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Music

Stream UK Post Punks Trials of Early Man’s Debut Album ‘Attachments’

The idea to start the band was born at a Braid gig.

Image: Julie R. Kane

Trials of Early Man are a high intensity post-hardcore band from London. You could compare their style to the early DC sound of One Last Wish and Rites of Spring and the more melodic mid 90s Mid-Western bands found on the [Caulfield records](http://www.caulfieldrecords.com/ f) filtered through a Drive Like Jehu herk and jerk.

Their new album Attachments will be released on Monday but the lads have given us a sneak peek and allowed us to stream the album. Listen below and read a quick chat with Ambrose Neville.

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Noisey: There are few words as loaded as ‘emo’ but your sound seems to reflect an ‘emo’ of an earlier time?Ambrose Neville: Sooner or later, most genre labels seem to get applied to music they don't fit comfortably with. Lots of music gets lumped under jazz despite having little similarity or lineage other than using roughly the same instrumentation. We all listen to a variety of emo from the 80s through to now, but I also think if any of us were asked we’d probably be comfortable with just being called a punk band.

You have all played in your share of bands. Did you approach Trials of Early Man with any particular musical style?
We wanted to do something drawing on bands like Drive Like Jehu. I've always found that to be a really timeless sound that has aged well. Of course that isn't at all how we've end up writing music - we don't really sound like that's what we're aiming at, and that's fine. I think we're very much a sum of the parts of our previous bands. The idea to start this band came about on the day most of us were attending a Braid gig, if that tells you anything.

Do you find you are writing about different subjects as you did when you were younger?
Lyrically I've learned to be a little less oblique and write slightly more directly to an idea - with limited success! With subject matter it's always been just a kernel of an idea that the words to a song end up hinging on. This band probably has more of a combination of fact and fiction in the same song than previous things I've been involved in. In a way that forms a new fiction.

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For some reason I associate your sound with the Collective Zine site. Is it still an important part of the UK punk and emo scene?
15-years ago when I started to get into the music I like now, I discovered Collective Zine and it became a lot easier to find out about wider DIY in the UK. And also to get help and advice from peers in other bands or find out who books shows in a given town, or post up shows I was putting on myself. I'm really grateful to Andy Malcolm for the site as I've stumbled across some of my favourite bands though recommendations on that site over the years - the likes of Sinaloa and Off Minor and what have you. That said none of us are really active on the forums or involved in the reviews, and right now If you asked me which bands people on C-Zine are excited about, I wouldn't be able to tell you, or how we would fit in. We're just doing what comes naturally to us, I suppose.

More generally for us as part of a DIY scene, we're loosely associated with the brilliant Rip This Joint folks who put on some of the best London shows, and are about to put out their second compilation LP.

“Ternary Means ABA” seems pretty interesting.
I read a newspaper obituary about Jeremy Thorpe who'd been a prominent British politician in the 1970s and had become embroiled in a scandal after allegedly sending a hit man to silence his former lover, Norman Scott. It just seemed like such a wild story that I wanted to write a song, with an element of humour, from the perspective of Thorpe, where he's so self-centered and fixated with protecting himself from embarrassment that he's justified murder to himself.

'Attachments' is available Jan 25.

Catch Trials of Early Man:
Jan 28 – London at Hope and Anchor
Jan 29 – Brighton at the Quadrant
Jan 30 – Bristol at the Old England