COVENTRY Music Museum Curator Pete Chambers BEM writes for the Observer.
So there I was in a friend’s car and suddenly a track came on, and it was one of those ‘Who is this?’” moments?
It turned out to be her cousin and the band in question are ‘This Island Must Fall’.
The track was a demo entitled ‘Burial Chest’ and what caught my attention was the mash up of conventional vocals mixed with the Grindcore growl, something that has been done apparently, but is new to me, but done perfectly by this band that class their music as pop/punk/emo.
Obviously, that made me even more interested and I wanted to learn more so I got in touch with the band and asked them those vital questions.
This is what they had to say.
How did the band form?
The band started in the lockdown of 2020 to bring our previous band, The Sleepover Soundtrack back together.
Dave Norton produced an album’s worth of instrumental demos on my home studio set-up and shared them with Sam Lyttle.
Other commitments meant this did not come to fruition, leaving only Sam as vocalist and Dave as aggressive vocals/instrumentals.
Having known each other for the best part of two decades and sharing an interest in the same love of music, we wanted to pursue what had already been written and not lose what had been, at that point, partially completed.
Realising this wasn’t the same band as before, it started to take shape into something new, different and needed a new name.
‘This Island Must Fall’ was born, the name derived as a homage to the US TV series Lost – a show we were both huge fans of.
We both chose, unconventionally, to record our parts in our own homes, in our own time and in our own way, bringing them together at the end when they had been completed. This has allowed us more time and freedom to make exactly what we wanted.
What other bands influenced you?
We are both heavily influenced by the pop-punk and post-hardcore genres of music from the 2000s with the likes of bands such as Saosin, Finch, Senses Fail, Thrice and Silverstein.
The way these bands pull together both melancholic and emotive vocals with the harshness of hardcore punk and aggression has always spoken out to me.
We are both also very lucky to have been brought up in Coventry where some incredible music has been made, from The Specials that our parents listened to, up to the more modern bands like Thoria, The Ripps and Napalm Death.
What does the future hold?
Being able to write, record and produce music to no timeframe and pressure means we can collaborate at our own pace.
We have a three-track EP, which I have finished remastering and we aim to bring that out soon.
Having played most venues in the city over the last 20 years, including many that are unfortunately no longer running, the one that has always eluded us is Godiva Festival,
I think we’ll both always feel we have unfinished business with live music unless we manage to do that.
