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The band talk to us about debut EP ‘The Feast of St. Perpetua and plans for what comes next. |
| Photos: Gabriel Forrest | Words: Marty Hill |
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“I think if you really like the EP, you probably won’t like the new stuff,” jokes Mleko drummer Ioan Saul. He joins guitarist Bruno Evans and I in the quiet Manchester pub that was closest when sideways rain interrupted our sunny Saturday morning walk. |
‘The Feast of St. Perpetua,’ the band’s first extended offering, is out on Heist or Hit later this week. It kicks against the established boundaries of Windmill-adjacent experimentalism, dragging discordant horn sections and maniacal guitars across oddball structures that stretch and collapse in on themselves and then stretch out again. Delicate folk stylings clash with disorientating noise sections and lyrically, unflinching sincerity and meta in-jokes trade blows. It’s a striking debut, and one the band are rightly proud of, but it’s clear that they see it as a starting point rather than something to dine out on. |
“There are parts, listening back, where everybody is trying to put forward every idea they’ve ever had… and there are seven of us!” says Bruno. That breadth of their thinking is evident on the record. They’ve been called jazz, post-punk, post-rock, psych, art-rock, prog and even “gub rock”. Granted, that last one is a meaningless label that they gave to themselves for their own entertainment, but the fact that it stuck for a while suggests that nobody was quite sure what else to call them. If you caught different ten-minute sections of their set at a festival, you could be forgiven for giving them any of those labels or more. Sam Jones — who has had similar assignments with The Great Unwashed, Maruja and Slowhandclap — was enlisted to turn the overflow of ideas into something more cohesive. “We really needed somebody who wasn’t afraid to say no,” laughs Bruno. “He was great at that. He got rid of some really terrible stuff.” |
Some of the songs on the EP are survivors of various line-up changes and different sonic pursuits. Bruno recalls early efforts to turn Mleko into a “horribly abrasive emo project” and a short-lived attempt at a “synthy Krautrock sort of thing,” whilst Ioan recalls a summer of outdoor rehearsals and “just really trying to be a folk band” after attending an Ugly show. In time, bolstered by a steadier formation, something more coherent began to form. Outside influences were distanced and the band began to take their inspiration from closer quarters. “It became a trust thing,” explains Bruno. “I was really stressed about whether or not it’d sound cohesive. Ultimately, though, it’s just the seven of us playing. Whatever we write, it’s going to sound like us because it’s us doing it.” |
A crop of uniting influences soon came to the foreground: The Orchestra (For Now), Holly Head, Do Nothing, Deathcrash, Brave Little Abacus and, really importantly, fellow Mancunian upstarts Shaking Hand. “They had a huge impact on us,” says Ioan. “We mentioned the problem we had with, like, jamming loads of stuff in before. They’re so good at not doing that, the way that they use space and make it so impactful is something that we’ve definitely learned from.” |
They often joke about the “gub rock” moniker, but if you’re willing to take it at face value there are more definitive sonic signifiers than a lot of microgenres. The sound that they landed on for this EP is defined by its shifting structures. “We have a joke that the Mleko formula is songs that start really quietly and end up really scary” says Ioan. The legacy of the short-lived emo and Krautrock tints remain in the driving rhythms and blasts of violence that the band are still learning to balance. |
“We’ll honour that EP and play pretty much all of it on the tour,” says Ioan. “But we’ve got so much new stuff that we’re super proud of too. We’ve pretty much done the second EP and we’ll probably do most if not all of that one as well.” The newer stuff, based on their word and a couple of demos, is much cleaner and more intricate. They’re writing new songs for a more permanent project for the first time and are settling into a more relaxed creative process. Some of their most recent songs came from a ‘summer camp’ at the school that Ioan’s dad teaches at. “I think those songs are probably a lot less soundscape-y, there’s definitely a lot less effects on the guitar,” explains Bruno. “We’re a bit happier with it all now, so it sounds happier. There’s less moodiness” adds Ioan. |
‘The Feast of St. Perpetua’ is one of the most compelling debuts you’ll hear all year, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get the band to talk about it throughout our conversation. Time and again, attention turns to what comes after. The songs that they’ve written since they “realised that they don’t have to play at the same time.” It positions their debut EP as something of a time capsule; whilst it was theatrical maximalism that made their first impression so strong, their ongoing process of refinement is what makes them (and us) so excited about what could come next. |
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