Glitchers: Carving Their Place In Punk
Punk is all about rejecting the norm and going against the standard. It’s a grassroots kind of music genre all about rebellion, and standing up for what you believe in with loud guitars, pulsing drumming, and abrasive and passionate vocals. From X-RAY SPEX and THE CLASH, and modern bands like THE MUSLIMS and BAD RELIGION. This is especially exemplified in the street-punk style and attitude of the duo, GLITCHERS. Making a name for themselves with their street gigs, notably outside the Heavy Music Awards in 2021 and the recent Outbreak Festival, the band have gone strength to strength across the country, including supporting HANDS OFF GRETEL and officially playing the after-party to MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE outside their arenas. Showing no signs of slowing down, Jake and Sophie chatted with us about their addition to Outbreak, plans for the year, and inside secrets about their second EP.
“It was absolutely mental to play Outbreak Festival,” Jake describes. “Like, it’s the kind of thing that we dreamed would happen when we first started doing this, but we didn’t expect it to happen this quick! We both thought we’d have to be at a fairly substantial level before someone invited us inside, so this was really cool. Mental to describe what this has meant, but of course, something this insane doesn’t happen to just any band, especially to go and play outside and then for organisers to be like, ‘do you want to play inside?’ This is so cool.”
Sophie shared the same sentiments, adding, “we were kind of shocked but I took a second and I was like, ‘well, why are you joking? Like this is serious?’ We had to double check with our other dates planned. We can go sit through data to work out our full tour dates, our full list of places to play on which dates. We’ll sit through it and go ‘oh, we’ve got it now’, and then two days later, it’s like ‘I’m gonna move this here because we need to go for your dates again’, and then it’s just a cycle. Because there’s so many places we put out on Instagram and Facebook and all the groups with us asking people where they want us to come. We went back through old videos and looked at comments, so it’s mad chaos.
GLITCHERS have been active for a couple of years, but it was during 2020 when Sophie officially joined as drummer. Since then, they released their first EP, Thought Crimes, and have performed all across the UK, notably performing outside the Heavy Music Awards 2021. “It was exciting, was a weird feeling then and now.” Jake reminisces. “We’re playing so often, stuff happens and you get excited for it. Then you’re back to doing something different. We haven’t really had time to sit back and appreciate what we’ve done that way. The past couple of weeks ago, we just had a bit more time off but we’ve also done loads. But we toured with MCR and it just felt like that was mad, but literally like a few days later we were just in some random town playing in streets again so it was like back to normal. It is bizarre.”
As mentioned, the band are currently working on their next EP, with their most recent single, Telescope, released back in June. “A lot of these songs are ones that I’ve written over the past couple years and then I’ve developed them with Sophie and I’ll teach her like the drums that I had in my head,” he says as he talks through the song. “This song I’ve had for a long time. I think I drove Sophie mad because I’ve just been playing around in circles for ages. But it came together pretty quickly. To be honest, I don’t really have a writing process. A lot of people asked me about this, and honestly, songs just come. Sophie‘s a witness to that. I’ll pick up my guitar, play for like half an hour, then put it down without writing anything. Then another day, I’ll pick it up and then come down an hour later with a finished song.”
So what would be the main goals for GLITCHERS? Sophie easily replies to this question, saying, “I suppose personal end goal we’ve always said that we want to make enough to survive and entertain people that you know, hopefully earn enough that we can then give back to other people, open up opportunities for other people and we want to rescue animals and stuff. As a band, I think we just want to reawaken stuff. You know the industry is doing well, the music industry, and it is at an underground level. But no one’s taking it further, and we need to try and awaken that and sometimes it doesn’t need loads of people to do it. It just needs one catalyst to go in and just boom and then all of a sudden it just shakes it up.”
“I suppose that’s what we want to do is just change things a bit if some bands can start playing on the streets like us.” she finishes the interview with. “It’s incredible that bands are watching us. I think the donation ethos we have, the ‘pay what you want’ system for our music and merch, it’s something that we’re very strong about as well, as the music side of things has become very very capitalistic. Even with the bands that are trying not to be, it almost feels like it’s impossible not to be. We want to be that band that shows that you can do something different, we don’t have to follow the same pattern of buying shirts from sweatshops, so we don’t really know where they come from. Music is art. Let those people value it. If we can bring people’s interest into alternative music back up again, get them wanting to go to gigs by shoving it in their faces in your car. We just try and get people active and passionate about music, about alternative music again, there’s so many music fans out there, we need to fight for it.”
Like GLITCHERS on Facebook.