Bubbling away across the various grassroots hotspots of London across the past 12 months or so – culminating in a sold-out headline at Hackney’s Paper Dress Vintage earlier this summer – Drum Tower’s brand of experimental-rock doesn’t have much truck with staying very still for very long.
Resembling the skeletal post-punk of Crack Cloud offshoots NOV3L, and the jerked-up rhythm-maxing of leftfield doyens YHWH Nailgun, this quintet are never far from speeding things up, slowing things down, switching up the vocalist or blasting 5 seconds of a different genre before cracking back on with whatever it is they were doing.
With oblique lyrical imagery and fragmented structures jolting from moment to moment like thumb-slides from one instagram reel to the next, ‘Junkyard’ is a punch-packed wellspring of undeniable intrigue. Much like the associations of its title, the band are compiling here a rusted, elegant exquisite corpse of a machine that feels hammered together from various hunks, bolts and modules collected from the overflow of alternative music abundance.
It’s restless music for sure, but at its honest heart is the deep-rooted understanding that nice melodies are nice, and that writing something that’s catchy is just as important as nerding out over whatever time signature this song is in. And I’m pretty certain Drum Tower believe in both things equally.
Photo by Louie Levison
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