It’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’m a huge fan of Plaids - I pretty much talk about how much I love them, both as musicians and as people, to anyone that’ll listen on a daily basis. I’ll spare you another long, cloying rant on the subject, but suffice to say after seeing them live a good 40 times last year alone, putting them on in both London and Cardiff and spending a whole lot of time with them on numerous tours it’s a bit of an honour to say that they’ll be joining the Barely Regal family, and we’ll be helping to release their debut LP. That’ll be out this September on 12” vinyl/download, and you can stream a track from the record on Brooklyn Vegan, or conveniently right here:
As the kind of person that actively ENJOYS going home from working 8 hours at my dayjob and then cracking on with label work after, I’m naturally drawn to bands that work really f*cking hard, and you’ll struggle to find a band that works as hard as Plaids. Alongside running their own DIY space, the (in)famous JT Soar, they’ve committed themselves to a fairly relentless schedule of recording, releasing and touring new material over the course of their few years as a band, with two albums-worth of material spread across various splits, EPs and singles already under their collective belts before they’d even approached writing album #1. It’s been really exciting seeing them develop as a band over the course of their releases to date, and as Collective Zine succinctly put it:
“Whilst their sound is rooted in a bygone DC and Dischord-era as well as 90s emo, Plaids are developing their sound so much so now that they're sounding unmistakably Plaids”.
And the development of that sound certainly hasn’t stopped with the LP. The band have used to extra space that an album affords to really push the boundaries of what you could call the “Plaids” sound, bringing in a much wider sphere of influences and slowing the pace in places to give tracks more room to breathe, without ever losing the explosive energy that made their songs so exciting in the first place. It’s a proper album, rather than just a collection of songs written at the same time, and you can tell that a lot of thought has gone into everything from the order of the tracks right down to the artwork, which is not only beautiful but also helps tie the whole thing together.
We’ll be putting the whole record up to stream in the near future, and ahead of that I’d advise clearing a safe space with no fragile objects in sight to give it a first listen, because you’ll be flipping everything in sight before you even reach the moodier second half of the record.
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