| The story so far for one of the UK's most exciting new indie bands, with new single 'she's my love' out now. | | Photo: Bethan Celeste | Words: Lloyd Bolton | | | casual smart are barely out of school, but they are making some of the most exciting indie rock in the UK today. Their songs have a charming directness, candid lyrics and instinctive arrangements built into compositions that possess a kind of domestic majesty without ever feeling overdone. Formed in Cardiff, the band are now spread between Bath, Bristol and the Welsh capital, remaining spiritually entwined in their home city's present and past. A conversation at Sŵn Festival inspired their first single, sets at Green Man and Clwb Ifor Bach remain career highlights to date, and their last two songs were recorded in the studio above Carmarthen venue CWRW. The band began in sixth form, and sound like the school band any teenage Belle and Sebastian fan dreams of starting. To date, they have four singles to their name, and each feels like a manifesto in miniature. We joined the band (minus saxophonist Rowan Phillips) to toast the release of new single 'she's my love' and catch up on their story so far. | | The group started as much out of a desire to make music for the love of it as to do anything more thought-out. As guitarist/bassist Emily Beal puts it, at that point, playing in a band was as far as their plans extended and the joy of making music with friends has remained central to the project. "I think we've always been led by friendship, and kinda respect for each other's feelings", reflects Emily. In terms of musical approach, as she remembers, "There was no big plan stylistically, there were no big goals or anything like that, we just wanted to do something, really". | | Keys player Peter Martin demurs that "there was ambition from the start" but agrees that these horizons were quite basic in the early days. The minimum aim for him was "just to play like one show, just to say I've done it". As the band has developed, they have continued to sustain a healthy mixture of ambition and grounding. As Pete continues, they have so far taken a strictly single-by-single approach to developing their sound. As he sees it, they put "an EP's worth of work into one song… I think being a new band, this is probably the best way of doing it". | | "They're homemade songs". | | We fell in love with casual smart on hearing their first release, 'it doesn't get any easier', an understated yet arresting collage of verses from Pete and Brooke Thomas – who also shares guitar and bass duties in the band. The single and its creation seem to speak of the band's ethos, combining humility and resourcefulness with the ambition to push themselves to create something exciting and fresh. Originally composed of its alternating and overlaying verses, the band were stuck trying to find a final detail to tie it all together. The imperative to finish the song was intensified by the impending date of their first gig. A couple of weeks before the show, a chat with the members of Tapir! at Cardiff's Sŵn Festival, where Pete was volunteering, provided the missing element. Bringing up their debut show and how "we were really nervous", Brooke remembers asking the band for any words of wisdom. They responded with the immortal title line: "It doesn't get any easier". | | Having thus finished of the composition, the recording process inspired a similar intuitive resourcefulness. Emily remembers the process of recording "one day after college" in a bedroom. "I'd lost one of the wires for my interface, so Brooke had to do the vocals into a MacBook microphone… and you'd just woken up from a nap, hadn't you?" | | "Yeah, I was asleep and sang it like ten minutes later", Brooke concurs. | | This feels appropriate, as casual smart explain that their work has been rooted in bedrooms as spaces to practice, write together, or just "loiter". A taste for the crackle of a homemade recording is felt on the band's first two singles in particular, 'it doesn't get any easier' and 'queen of hearts'. Pete distinguishes these from the subsequent recordings, "They're homemade songs, which suits them very well because there is a sense of rawness and actuality that you wouldn't get if it was a studio recording". At the same time, he qualifies that the economy of these recordings, while appealing in its own way, did not bound the ceiling of their own sonic ambitions. Speaking of early reviews calling the band 'anti-folk' and 'lo-fi', he comments, "I don't think that was ever something we were going for, I think it was just the sound we could make at the time". | | A degree of bedroom charm has remained important to the band's sound, even as their recording techniques have grown more sophisticated. 'cranes' and the newly released 'she's my love' retain a raw vocal sound, short on effects and hinging on the human delivery of loose harmonies. Emily adds that a consistent drum sound has also spiritually linked their releases to date. "We've never liked having really clean drums", she says, explaining that they prefer a "dusty" sound, a detail which has indeed added a kind of polaroid haze to their output. | | Consistent with the atmosphere upon which the band was built, the group always look to pool the best of their abilities in composing songs, trusting that the product of this effort will inherently carry the collective essence of the group. Brooke explains that their rehearsals tend to involve a kind of "show and tell", where one member presents an idea they've been testing and everyone else tries to play along. "If it works, we stick with it". | | The process of developing ideas together is one Pete believes the band "have got better at", the writing of 'she's my love' feeling like a good example of this. Emily modestly suggests she has "a bad tendency to make things too complicated all the time", so with this track, she wanted to make something as direct as possible, "to strip it back and see if I could still do something worth doing." Writing the lyrics in half an hour, she asked herself, "What do I really care about? My girlfriend I guess! As soon as I started writing it, it just really came along really naturally". The simplicity leaves plenty of space for the rest of the band to add their own flourishes and match the immediacy of passion that inspired the lyrics. | | "One of the pinnacles of the year was participating in the Eisteddfod". | | In spite of a few moves, casual smart still feel very much immersed in Welsh music culture (indeed, their Spotify bio still simply reads: 'Cardiff'). Drummer Oliver Goddard speaks of strong ties that continue to connect them to the city. "When we were thinking about this upcoming tour, we were thinking about support acts. And when we got to discussing who we wanted to support in Cardiff, everyone was talking about all these different local bands… we're still very much in touch". | | Beyond the specifics of the current scene, or the sustained influence of Wales' illustrious ranks of indie legends (we compare plans to catch Super Furry Animals this year), the group agree that there is something specific about Welsh culture that has shaped their attitude towards music. The country's reputation as 'the land of song' is actively sustained by conscious efforts to involve people in making music, particularly at a young age. Pete's first singing gigs came as part of the Welsh National Opera. Emily adds that in school, "one of the pinnacles of the year was participating in the Eisteddfod", a nationwide festival celebrating music, poetry and literature. As she remembers it, "Everyone's sat cross-legged in the hall and you go up with your guitar to play some crazy song that you've just written and its terrible, but, like, it's so encouraged". She continues, "I've been really lucky with the teachers in my life, I feel like everyone around me – in Wales at least – has been always so encouraging towards the arts, I think it is just part of the culture". | | Now one of Wales' most exciting acts, casual smart have just been confirmed for this year's Green Man Festival, having previously performed at its Settlement stage in 2024. They are a particularly striking embodiment of the pipeline from school practice rooms to festival stages as facilitated by a culture that encourages this kind of engagement with the arts. Cutting their teeth in Cardiff and making their first studio recordings at CWRW, the band further represent the ongoing strength and solidarity represented by Wales' music scene. | | casual smart's horizons continue to grow and so too do their sonic ambitions. All the same, they still carry a welcome degree of that schooldays enthusiastic homemade quality into the music they produce. It is this above anything else makes them a band to truly fall in love with. | | Following the release of 'she's my love', casual smart are on tour from late February through to the start of March. All tour dates here. | | | | |
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