SOUND SCOUT
Rob Hakimian, music columnist for ‘cene, Quietus, Dazed and DIY, casts his eye over the ones to watch
pink suits
pink suits is a bombastic, political duo born on a Megabus in the wake of the referendum vote and the US presidential election of 2016. Converting the despair into fury, guitarist Lennie wrote on the back of the ticket: “one step forward decades back, regression is this year’s political black. Fear fuels cruel in this climate of lies, hatred trumps and humanity dies. The old white right puts up the fight, post truth fuck proof and talking shite. They stoke the fire we feel the burn, will we ever learn?”
In 2016 Ray Prendergast from Colorado and Lennie from Manchester were artists trained in ballet and contemporary dance, with only a vague notion of how to play music – but something about its immediacy spoke to their need to express their rage. They promptly moved out of the prohibitively expensive capital and to the seaside haven of Margate, and pink suits was born.
A self-described “Queer Feminist Punk Rock and Rage” band, pink suits released the three-track statement of intent pink suits everyone in 2019, but they’re on the build up to their debut full-length this year. Entitled The Political Child, the duo is teasing their record by describing it as “An Anti Capitalist protest. A Feminist rebellion; a Queer resistance of gender binaries; a late onset teen angst scream of rage against the current political system,” and that “it aims to fight back against intolerance and the global rise of right wing politics by using aggressive political rock to bring people together in rage and frustration.”
You have been warned.
Insta:@Pinksuitsband
Roma Orme
Having named her debut album The Poster Girl of Impossibility, Roma Orme is letting us know that she’s got a dramatic and cinematic mind – and that translates into her music. Sitting somewhere in the uncharted waters between trip-hop, jazz and sultry blues rock, her unique sound is beguiling to say the least.
After experiencing a traumatic rescue from a boat during a storm, Orme started cathartically started scribbling down words, processing the event and the emotional aftermath. Her feelings poured out into written verses, and soon she found herself singing these poems acapella – seemingly, they wanted a life beyond the page. There’s a nice circular narrative to the fact that Orme ended up recording the album in a floating studio on a barge in Sandwich, although that’s hard to believe when listening, as it sounds as though it’s fluttered down from somewhere more glamorous – or another planet. The poetic origins of her words, combined with her dextrous and silken vocal abilities, allow her music to skirt around genre-pigeonholing. Instead she sings atop jazz drums, echoing pianos, plains of hovering synthesizers, scrappy guitars and many other amorphous sounds that create an undeniably alluring whole. Orme’s voice floats across this whispering instrumentation like smoke unfurling from someone’s mouth in a darkly lit bar, with a fragrance and mystical shimmer that lures you in closer – but could easily claw at your face.
Insta: @Romaormemusic
Hands Up
For those with only a surface-level knowledge, punk wouldn’t seem like a children’s medium, but a little look at the history of the genre would beg to disagree: it was punk legends like Fugazi that blazed the trail for all-ages shows held in school gyms, wanting to inculcate young people to the world of expression outside the mainstream.
Fast forward to the modern day, and East Kent act Hands Up are still testing the effects of mixing innocent world views with righteous rock, and getting explosive results. Three of the band’s four members are school teachers, and lead singer Ben WQ takes his lyrical prompts from his primary school-aged children Mabel and Osker. This means that their songs end up being about things like playing kickball rounders, getting pick n mix at the cinema, seeing a spider round your friend’s house and a miscellany of other things you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about since you grew into a jaded adult. The words are just a part of the magic though, with Hands Up’s effervescent pop punk also containing the type of boundless energy that children seem to have, ensuring that each of their songs is a capsule waiting to take you back to your school days.
Beyond just playing as Hands Up, the collective also works as No Name Promotions, putting on gigs in Kent to raise money and awareness for charities like Oasis Domestic Abuse Service, Solidarity Not Silence and Rising Sun Domestic Violence and Abuse Service.
Overall, you’d have to say this might be the most wholesome bunch of punks around.