Just like Honey...
Starting out as a small group bands like Echo Lake, Mazes and Veronica Falls resurrecting the fuzzed out shoegaze/slacker pop of mid ‘90s the indie scene, the past 12 months or so has seen an explosion of sun kissed indie rock bands emerging all over East London, all hell bent on combining My Bloody Valentine style wall-of-sound with Pavement’s melodic rock.
Out of what has become a pretty vibrant scene, Honeyslide are one of my favourites. A slightly mysterious four-piece who seem to have coalesced in Hackney somewhere, although they have no records out officially or anything, the two songs on Soundcloud captures the band in all their hazy, psychedelic glory.
I’ve managed to catch them a couple of times live, and their ridiculously warm sounding dream pop studded with rolling bass lines and big epic choruses, somehow reminds me of the first Radiohead album, Therapy? (in their weirder moments) and This Mortal Coil all at the same time; definitely not too shabby for a band who have only been around for 9 months at best.
What exactly is a Honeyslide? Sounds sticky...
Well the name came from just putting two words together that we liked the sound of but afterwards we realised that a honeyslide is when you get a bud of weed, glaze it in honey then eat it. It's supposed to be pretty good.
How would you describe your sound? What kind of stuff influences your music?
We don't really like describing our sound, mainly because I'm not sure that we really have one except that we love fuzz but some songs we're writing have none in whatsoever. We don't want to be tied down to a certain sound; we just want to make good music that we can enjoy listening back to and others can enjoy as well.
The two main things that have influenced the band are My Bloody Valentine and Pavement; everybody in the band are big fans of those two. Separately, Meytal's listening to a lot of Cocteau Twins right now, Mikes always listening to Fugazi, Josh is listening to Thee Oh Sees a lot and I just got some new Swirlies music so I will probably be listening to that a bit later today. I think we influence each other the most when it comes to writing riffs, melodies and lyrics etc.
You haven't been a band that long right?
Well we kind of have and we kind of haven't. Me and Josh have been writing songs for about 2 years as we live together but Meytal and Mike joined towards the latter part of last year. Then the songs me and Josh had been writing got filtered through Meytal and Mike with each person putting their own touch to the music and it came out even better.
London's shoegaze scene just seems to go from strength to strength. Who do you reckon we should be looking out for?
I'm not sure about the shoegaze scene but some of the people you should look out for if you haven't already are Old Forest, Sealings, Slowcoaches and Keel Her. They’re all really sick and we're playing with Old Forest and Sealings in July. There’s loads of other good new bands out there as well, too many to mention. Check out the new Dignan Porch album, it so good.
What's next for Honeyslide?
Well we're just trying to play lots more shows now and trying to organise a tour of some kind, we want to get out of London at some point. We've written a lot of new songs which we're hopefully going to record in July so when the EP comes out we'll have a batch of new songs ready to release.
https://www.facebook.com/honeyslide
Honeyslide will be supporting Milk Maid at the Shacklewell Arms tomorrow.
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