Credit: Ashley Rommerlath
November 2, 2023: The emerging London four piece Talk Show have announced their much anticipated debut album, Effigy, to be released on February 16 via Missing Piece Records. With Effigy, Talk Show do more than just push their sound; they completely reinvent it. Produced by Remi Kabaka Jr. of Gorillaz, the record offers up a bold and exhilarating showcase for the band’s dramatic evolution. Drawing on everything from The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy to Nine Inch Nails and The KLF, the band leans into the raw, primal sound at the intersection of techno, electronic, industrial, and rock music that informed their 2022 EP Touch The Ground (produced by Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Al Doyle).
Along with the announcement, the band shared the album’s pulsating opener “Gold,” which sets the scene with relentless drums and bruising, distorted guitars pumping like adrenaline through your veins. Like much of the album, it’s a song rooted in ambivalence and delivered with a snarl; there’s a sense of menace in frontman Harrison Swann’s delivery, an uneasy feeling that things could turn dark at any moment.
“The first song we wrote for the album was ‘Gold,’” states Swann. “We started with an underlying, pulsing bass, and I just started mumbling words and lines over top. ‘Gold coins at the bottom of my pocket’ just kinda fell out. It’s weird we just knew we had something special to us straight away. It had a climatic feel, with feelings of frustration and turmoil, mixed with tensions and release. We looked at early The Prodigy and those songs with that type of energy and that helped form the rest of the track.
“We’ve been playing Gold live at various shows for the past year or so and it always seemed to grab people going straight away. We tinkered with it along the way, but essentially it’s stayed the same since the very first day. In the studio, the main goal was to just bottle up the energy of the track and get that down on record. It had to feel massive. I wanted it to sound bigger than anything we’d written before.”
“Gold” follows last month’s single “Closer” which was raved by FLOOD Magazine saying: “dirty electronics mingle with an uptempo drum groove on the track before a dance-punk inspired guitar riff skirts around Harrison Swann’s sardonic vocals. Handclaps and a funky bassline round out the diamond-sharp cut.” The video directed by Ashley Rommelrath grew from visual cues of a club/warehouse space imagined by the band, influenced by the intro to the movie Blade. “We wanted to create the kind of music we’d play if we were performing in that club, to put ourselves into that scene and see how far we could push it,” writes Swann.
The band dubbed their envisioned nightclub Effigy – something to be worshiped and despised at the same time – and visualized every detail from the ground up to help guide their creative focus during recording sessions. What would it look like? Where would it be located? How would it feel to wait in line? To walk through the doors?
Like “Closer,” “Gold” also arrives with a video by Rommelrath, which pulls listeners further down the rabbit hole of this phantasmagorical club scene. “The video took direct inspiration from the title sequence in Gaspar Noe’s film ‘Enter the Void’ and early Prodigy to create a much more hectic atmosphere than the one we had created for ‘Closer,’” says Swann. “It needed to feel claustrophobic, manic, and something that just never let up. It was filmed at a few of our shows on tour and on record you can hear me breathing and catching my breath. It was important we had a moment where you could see that in the video. It became this meditative state where I was psyching myself up and getting ready for what was to come, getting ready for that release.”
Hailed as one of the UK’s most exciting new bands, Talk Show first came together in 2017, when Swann met bassist George Sullivan, drummer Chloe MacGregor, and guitarist Tom Holmes at Goldsmiths, University of London. A series of critically acclaimed singles and raucous live shows led to the band’s internationally lauded debut EP, These People, which arrived in March of 2020, just as the entire world shut down. By the time the pandemic had subsided enough for Talk Show to properly tour the collection, though, the group had already begun to move on creatively, trading in the brash post-punk of their early work for a ferocious, guitar-driven vision of dance music that would help earn them festival slots everywhere from Pitchfork Avant-Garde to Sonic Wave, tours with the likes of Fontaines D.C., Squid, and Shame, in addition to a four-star review from the NME for their 2022 follow-up EP, Touch The Ground.
“The shift in sound wasn’t so much about changing who we were as it was about finding ourselves as a band,” Swann reflects. “It just felt like the most natural thing in the world to us, and we’re never going back.”
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