Post-punk Glaswegians Humour are back with a helter-skelter of a single: ‘Wrangel’.
Inspired by the environment and pastime stories, the track is like a documentary-fuelled dream, paired with needling guitars and thrashing drums from Ruairidh Smith. The band is one to watch, having bagged touring gigs with Do Nothing across the UK and Europe. The five-piece are destined to go above and beyond.
The release of ‘Wrangel’ follows the band’s debut EP ‘Pure Misery’, a six-track wonder that pushed the band into the blinding starlight of the Art Rock scene. Following packed shows at The Great Escape, the band catalysed a chain reaction of international press coverage.
The five-piece are true Rembrandts, mastering the arts in more ways than one, with frontman Andreas Christodoulidis producing sketches to accompany each single as well as the 2022 EP. Each track is like an etched story in charcoal, imprinting a vivid pattern of images upon the listener’s mind, each lyric as descriptive as an ekphrastic poem.
When asked about the new release, frontman Andreas Christodoulidis said:
“‘Wrangel’ is inspired by different stories of polar exploration. I was reading the biography of Captain Robert Scott who led an expedition of five men to be the first to reach the South Pole, all of whom died on the return journey in an unrelenting blizzard. The music had come together already, and the plodding, steady rhythm of the verses made me think of trudging through snow. I had recently watched an episode of Our Planet which showed footage of Wrangel Island in the arctic circle, an uninhabited place where polar bears are now arriving in their thousands to hunt because of the lack of sea ice. I thought that there could be something peaceful about being in a place like that, and wanted the character in the song to be imagining living his life out on Wrangel as he makes his way across the ice without much hope of survival. An Indigenous Alaskan woman called Ada Blackjack actually did this after being sent to Wrangel as part of a doomed expedition of which she was the sole survivor, living alone on the island for nearly two years while teaching herself to hunt and to fend off the polar bears which she had a mortal fear of. A really incredible person. These stories of both survival and accepting fate at the end of the world were the inspiration for the song.”
Photo by Craig R Mcintosh
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