Peer Pleasure invite us back into their bleak underworld with the release of ‘Shed Residents’, a new single from their upcoming debut album ‘Unvetted Males’.
With this single, Peer Pleasure are really beginning to carve out a distinguishable sound: sudden outcries of strained screams rupture morbid spoken word passages, colliding with sporadic instrumental thrashing. ‘Shed Residents’ shifts between unrest and quietude, mirroring lyrics that oscillate just as wildly: “My thoughts are dark, very dark.” Followed moments later by, “I’m doing well now much better now it’s different this time.” Just like most moments of tranquillity offer only brief relief, the track’s quieter moments feel less like resolution than sedation, quickly overturned by renewed thrashing commotion and a return to psychological pandemonium.
Written in 2023, ‘Shed Residents’ reflects on the band’s living conditions and daily routines during the covid 19 pandemic. For Peer Pleasure, this period was one of confinement and disinhibition, where the space they shared became their total space. With no external structure, everything inside their flat become louder: impulses, moods, habits and creativity all feeding off one another. On this time, the band says, “during the covid pandemic all my friends either lived in the one place or were there all the time even if they didn’t, we created our own bubble and intense world full of humour, joy, desperation and different flavours of mental illness and full blown psychosis.”
Sociologist Erving Goffman described similar environments where social life folds inwards and behaviour becomes exaggerated through constant proximity. Though he was referring to “total institutions” such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals or care homes, many lockdown living arrangements began to mimic aspects of these closed systems. ‘Inmates’ of these environments develop what, Goffman calls, an underlife of rituals, humour or coping behaviours to make bearable such confinement.
In prolonged enclosure, mundanity often curdles into absurdity. When the mind is sealed within a small space for too long, creativity can emerge in distorted or destabilising forms. ‘Shed Residents’ sounds like the product of a world that became too compressed for clarity. The track feels not just like a reflection on lockdown living but a document of what happens when there’s nowhere left to step outside yourself.
Photo by Anna Moody
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