Over the years we have championed and tipped a host of bands who have emerged through the club and festival scene… Florence and the Machine, Seasick Steve, Foals, and more recently Nova Twins all spring to mind.
As of May 2023 as we are looking at the current pool of emerging UK musical talent and deciding where to put our money…and if ever there was a year of joint favourites this feels like it.
SNAYX – HotWax – VLURE
Interestingly though, none of these three bands we have our eye on quite fit into the ‘genre with no name’ that seems to have been enveloping the 6Music airwaves for the last couple of years.
From Bodega and Squid, to Yard Act and Personal Trainer, there are literally dozens of great acts on the circuit now who feel like podcasts set to music and who are churning out great original lyrical content and delighting a growing groundswell of fans.
But on the edges of this movement are a growing number of young bands who are ploughing their own furrow. They can’t help but take a leaf from the many bands who have come before them – the recent court case with Ed Sheeran proves just how hard it is to write 100% new material – however it’s not the ingredients that matter, it’s how you put them together that counts.
And it’s a credit to the bookers at The Great Escape that all three are on the line-up for what is, after all, probably the premier festival for new music in the world.
For those who may still need a quick history lesson, The Great Escape was conceived by the legendary Martin Elbourne.
Martin’s CV is simply incredible.
As well as creating The Great Escape he was the booker for Glastonbury’s main stages for many year, he co-created Womad, he set up M for Montreal, and he was Adelaide’s ‘musical thinker in residence’ – during which time he wrote the blueprint for the ‘Music Cities’ movement.
So it’s fitting and a testament to his vision that we find the UK’s hottest musical property clustered here together on one festival line-up in Brighton this May.
Our strong opinion despite being a festival and band review site is that the music should speak for itself – so if you’ve not yet heard any of these bands before simply skip down to our Spotify playlist and invest an hour of your life in a little exploratory tour into the worlds of SNAYX, HotWax and VLURE.
But should you value our words at all, here’s it as we see it in a nutshell:
SNAYX
How can a band be so raw and yet so polished all at the same time? SNAYX are visceral…they play from the gut with a primordial energy. At the same time they are slick – but in the same way you imagine a snake will feel, until you actually touch one…when you realise it’s skin is leather-dry and hard.
Songwriting – check!
Stage presence – check!
Set for take-off – check!
HotWax
Here is the band on everyone’s ‘must book them’ list right now – and for good reason!
John Robb from Louder Than War named them as a future Glastonbury headliner after seeing them play at their hometown Hastings Fat Tuesday Festival earlier this year, and the NME put them close to the top of their own TGE top-twenty picks.
Over the past couple of months they have released a series of powerful songs demonstrating both musicianship and lyrical sentiment – and live they tread that fine line between shoegaze and full-blown rock-out.
VLURE
We first saw VLURE at the very first festival of 2023 – Rockaway Beach in Bognor.
And they quite simply blew us away!
Harking back to the anthemic industrial rock of Nitzer Enbb in the early 90s. VLURE bring a Scottish accent to the genre that sounds as if Mel Gibson’s William Wallace is singing Lightning Man produced by the On-U-Sound crew.
Our second taste was actually in Brighton as the band played a showcase of new music and we were able to cement our opinion that they have an epic career ahead of them.
Ironically they told us after the set that they ‘weren’t playing any UK festivals this year’.
Little did they know they would be booked for The Great Escape and so be back in Brighton just a few months later – oh, and that they would be runners up the the Glastonbury emerging talent competition, and so be on one of the hallowed stages there too.
Personal Trainer
And then there’s Personal Trainer.
We didn’t list them in the top three because they are from Amsterdam, not the UK.
But of all the bands in that ‘genre with no name’ right now we think they have a huge potential to become The Hives of the pack. That European act who epitomise a particular sound and keep it rumbling down the years.
So we have added them to the playlist and you can decide for yourselves.
