Here you can find all of our music!
Our most recent album release
South of The River is the synthesis of all of the material the band has been dabbling with in the last year or so. Taking advantage of the group’s live chemistry, the songs were all tracked live in the studio with everyone playing together in the same room. All the base tracks were recorded in just three studio half days, most of the songs are either the 2nd or 3rd takes of the material, capturing the sound and orchestration the band has when playing live.
The album itself and the songs therein are a dedication to the south London experiences songwriter Martino Gasparrini has had since living there. Songs like ‘New Cross Gate’ and ‘Hold Me Up’ recount the all too familiar situations of taking the tube, travelling on a bus or meeting someone at the local pud. The lyrics shine a spotlight and give attention to the mundane of the everyday, like bikes being stored in a front room, searching for a table at a pub or waiting in the cold for a night bus. The songs detail the imminency and the present day of people living in the here and now. With ‘Light’ exploring the political and economic hardships immigrants face in the everyday situations that the city creates or ‘Into The Dark’ detailing the unpleasantness of commuting to a job you hate. Even the album cover exemplifies the idea of the everyday being a picture Martino took in Southwark Park on his way to work.
As with any large city, London is a unique melting pot that effortlessly creates unique experiences and chance happenings. This is something that the group intentionally wanted to recreate by recording the songs quickly and all together in a single moment in time. The album and the band as a whole is a product that only a city can create, with different people from different places coming together to make the music. Both sides of the album are bookend by a solo acoustic number, one detailing the experience of listening to estate agents trying to aggrandise horrible room-shares and the last song on the album recounting the inevitable partings and many goodbyes a large city always creates through many people’s comings and goings.
The album is the band’s best effort to date and a sign of the future direction the group is taking. Instead of focusing on meticulous click-track recordings and computer tinkering that we have in the past, the band is taking a more live-in-the-studio approach to album making by concentrating on song-craft and in the honest performance of those songs. The recordings naturally shine through by embracing the tiny imperfections and nuances of having people playing music together and not fixing anything after the fact. In 2024 the band is excited and looking forward to sharing these songs and experiences both live and through people listening to the album itself.
A project like this wouldn't be possible without the people involved with it so I would like to thank George, Lea, Ralph and Rosa for playing on these songs with me and coming to practice them week after week at our rehearsals. Also I would like to thank the engineers Matt Green and Paolo Ruiu who managed to capture and record the band in the short amount of time we had. Alex Edge helps us record some amps for a couple of songs which proved to be vital and also on Night Bus we had two other great musicians come in and help us make this long song a reality so thank you Zach and Hannah. Finally I would also like to thank Max for his patience and his great mixing and mastering skills which has allowed the entire album to shine.
released February 16, 2024
Albums
Too many albums? Probably, if you are wondering where to start I would suggest the band’s most recent endeavour. Everything here is listed in chronological order.
The first album every released was The Three of Us which came out in 2016. This like all the albums up until One More Time With Feeling was a mostly solo endeavour. I would spend days in my bedroom on my computer writing and recording everything onto logic. It was a massive learning curve and I learnt so much from it. At the time though we would still play live as a band around London with Ollie Cox on bass, Tony Lea on guitar and George Barker on drums up until 2020. These first albums I find I was still trying to find my voice as a songwriter and bandleader. While I look fondly back at these albums I do think the band has made giant strides since then.
One More Time With Feeling was the first time I recorded in the studio. For this one I recorded all the demo tracks at home and then went in the studio for a day and re-recorded all the guitar parts. Thanks to Jonny Coddington I managed to get a much better sounding record than ever before.
Then the pandemic hit and everything had to change. During that time I ended up recording at home three separate albums. At Our Best is probably my favourite homespun record to date. I recorded everything while trapped in my bedroom with Rosa (who plays violin on the record) who at the time was suffering from long covid. Then I sent all the music over to Ollie where he was able to record and come up with amazing basslines for the entire record. It was an album about youth and running away to a different time and place.
Shortly after I ended up being very isolated living with my parents for numerous months, there I wrote and recorded probably the most somber album to date, Songs From the Brink which is a fully solo voice and piano album.
Finally at the end of the pandemic we released Single Series which is a collection of many songs we have released since 2019. This album has our most successful song to date “It’s Quiet’ which has had the luck of being featured on a small Spotify playlist.
Tinder Date was a concept album that I had the idea for for quite some time. In many ways it was exactly what all my bedroom albums wanted to be and I find that on that album I perfected that sound and finally was able to move on.
Live Session
This is a live session we did a while back playing some of our (now) older songs, It’s Quiet, Shhh and Feel Bad For Me.
Here you can also watch our most recent music video
Eps and Demos
This is my work in progress stuff. Usually I work on a load of songs before putting them on an album or try them out with the whole band. Our second bandcamp page (affectionately called Parachute Turds) is where you can hear all the work in progress stuff and where you can hear unreleased songs.
You can find the music also on all streaming services