Working Mens Club - Working Mens Club (2020)

A rumble on the horizon. Gritted teeth, nuclear fizz and
fissured rock. A dab of pill dust from a linty pocket before it
hits: the atom split, pool table overturned, pint glass smashed
— valley fever breaking with the clouds as the inertia of small
town life is well and truly disrupted. Here to bust out of
Doledrum, clad in a t-shirt that screams SOCIALISM and armed
with drum machine, synth, pedal and icy stare are Working Men’s
Club, and their self-titled debut album.

It’s hard to believe that the three fresh-faced music college
kids who bounced out of nowhere and onto the 6 Music playlist
with the sweet-but-potent, twangy guitar-led ‘Bad Blood’
(Melodic Records) in 2019 are the same band who clattered back
there with maddening techno-cowbell- puncher ‘Teeth’ less than
half a year later — and that’s because for the most part,
they’re not. Having signed to Heavenly and with the hype around
them building, underlying tensions came to a boil a mere five
days before the band’s all-important first London headline
show, and wunderkind frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant was left high
and dry; guitarist Giulia Bonometti had decided to focus on her
blossoming solo career, and drummer Jake Bogacki was against
the new electronic direction Minsky-Sargeant saw Working Men’s
Club taking. (“I guess WMC started off as a bit more
guitar-based, tryna copy stuff in our own way, like the Velvets
and stuff like that, but I didn’t want it to be that anymore. It
became dancier and dancier as I tried to experiment”, he
explains.) All that remained of the outfit was Minsky-Sargeant
himself, recently recruited bassist Liam Ogburn, and — given the
band’s indebtment to wood panelled, community-run venues for an
early leg-up — a rather pertinent name. But with staunch
determination burning in his belly, Minsky-Sargeant quickly
assembled a lineup consisting of himself, Ogburn, and Mairead
O’Connor (The Moonlandingz) and Rob Graham (Drenge, Baba Naga)
— both of whom he had met at the Sheffield studio of producer
Ross Orton (The Fall, M.I.A., Arctic Monkeys) — replaced the
live drums with a drum machine, and rush-rehearsed the new
setup before going ahead with the show. “If it wasn’t for
Sheffield then we probably wouldn’t have played that gig” he
says. “I was shitting myself, because I didn’t know what would
work or not.” Luckily, something stuck: “After about three gigs
with that lineup it was already way better than what we’d had
before.”

Two original members lighter and three new ones the richer,
Working Men’s Club took on a new hard-edge permutation, their
shows becoming ever more sweaty, pulsating and rammed to the
rafters; their energy raw; their vigour renewed; their interplay
as musicians growing ever-more intuitive and elastic. Their
eponymous collection of songs is equal parts Calder Valley
restlessness and raw Sheffield steel; guitars locking horns with
floor-filling beats, synths masquerading as drums and
Minsky-Sargeant’s scratchy, electrifying bedroom demos brought
to their full potential by Orton’s blade-sharp yet sensitive
production.