Swansea Sound kick off tour in St Leonards on back of new album

Swansea Sound, who feature members from Heavenly and Talulah Gosh, kick off their tour in St Leonards at The Piper on November 13 on the back of new album Pre-Post-Truth.

A spokesman described it as “collection of twelve new punk and power-pop tunes with a lot more lyrical bite than you get from the average indie band.

“Sometimes described as an indie supergroup, Swansea Sound are Hue Williams (ex-The Pooh Sticks), Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey (Heavenly), Bob Collins (The Dentists) and Ian Button (Death In Vegas, Railcard). Pre-post-truth is their third album. They have recorded sessions for 6Music, Radio X and WFMU (New York) and have just completed a tour of the US.

“Pre-post-truth sees Swansea Sound expand their musical ambition and broaden their lyrical targets. It used to be YouTube and Spotify that the band railed against, but now everyone’s getting their heads round those issues, so why not attack the whole edifice of tech-bro hegemony? This album is loud and it’s outspoken, but it’s also energetic and very witty. There’s an awareness of impotence too: the songs are often self-mocking, asking if it’s even possible to make subversive statements in a world where the communication channels are all owned by the tech-bros themselves.

“In The Grease That Oils the Wheels, a runaway train of a song, Amelia and Hue sing three duets: in the first part, they’re a young couple struggling to make ends meet in a gig economy dominated by Uber and Deliveroo; in the second they are a middle class band arguing how much money they should spend on online influencers to achieve digital fame: and in the third they are a wealthy political couple who’ve traded in their political influence to secure lucrative jobs advising big-tech companies. The one thing all three pairs have in common is that they are totally expendable: they are merely the grease that oils the wheels.

“20mph, musically more akin to Wire or The Ruts, presents a tech-bro who is surprised how easy it is to stir his British followers up into a frenzy of fascistic rage. The choruses feature the fired-up mob, chanting the song title as they head out to destroy another speed camera and replace it with a Union Jack.

“Other tracks come at the same theme from different angles: the poignant, chiming Flamin Groovies-like On Our Own traces the history of a building and the people who inhabited it: once upon a time it was a small venue where the band first played; in the 80s it was demolished to make way for an office block, giving employment to the white collar working class (‘the work was dull but paid enough’), and now the building lies empty: all those clerical jobs have been sucked up by AI. The friends who played and worked together don’t hang out anymore because they are all stuck at home, doom-scrolling.

“There are a couple of love songs here too. Wrong Way Round, sweet, warm and catchy in a Squeeze kind of a way, is a fond tribute to a loved one who can gently nudge you out of depression.

“Double de-clutch is an ode to the Dylan Thomas book-bus, sometimes seen at music festivals in Wales. “Its owner, Jeff Towns, realised it was hard to get people to come and buy poetry books from his shop so converted an old bus into a mobile store and took the books to the people instead: a temporary, mobile, analogue idyll. Dylan Thomas himself is echoed in the lyrics, linking the song back to a truly bygone time, an imagined pre-post-truth era, where maybe we saw things more clearly.”