Girls In Synthesis: 'Howling'.

Photo by Bea Dewhurst.

The people I work with seem to want to listen to retro commercial radio stations whose playlists are musical honey traps of lowest common denominator, innocuous, familiarity, lulling the listener into a soporific state, so they can be sold to the advertisers, cultural roundabouts always moving but taking the listener nowhere...the musical equivalent of a comfort blanket, ‘Keep Calm and Go Round In Comatose Inducing Circles’. Against the backdrop of late capitalism’s domesticating of so much cultural output Girls In Synthesis stand out like a searing, prophetic burst of uncompromising honesty, like a beam of condensed light, waking you up, reminding you of the importance of art as insurgency. Art as site of resistance, music as cultural resource in the struggle to remember and reproduce reality in a world of disorientating bollocks. Girls In Synthesis, inspired by the early DIY punk and post-punk movements, have had four releases so far The Mound/Disappear, the Suburban Hell EP, a Dub version of Suburban Hell and in May this year the EP We Might Not Make Tomorrow. October/November has seen them playing a series of gigs around the UK with a new 4 track EP Fan The Flames being released to coincide. It’s four tracks of jarring, exhilarating, intense, thought provoking neo punk, of utter relevance to working class Britain eight years into Tory rule. If you want an insight into working class experience in 2018 skip the mainstream media, give this a listen, elite corruption, greed, arrogance (the effects pictured on the cover), the experience of powerlessness, precarity, anxiety familiar to so many, the corrosive effects of being subject to, and internalising, the hostilities of society. Girls In Synthesis are important because they don’t just point the finger, they remind us that we are all infected and that our struggles for truth, reality and justice are as much internal as social/political. Musically Fan the Flames moves the band on again from We Might Not Make Tomorrow, as they continue to evolve and develop. 
To coincide with the EP release Girls In Synthesis have released a video of 'Howling' a track that combines Girls In Synthesis’ hallmark elements of ferocity, compassion and intelligence in a way that only they can.