There’s been such a lack of innovation in guitar music recently that the chances of anything really making you sit up and take notice get increasingly rarer. This debut song from The Breaks does have echoes of several influences but they are all combined to create something that is refreshingly instant, vital and memorable.
“Honey” is a fuzzy-sweet anthemic blast of indie noise awash with wall-of-sound guitars and hooks-a-plenty. In shoegaze fashion the lyrics are not always audible but there’s an air of romanticism through being comfortable with an obsessive or occasionally painful relationship. The song is as good an introduction to a band as any we’ve had this century. It has the commercial element of a band like The Vaccines but with more of an edge in the vein of Yuck. There are also Grizzly Bear style ‘oh-oh’ harmonies blending in with the distorted lead so there’s something for everyone.
There’s a deliberate lack of information about the identity of the band members, and please feel free to speculate over the reasons for this, but the video shows them (or maybe it isn’t them?) on a sojourn through urban north-western streets. Nights out in their hometown Burnley are interspersed with flickers of graffiti or occasional gallivanting around the Northern Quarter area of Manchester. In a self-obsessed age where the phone camera captures everything and everyone thinks they live in their own reality TV show, there’s a welcome authenticity to the images. No pretensions, just real life. They’re having a good time being young with none of the affected laddishness that sometimes infiltrates the scene.
Their EP Misery is available on Bandcamp and this song, labelled as their ‘most accessible’ by the band, kicks it off. There are three other songs: “I need” is another fuzzy blast, like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin meets Arctic Monkeys; “Biscuit Factory” sounds like a lighters in the air moment, a slower song reminiscing about self discovery in the strangest of places and the frustration of hindsight, ‘you should have told me that I was happy at the time’ despite the routines; and to round things off, “Misery” is an epic builder and seems to be bigger than its short track length would suggest.
You can currently get the EP at places like Spotify but you can also get it as a ‘pay what you like’ deal on Bandcamp which is recommended.
