Welcome to the family: Arkless

Arkless


Remember when emo wasn’t a dirty word? When it was the kind of term you’d associate with bands like Rites of Spring and Hoover, rather than terrible bros with tight t-shirts, straightened fringes and lip piercings, or more recently rubbish twiddly nonsense* and boring grunge ripoffs?

Bubbling under the surface of all the hype around the various ‘emo revivals’ that have waxed and waned in recent years, a growing community of bands have been quietly pushing the genre in new and interesting directions. I say ‘quietly’, there’s nothing quiet about the likes of Carson Wells or Plaids, but you get what I mean It’s a community of bands that have never chased nor bought into the hype, who’ve managed to draw tastefully on influences from different aspects of the emo/post-hardcore canon without ever falling into the tropes of the genre.

Hopefully you’re already acquainted with both the aforementioned bands, alongside the likes of Human Hands, The Blue Period, Kin Shot (to name just a few of the good ‘uns), and now we’d like to introduce you to one of the latest bands to emerge from the fruitful scene – Arkless.

A few things you should know about Arkless:
  • They’re four excellent humans that all have a long history of playing in great OG emo bands from the UK, including Bird Calls, What Price Wonderland and Losing Sleep to name a few.
  • They’re named after an excellent track by Wilderness (who Arkless’ bassist Andy actually introduced me to recently – turns out they're incredible, where have they been all my life?)
  • They basically sound like a UK version of the Van Pelt mixed with other 90s emo goodness, and they’re really fucking great.
We’re dead excited that they’ve asked us to be involved in releasing their debut EP, which will be out next May on 12” vinyl and digital download (the packaging for the vinyl is going to be bonkers, watch this space). They’ve got some tour dates in the works too, which we’ll have more news on in the future.

In the meantime, they’ve got a few live demos up online from their set as Fire As A Metaphor festival in Nottingham, which you can listen to here.

*Disclaimer: some twiddle-mo is actually totally ok, but equally there's a lot of rubbish out there, and there was a particular deluge of crap in 2013/14, which luckily seems to be a phase that has passed now.