Nape Neck / Pink Pound / Game_Program

NAPE NECK (Leeds)

Your favourite Leeds post-punk outfit. Here’s what Erika Elizabeth said about their latest EP…

The UK’s leading jabbers and scrabblers NAPE NECK return with the follow-up to their absolutely bruising self-titled 2020 cassette debut, and somehow they’ve managed to squeeze the vice even tighter on Look Alive. Vocals from all three band members push and pull against one another, fighting for space in a claustrophobic crush of caustic sheet metal six-string scrape and a frenetic, lockstep rhythmic rumble, like the DOG FACED HERMANS or the EX if they had come up through artist lofts rather than anarcho squats. The exquisitely ERASE ERRATA-esque “Aim Slow” scratches and slides through a cycle of needling guitar and staccato bass grind before breaking down into abstracted-from-language shouts punctuating the title imperative; blink-and-you-missed-it chorus clangs of cowbell provide some limber post-punk-funk release in the otherwise hermetically pressurized “Kiss Me Boy, I’m Dying;” “Warm Air” spirals around a Möbius strip bass line, bisected by an anxious and agitated/coolly collected call-and-response vocal tradeoff—but anxious almost always wins out with NAPE NECK. No wave for the now!

PINK POUND (Glasgow)

Andrew Milk (Shopping / Current Affairs) is known for playing in post-punk bands as well as performing in drag at queer clubs and festivals across the UK. Milk has long worked as a sound, performance and visual artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. The bedroom electronic pop album “Cottage Industry” is his first full length release as a solo artist. Milk creates a kaleidoscopic landscape of fist pumping Hi-NRG gay disco and introspective bedroom pop that explores identity, power dynamics and joyful connection found within queer spaces both physical and intangible. The music was best described by one fan recently as “The Yassification of New Order”.

GAME_PROGRAM (Leeds)

Cowtown guitarist/Holodrum drummer messing with about with boxes, panning for blessed tones.

£7 advance. Nobody turned away for lack of funds.