New post-punk teenagers and latest Speedy Wunderground singings The Lounge Society hail from in and around the Pennine towns of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. 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”, and which has recently spawned Working Men’s Club and The Orielles….and now The Lounge Society.
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.
In tracks such as ‘Cain’s Heresy’ and their pulsing, paranoid reverb-laden debut single ‘Generation Game’ (released as a limited edition seven-inch on Speedy Wunderground in March 2020) there’s a sense of the anthemic too. The latter track, with its “What will the US do?” tag-line was bursting with so many ideas it was split over two sides of the same piece of vinyl. One reviewer remarked on it being a collision of Beta Band ambition, Fat Whites rabble-rousing and early Roxy Music sheen.
Little wonder they were spotted and swiftly signed to the UK’s coolest and best small indie label (an accolade Speedy Wunderground officially won at the AIM Awards) in late summer 2020. Speedy, less we forget, have already gifted the world with some of the best new bands of their generation: Black Midi, Squid, Warmduscher, Black Country, New Road and others.
Recorded with producer Dan Carey (Kae Tempest, Bat For Lashes, Fontaines D.C.) as soon as Covid-10 lockdown restrictions were lifted, Silk For The Starving crackles with the type of listless, nervous energy that comes when you’re teenager who has been denied all the simple pleasures in life, and you’ve been robbed of a precious summer that you’ll never get back. The Lounge Society sing about what they know, then. 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.
