When in London, you’re never more than two meters from a post-punk band these days, but few of them are anywhere near as brilliant as deep tan. Following up on last year’s ‘creeping speedwells’, they’ve just dropped a brand new EP, ‘diamond horsetail’, and it’s wild. From women’s self-defence class to dissing Trump’s lawyer, there’s loads to dive into. We asked them to run us through it for our latest Artist’s Guide.
beginners’ krav maga
Krav Maga is a style of hand-to-hand combat that has a reputation for being the most vicious type of martial art in existence. It’s taught worldwide as a method of civilian self-defence, and the point we’re making with the track is that even if we were actively learning the most vicious type of martial art around, as women, we still wouldn’t feel safe walking alone on the street tonight (and that needs to change).
device devotion
If you’ve ever caught yourself half an hour down an internet wormhole reading about, say, lobster erotica, this one’s for you. Device devotion is both a chaotic browser history speed-read in cut-up technique and also a commentary on smartphone addiction. The instrumentation is some of our most off-the-wall to date, and this mood inspired the subject matter. Notable shoutouts include vore-porn subreddit scrolls, naked lunch PDFs and free online tests.
gender expansion pack
‘gender expansion pack’ is mostly an instrumental but features something new we haven’t experimented with before: subliminal messaging. While recording the track, the hypnotic and darkly dangerous mood of the song became increasingly clear and, with this in mind, research was undertaken via WikiHow on how to create homemade hypnosis tapes. When thinking about what exactly we’d like to subliminally plant on people’s minds, Celeste had the idea to have text read – and pitched down to a subliminal frequency – that pushes the listener to question their gender and consider a more expansive view of it. Quite a bit of our audience are older cishet men who’ve possibly never considered questioning this aspect of themselves, and to do so might make some of them uncomfortable – which is why we chose to do it. Trolling the demographic that buys most of our vinyl? Why not. We also see it as a way of weeding out any toxic masculine presence that might be amongst our audience because if an older cishet man wants to keep listening to us after this, they’re very much welcome to the party.
rudy ya ya ya
The Rudy Giuliani diss track you never asked for.
diamond horsetail
Three minutes of menace, five litres of revenge: the title-track of our new EP ‘diamond horsetail’ is one we’re particularly excited to start playing live. Also, KLF stans: there’s something for you in the outro.
