Humour Share Video For Pure Misery

Photo by Craig R. McIntosh

At the start of the summer So Young Records – whose recent releases have included Vlure, Been Stellar and Lime Garden among others – announced the signing of Humour, a Glaswegian group still in their relative infancy, but one who arrived musically fully-formed, pairing together fragments of off-kilter post-punk, erratic indie-pop and discordant post-hardcore, delivering a sound that is at once disorientating and immediate. Early shows in support of Do Nothing and Folly Group have already marked them out as a must see live band, propelled by the unhinged lyrical energy of front man Andreas Christodoulidis.

The band’s debut single “yeah, mud!” paired off-kilter, emotive verses in seachange to an immediate, melodic chorus, while its follow-up “alive & well” was propelled by gang vocals that predict a firm future of firing up their audience – these thrilling introductions seeing the band immediately championed by the likes of Radio 1, 6 Music, DIY, Dork, CLASH, Brooklyn Vegan and more. 

With their six-track debut EP, “Pure Misery”, set for release on November 25th. (pre-order the record direct from So Young here), the band today share the thrilling title track, a choppy, unhinged paean to the often uncertain process of fronting a band.

The band’s frontman Andreas had the following to say about how the song came together: “Pure Misery is about finding or putting yourself in a position where you are expected to have something important to say, and realising that you don’t really. I wrote the song about being a singer in a band, and standing up to address lots of people in a very serious way as though I must have something meaningful to relate; something the audience needs to hear. It feels a little ridiculous doing that sometimes, especially when the songs are most often just about stories or feelings. So the narrator of the song is supposed to be trying to convince the audience that he has something very profound to tell them, and he’s kind of stalling until he can come up with something.”

Paired to a video that sees Andreas singing from a water tank, the sunroof of a mobile home, a paddling pool and most consistently a hole in the ground, the visuals match the absurdity of the vocal delivery and the idea of a singer as a spokesman for a generation. Sometimes, they’re just words.

Humour live together in Glasgow and formed across the 2021 lockdowns, writing and recording their material at home, with the music intended as a backdrop to Andreas’ lyrics. Sometimes they’re about letting people down, sometimes they’re about pets dying, sometimes they’re about trying to say something when you don’t have anything worth saying. They’re usually just trying to paint a picture, with Andreas drawing sketches to go along with each of their songs, including the EP cover, and the artwork and visuals behind the lyric videos for both “yeah, mud!” and “alive and well”.

They hope that each song looks the way that it sounds.

Source: thoughtswordsaction.com