WILD BEASTS

‘Smother’ is the third album by Wild Beasts, four young men from Kendal on a trajectory that took them from Kendal to Leeds to London, who make music that retains the sensitive observational quality of being an ‘outsider’ informed by the intimacy of a childhood spent in the Lake District. Like its predecessors ‘Limbo, Panto’ and the Mercury-nominated ‘Two Dancers’, it is a genuinely brave, beautiful record that stands outside the vicissitudes of fashion, and sounds like nothing so much as itself. If ‘Two Dancers’ was a night on the tiles, dizzy and giddy and pulsing with hedonism, then ‘Smother’ is pillowtalk. Intimate and sensual, it has the courage and confidence to talk softly, knowing that once it has the listener, it has them forever. Born out of an intense six week period of writing in East London and a month recording in remotest Wales and co-produced with long term collaborator Richard Formby. They say “we never wanted to be four white boys playing guitar forever; we hope to be the kind of band that shouldn’t exist”.