About this Event

Yuck

plus Soda Fabric // Middle Distance



Tickets: http://tinyurl.com/BRyuck



Though Yuck has been a band for less than a decade, the London-based garage-pop outfit has already managed to cram what feels like a lifetime of Behind The Music-worthy experiences into their backstory. Formed in 2009, when most of the band members were still in high school, the group quickly garnered attention for their early singles (2010’s “Georgia” being a standout) and in 2011—after having already toured with the likes of Tame Impala—they released a self-titled debut album (the gloriously fuzzed-out Yuck) to critical and commercial acclaim. This early success was followed by the departure of founding member Daniel Blumberg in 2013 and the induction of new guitarist Edward Hayes. The band promptly got to work on a sophomore album (2013’s Glow & Behold) in upstate NYC whilst overcoming the anxiety of a lineup change and the realities of a bug-infested recording studio. As rock and roll stories go, theirs is not an uncommon one—or even an outrageously dramatic one—but for frontman Max Bloom, the path has felt almost comically arduous. “It’s so cheesy, the whole thing,” he says. “Being in a band really is like Spinal Tap. There’s so many situations in music rockumentaries that actually echo my life, it really is a giant cliché.”



Cliché or not, the path that Yuck has taken has seemingly all been leading up to the band’s excellent third album, Stranger Things, a record brimming with manic energy and pop hooks for days. Released online last summer, the record’s first song “Hold me Closer” is a visceral primer for what the rest of the record has in store. “I remember the first couple of songs that started the record off, I basically wrote one morning when I was very high on coffee,” says Bloom. “I guess it set the tone for everything that came after that.” To that end, tracks like “Cannonball” come ripping out of the gate with the appropriately buzzed-out guitar sound that made previous Yuck tracks like “The Wall” such epic jams, while “Yr Face” could be a long-lost lover to an old Dinosaur Jr or Built to Spill record. Stranger Things is a remarkably gentle record as well, with tunes like “Swirling”, “Like a Moth”, and “I’m OK” addressing the fears and uncertainties that followed the band for the last few tumultuous years. “‘I’m Ok’ is a very personal song because it’s just about the anxiety I’ve been feeling over the last couple of years. It’s very cathartic to write about in a song, but definitely not easy to speak about,” says Bloom. “It felt important with this record to deal with a bunch of that stuff, clear out the past, and make a fresh go of things.”



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