
Nia joined by vocalist Julia Pierce. They shared stages with everyone from Foo Fighters to The Smashing Pumpkins and put out album ‘This Is The End of Control’ in 2012. The following year Julia left, Casey started filling in on guitar, and Rena took her place at the front. “We were still going by the name Cherri Bomb while Casey was in the band but we should have changed the name then. We were hanging onto the name because we were afraid of change.” The name stuck around for a few years while the band figured some things out, but Cherri Bomb was dead. Hey Violet was alive from that moment on. “When we parted ways with the other member, that’s when it was a complete change. It was a new era. We were trying out different things, and that’s when we were a different band. It took us a while to get the name change going, but in our hearts and souls, we knew this was different. This was a new band. We needed a fresh start.”
the band down a path that leads to their debut album ‘From The Outside’. “There have been ups and downs musically, there have been some weird moments, our mid-band-life crisis, but now we’ve got to a great place and can confidently say we stand behind it. There was just such a long period of trying to find our sound,” offers Rena. “Even at the beginning of Hey Violet when we were a different band, we knew we wanted to go more pop, but we were lost in the fact that we didn’t know how to do pop. It’s a whole other animal you have to tackle.” Refusing to take the easy route of staying in their lane, ‘From The Outside’ sees Hey Violet branching out and not making any apologies about it. “We were doing that whole pop-punk thing, and then we asked, ‘Well, where can we go now?’ It’s more about pushing yourselves than seeing where the destination is,” explains Nia. “Let’s see how far we can go to the left, or how far can we go to the right, and then figure out what feels best to us.” It turns out what feels best is a little bit of everything and a whole lot of heart.
“THIS IS US. THIS IS THE MOST US THAT IT’S EVER BEEN.”
After a couple of years of moving the puzzle pieces around, Hey Violet broke cover in 2015 with debut EP ‘I Can Feel It’, signing to Five Seconds Of Summer’s Hi Or Hey Records and supporting the Australian band on their arena tour. The ‘Brand New Moves’ EP followed in 2016 alongside the addition of Iain Shipp on bass, freeing Rena up to focus on the microphone.
Over the course of the past few years, the band have moved from the sort of primary-coloured pop-punk that you’d expect, to something less obvious. While ‘I Can Feel It’ is all power chords and bubblegum punk, ‘Brand New Moves’ takes that attitude to the dancefloor. Elsewhere the tilted-head truth of ‘Fuqboi’ and the dark euphoria of ‘Pure’ started
“Somehow we ended up in a comfortable spot for us, and yet, uncomfortable at the same time,” laughs Rena. It was important for ‘From The Outside’ to see the band “outside of our box”, without seeming like they’re trying too hard. “We’re not going to do something different just to show people we’re unpredictable; we’re just doing it because we loved it.” “The funny thing is, talking about doing what other people say instead of doing what’s in your heart, we’ve definitely been there,” adds Miranda. “Now we’re coming out of it; people are like, ‘Now you’re just not being yourselves’, but this is us. This is the most us that it’s ever been.” ‘From The Outside’ is a record about falling in love. It’s about heartbreak and heartfelt discovery, being in control and not being afraid of how you feel. “We used to write a lot of songs about not being in control. We wanted to turn that around and see what it was like from the other side,” starts Nia. “The record does that. When we’re singing about having
T H E E L ECT I O N O F D O N A L D T RU M P G AV E RI S E AG A I N ST P L E N T Y TO G ET ST U C K I N TO O N T H E I R N E W A L BU M , ‘ WO LV ES ’ . F RO N T M A N T I M M C I L R AT H I S A N G RY A N D U PS ET AT T H E E L ECT I O N RES U LT, BU T H E ’S FA R F RO M F E E L I N G D E F E AT E D… WO RDS : JA K E RI C H A RDSO N . P H OTOS : SA R A H LO U I S E B E N N ET T.
D E T A R THE OFFICIA
ING. N EVERYTH L VERDICT O
PA R A M O RE A RE M O RE T H A N J UST A BA N D N OW.
PARAMORE AFTER LAUGHTER
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TH E O F F I C I A L VE RD I CT
“Oh please, don’t ask me how I’ve been, don’t make me play pretend.”
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hat, right there, is the thread of Paramore’s fifth album, ‘After Laughter’. After years of internal shifts, line-up changes, allegations and legal disputes, it’s no shock that they’d find themselves feeling more than slightly shook up by this point. What’s remarkable is how they’ve used it to make what in many ways is their best album so far.
Because there’s absolutely no doubt about it, that’s what they’ve done. You can split Paramore’s history into two distinct halves. Their first three albums, up to 2009’s ‘Brand New Eyes’, are packed with youthful rebellion, raging against the growing pains. Even though that third album saw relationships breaking down, the fire burned hotter than the sun. They were the torchlight of a scene shining bright. But by the time 2013’s self-titled record came round, they were different
people. Some of that DNA remained, but it was replaced by the invention of a band realising their horizons were as wide as they wanted them to go. Dealing with the damage of losing the Farro brothers in a messy divorce, rather than drill down, they looked up to the stars. Unusually for a band in their position they reached them too, on their own terms. To suggest even four years before Paramore would have written a song like ‘Aint It Fun’ would to be laughed out of town. With a Grammy win behind them, it’s them who got to wear the knowing smiles. And then it all crashed down again. With bassist Jeremy Davis leaving in another messy (but thankfully marginally less public) breakup, Paramore were down to two. It’s that dynamic that colours the underbelly of ‘After Laughter’. That, and the way
they found their way back from the brink. ‘After Laughter’’s defining character isn’t the breezy, 80s pop vibes that run throughout. It isn’t a change in sound which manages to be both evolution and revolution in the same note. It isn’t even the fact that, despite all the odds, Paramore may have found themselves as the most important rock band on the planet, while not really playing traditional rock music as they grasp that crown. Instead, it’s the energy that’s kept the wheels turning that defines a remarkable record. The opposing poles of lyrics and music that run throughout don’t just repel, they spin. Fast.
turmoil bubbles away. Working as both a brilliant pop banger and a statement on the modern condition, it’s the calling card for Paramore’s ascension to the very top.
MORE THAN EVER BEFORE, WE ARE PARAMORE.
While on first listen lead single ‘Hard Times’ sounds like a tropical, Talking Heads informed bop, under the surface it’s a muddle of darkness, all awkward feelings of revenge and defiance built on selfdoubt. While their peers sing about platitudes and cliché, Paramore are different. We know what they’ve been through. We know that this is painfully real. Much of the album carries a similar theme. “For all I know the best is over and the worst is yet to come,” Hayley Williams ponders on ‘Told You So’. Her doubts about reforming the band for another record are well documented, but committed to record that juxtaposition stops being a downer. Instead, when coupled with guitarist Taylor York’s sparky invention, it turns into a strange form of defiance. With a determination to force that smile and drag themselves back up, the new Paramore don’t really know their own strength. They don’t just find their feet, they break the stratosphere. The album’s most immediate moment is a different beast entirely – but if it’s a sign of where Paramore go next, it’s impossibly exciting. ‘Rose-Colored Boy’ is a salted caramel – a place where the twin peaks of ‘After Laughter’ crash against each other. Carefree on the surface, underneath its
That suggestion that Paramore might now be the most important band from their scene possibly doesn’t go far enough. It’s also one they’re actively rejecting. ‘Idle Worship’ spells it out in forthright terms. “Be sure to put your faith in something more,” Hayley pleads, but in claiming not to be superhuman what she highlights is exactly why she has been placed on the pedestal in the first place. This isn’t simply about Paramore producing what feels like the best pop album of the year. Sharing everything, it’s hard to think of another band on this scale who offer such honesty on such a grand scale. Those thoughts within, they’re not alien to the rest of us. They’re not worries about shifting units or hard life on the road. They’re the same struggles we feel just with the plot lines on a more public stage. Imposter syndrome, relationships, the constant internal warfare of a self-doubting mind – they’ve all been lived through too, not written to create an impression of something else. That’s why Paramore matter. They’re not up there because we expect them to be perfect. They’re there because they’re most definitely not, and yet still, with everything seemingly out to get them, they’re trying to do the right thing. If we get the heroes we deserve, it’s a reluctant crown Paramore will have to get used to, safe in the knowledge that pillar isn’t made of stone but rather the well placed faith of a whole legion of fans who feel a part of something bigger. If they happen to fall on occasion, we’ll catch them, because we understand. With Paramore, we can identify. We’re the same. In their own words, Paramore is at least Hayley, Taylor and Zac, but in the same breath, it’s not just three people. It’s all of us. More than ever before, we are Paramore. Stephen Ackroyd
COLOR FILM
LIVING ARRANGEMENTS
Epitaph
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An absolutely epic ride through what could only be described as the mind of an 80’s fanatic, Color Film’s ‘Living Arrangements’ is more than a bit manic and more than a bit brilliant. Not quite the output you’d expect from one-half of Glassjaw, but the realised ideas that have been sat around for a while are unleashed in a way that’s filled with fun and sincerity. There are moments that feel like they impede proceedings slightly (‘Ambush Bug’ doesn’t appear to serve any real purpose), but if you’ve heard and loved the two early singles, ’52 Minds’ and ‘Bad Saint’, then you’ll have no problem getting lost in this beautiful chaos. Steven Loftin
KAMIKAZE GIRLS
SEAFOAM
Big Scary Monsters
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Kamikaze Girls are finally here with their debut and they’re taking less shit than ever. The raw edge of duo Lucinda Livingstone and Conor Dawson has found itself in a more developed, strengthened sound that proves they’re far from done with the world. Opener ‘One Young Man’ gives you a glimpse of the power to come, while reverbsoaked, aggressive guitars and lines such as “Touch my hand again, I’ll knock your fucking lights out!” really hone their point. ‘Seafoam’ is an onslaught you’re happy to be a part of. Steven Loftin
BLEACHERS
GONE NOW
Columbia Records
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At this stage in his career, chances are you know a lot more about Jack Antonoff than you think you do. With former band fun., and a roster of songwriting credits for the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift, he has become something of a purveyor of pop royalty, a feat that delightfully bleeds into his latest work as Bleachers. His second solo record following 2014’s ‘Strange Desire’, ‘Gone Now’ displays the same Midas touch making that made the likes of Swift’s ‘1989’ such a pop delight. 80s inflexions are in abundance - even the weaker songs hold a certain charm thanks to Antonoff’s knack for a big fist-pumping climax. ‘Don’t Take The Money’ could soundtrack any coming of age movie conclusion with its Cadillac chorus, while ‘Hate That You Know Me’ is the epitome of a millennial love