From the opening notes of Feral Family’s self-styled ‘mini-album’ ‘…So Far Behind,’ the Yorkshire three-piece grabs your attention and never lets it go. Throughout its generous 25-minute runtime, Jamie Lowe (Vocals, Bass), Oscar Woods (Guitar, Additional Vocals) and Regan Grimson (Drums, Additional Vocals) work through a litany of references to craft a dystopian world that can only come from the coastal grim of their North Sea-facing Yorkshire upbringing.
Opener ‘The Balance’ flirts with the chip shop rock & roll of early Arctic Monkeys, while hinting at a darkness beneath the surface. This is the brightest moment on an otherwise bleak record, with only penultimate track ‘Catalina’ offering any other form of reprieve in its repression of pain, moving from industrial-adjacent stylings to shoegaze-leaning layers. Final track ‘Down In The Dirt’ feels like a statement of future intent. It is a slow-burning Sergio-Leone-tinged vision of a nightmare, marching from finger-picked guitars into stomping explosions of riffs like a surprise attack on a town.
‘…So Far Behind’ feels like a real-time exploration, moving from spaghetti western soundtrack to the angular drive of 2000s Bloc Party. Each track introduces a new influence, providing a showcase of a band still deciding on a direction after trying them all. The experimentation feels like a retrospective soundtrack to a youth spent reading Frank Herbert and finding parallels in the nowhere coastal town they were raised in. It is simultaneously driven by hope, a childlike understanding of their surroundings and a need to escape it; every track drones and borrows from a variety of 00s scene-kid tastes. These visceral landscapes have deservedly got them onto KEXP’s playlist, and marked Feral Family’s arrival as a raw yet compelling addition to Yorkshire’s musical history.