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| Outfit |
After their third gig at the Liverpool Sound City in 2011, where they had the UK's music press in attendance, NME declared them No.6 in the top 25 new bands in the world to watch and the National press followed. Gig four followed at St George's Hall where they supported Liverpool alt-pop favourites, 'Ladytron', before signing with former Liverpool University student Hari Ashurst's ultra-hip indie label Double Denim. From their early offerings, 'Every Night I Dress Up As You' and 'Firemen Don't Fly', a catalogue of stunning singles followed led by the release of their first official single, 'Two Islands', a near-perfect encapsulation of the band. Defined by its internal contradictions: at once ambiguous and immediate, pensive and hopeful, danceable and full of melancholy, it is indicative of a band intensely comfortable with conflict. They moved to London in 2012, leaving behind a small but enthusiastic scene, where they crafted their debut EP, arguably one of the most exciting EP's of the year so far, 'Another Night's Dreams Reach Earth Again', which was very much a record of its time.
Having started writing the tracks, they headed back to Liverpool to self-produce their debut album, 'Performance' in 2013, which some described as probably the best debut from a British band that year. A lot of its success was down to its concision – clocking in at 40 minutes, 'Performance' was streamlined down to a mere 10 songs, so refreshingly free of filler. More than that, the album worked so well because the songs were really, really good. Andrew Hunt said, "We want to take the listener somewhere else and make music that's evocative and not down to earth musically."
They were then lucky enough to have their own dedicated studio space having moved to a pretty dilapidated old warehouse in the Liverpool docks area. Having reinvested most of the money from their first album into developing a studio enabling them to have access to a good quality recording environment, it made the band sustainable and also allowed them to do other things too.
At the beginning of 2014, they found themselves scattered across two countries and three cities, separated by life and love from each other and from those closest to them, with Andrew Hunt in Brooklyn, New York, Thomas Gorton in London, Dave Berger in Switzerland and Nick Hunt and Chris Hutchinson in Liverpool.
'Slowness', the band's second full length LP, finally released on the new independant record label Memphis Industries in 2015, is the sound of its five members snatching intensive weeks to plant themselves in one place, with the tensions of touring, moving and transatlantic relationships still weighing heavy in mind, to create an album with bold presence. Though writing for the album began almost immediately after touring, their debut LP 'Performance' wasn’t really fleshed out until one solid session across three months, with all the band together in Liverpool. Andrew said, "We really thought we'd finished it after that process,but coming back to it after a few months we realised that we hadn’t really finished at all." Periods apart from the each other, from friends and from loved ones, all feed into an album that deals in much more personal material than their previous releases, and the result was certainly their most coherent and intimate work to date. 'Slowness' paints a portrait of distance using haunting piano, piercing synthesizers and guitars, all underpinned by their trademark rhythm section. The more you listen to it, the more compelling it becomes. It is an album borne of late-night Skype calls, long-distance relationships and perpetual struggles with online identities.
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