WL//WH EP Premiere NO DRAMA
photo by © Delphine Gabet
No Drama is an Indie/Punk quartet from Toulouse, South of France, including members of several other bands such as Radical Kitten, Docks, Walk Home Drunk, Comité Balnéaire and Chien Pourri (all of which are on the Hidden Bay roster), namely Amandine Rué (bass guitar), Daniel Selig (guitars/vocals), Manon Raupp (guitars/vocals) and Iso Couderd (drums/back vocals), tainted by the gritty and slanted energy of Pavement, Archers Of Loaf, Guided By Voices, MBV, Texas Is The Reason, Sonic Youth and Fugazi, just to name a few.
After a year spent playing local shows (opening for bands such as Come, Spite House and Cosmopaark), the band recorded a set of demos in May, spinning effortlessly an electrifying and emotionally evocative array of 90s-tinged Indie Rock hues, colored with the sparkly intensity of Midwest Emo and layered with distorted Shoegazing noisy-pop textures, to sound loud, discordant, and earnestly melodic at the same time.
Whilst lyrically, the band takes a nostalgic walk down the late ’80s and early ’90s Punk ethics memory lane, imbued with angsty, aloof ‘harsh reality’ lo-fi minimalism, narrated with everyday ‘common man’ observations, such as day jobs, Brexit, and social anxiety disorder.
The songs play out in little slice-of-life vignettes, delivered by a frustrated and alienated vocal ache, haloed in high anxiety back-ups, where drinking with friends underscored by insistent rhythms and pain-filled wiry guitar wails (“Better Off”) or clapping at a show, fueled by urgent riff-blistered repetitions (“Born to Clap”), while infested with psychological dysfunction, are truly the highlights that sustain the ordinary heart to keep beating into the next day.
The EP also leaves room for some more mercurial soft/loud parts, amid reflective, and wistful moments interspersed with excruciating instrumental overflows, like “Exit” and “Happy Dog”, albeit punctuated with cathartic surges of anger the former, and compulsive rippling weeping stabs of poignant desperation the Grunge-smeared latter, whilst “MFNM”, with its lingering moody tinkling tension and gripping vocal interplay, “Making Friends Not Money”, pretty much says it all.
Whether they recall the ’90s or not, No Drama brings 5 songs, 5 sticky, torn and raucous slices of melodies that offer glimpses of sheer heartfelt and devastating lyricism, sometimes whispered, more often shouted at the top of your lungs, overlaid with riffs that blast in your ears with the urgency of an emotive whirlwind.
Get angry, get emotional, be moved, just play it loud!!!
No Drama‘s Self-Titled EP is due out, on Cassette & Digital, on November 3, 2023, via Hidden Bay Records and Seitan’s Hell Bike Punks.
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photo: © Jérôme Tendresse Violence
