THE LOUNGE SOCIETY
New post-punk teenagers and latest Speedy Wunderground singings The Lounge Society hail from the Pennine towns of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. There the rain falls two hundred days a year upon the moss-draped, post-industrial ruins, the clouds scud overhead at speed and up on the heathered moor-tops carrion crows hungrily peck at the skulls of dead sheep.
More recently the valley has enjoyed a musical renaissance centred around the venues of The Trades Club and The Golden Lion, a movement that some have glibly dubbed “the Calderfornia sound”. “Growing up 5 minutes down the road from both venues has been hugely influential for us,” say the band. “Sneaking in the back door when we were 14 years old and having to keep our heads down in order to watch The House Of Love or Peter Hook was the making of us.”
Like any musical movement worth its salt, it’s not one that the bands themselves might willingly admit to being a part of, yet there must be something in the water. For while their contemporaries deal in jangle pop and contemporary rave, The Lounge Society – who met at their local high school in nearby Mytholmroyd (otherwise famous as the birth-place of poet Ted Hughes) - explore something more raucous. It’s a sound shot through with the adrenalized and undeniable youthful surges that informed both proto- and post-punk, with The Velvet Underground, Talking Heads and Fat White Family cited as shared influences. On their debut EP Silk For The Starving there’s a rawness which belies a self-assured songwriting slickness that is almost alarming for four teenagers.
Make no mistake, this is the sound of young England: articulate, enraged and energised. And – perhaps crucially - highly danceable too. It should give hope to anyone who has lost faith in the future, because here the future is in safe hands.
Today the band have announced their new single and video ‘Blood Money’, a direct comment on the corruptive force of power. “’Blood Money’ is a reaction to the culture of greed that’s seeping into the corridors of power across the world,” say the post-punk teens. “It’s a reminder that ultimately, we all suffer at the hands of self-serving elites, and it’s our personal perspective on the effects of dirty politics on the everyday lives of ourselves and people we know.”
Recorded over two weeks in November 2021 at the studio of Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Kae Tempest, Wet Leg), Tired of Liberty is a stunningly ubiquitous snapshot of instrumental meltdown, and timeless adolescence.
