SMILE

Fresh from a slot at Groningen showcase festival Eurosonic in January 2025, and having already chalked up live shows with the likes of Fontaines D.C, Squid and Lawnchair, Cologne-based five-piece SMILE share grimy new cut ‘Hot Friend’ - released 12th February via Austrian label Siluh Records (Culk, Laundromat Chicks, GARDENS). The follow-up to the brooding, post-punk glooms of 2023 debut album ‘Price of Progress’, new single ‘Hot Friend’ sees the band embrace the sensuous temptations of slobbery, squalid trip-hop grooves, howling vocals and eerie, industrial atmospherics. Landing somewhere between Psychotic Monks, Ditz, Touché Amoré and Massive Attack, ‘Hot Friend’ traces its lyric from the poetry of Albuquerque- born lead vocalist Rubee True Fegan, serving up an exploration of desire, obsession, infatuation and unease, as they explain: "Hot Friend hails from the long nights on tour, where the hours between gigs blurred into a haze of restless energy. Feeling our live set lacked something to channel both its rage and sensuality, the idea for this track was born. Last summer, it took shape as a messy undertow driven by caustic, percussive guitars and a hypnotic groove. The lyrics sprung from poems passed back and forth between Rubee and dear friend and brilliant writer, Olivia Martinez. Engrossed in delirious, hot, dripping days in the desert, poems emerged of past heartbreak and the potential of new lust discharged from the pressure of performance and passivity. In November, we recorded it with Jan Philipp Janzen and Julian Stetter at the ONE artist studio in the Eifel, capturing that late-night tension in a single weekend." SMILE is a post-punk band with a singer, who prefers not to sing. Instead, she intones her poetic stories spiked with personal reflections. With their excellent debut ‘Price of Progress’, SMILE light-footedly show that post punk can still sound refreshing. They don't take their references as dogma, remain experimental, stubborn. Narrative, catchy, rough and cuddly, the subtle, poetic observations of singer Rubee True Fegan (USA) merge with the accomplished sound of a band that producer Olaf Opal has put exactly where it belongs: on the starting block of innovative, clever and sensual guitar music. In‘Price of Progress’, the interplay of musical Sturm und Drang and the maturity of a reflective narrative perspective manifests itself.