MEMES: Another genius band out of Scotland (see my previous posts on Dictator and King Creosote, and plenty of other artists not yet featured on the blog, although they are on my Other playlist: The Snuts, Christie Oliver, Rianne Downey ...) and definitely one to keep an eye on.
After a funky bass intro and a few seconds of a stripped back electronic beat, this track starts with an instant classic of a line "I never listen to a song more than halfway through" - for me, this was enough to have get me hooked.
This song only plays for 1 minute and 43 seconds - it's taken me several times longer to write this than to listen to the song - but somehow there's so much packed into it. You get jangly guitars, shouty backing vocals which feel halfway between punk and lo-fi New York garage rock, proper drums, and a twiddly acoustic guitar (which could be organic or may come from the depths of MEMES' laptops) riff. And you get more throwaway lines delivered with Glaswegian panache.
As a taster of what MEMES are all about this, it's a perfect introduction. The song is the first on a 5-track EP released in 2020: if you've got a spare 12 minutes, you could do worse than sitting down and playing it through. Like me, I think you'll come away energised, intrigued and impressed.
Here's the track: