dramatic and devastating debut.
Savages, makes us dream of what it must have been like to have been around to hear, in real time, the debut releases by Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, to feel, as those incredible records hit the shops, that unearthly power and sense of a transmission from a satellite reality. They are an all-girl four-piece, barely together for a year with their debut gig as recent as January 2012, who remind you of that post-punk moment when a new kind of female musician emerged, a reminder of the feral energy and cerebral vigour that we first experienced via Siouxsie, the Slits et al. Not that they exploit the fact of their sex: if anything, the singer has the intensity of an Ian Curtis as much as anyone from the canon of female performers and she compels, like Curtis, without having to resort to anything obviously theatrical and pantomimic. It's all in the simplicity and the stare.
Blink and you'd think you'd heard it all before, which is why we didn't write about them before. And so congratulations should go to the players who make, through their contributions, the medium, 56 this year, seem utterly new. Musically they're incredible – jazzily fluid and exploratory but tight, not sloppy and grungy. The rumbling bass has a motorik drive, and the drums back it up skilfully. They have the rhythmic insistence and violent precision of the key Manchester bands, and the dishevelled looseness of the Bristol ones (if the Pop Group were riot grrrls …), and when the guitar slashes into view it does so with ferocious force. Image-wise, they're thrillingly intriguing, too, both live – where they're bathed in black and white – and in interview photographs, where their arty cool (they're serious about Dali, Monk and Celine) comes through.
Husbands is the only official track so far and it is astonishing. It is instantly recognisable as something that you would term post-punk but it manages to be totally in tune with the radical spirit of that era by a mystifying act of alchemy. It's like the best bits of the best bands of that period, condensed and unleashed. It's remarkable how easy it seems to do, so hard when you've been waiting so long for someone to do it this right. "It's all in the final hour," shrieks Jehnny Beth, who has just woken up to find the titular groom lying next to her suddenly looks like a total stranger. "Saw the face of a guy/ I don't know who he was, he had no eyes – his presence made me feel ill at ease." Urgency, dread, alienation, foreboding – all the greats are invoked on this dark, dramatic and devastating debut. We can't wait to hear other stuff by them, of course, but for the three minutes and four seconds of Husbands our faith in the form is restored, and really, we can't ask for more than that.
Debut double-A-side single Flying to Berlin b/w Husbands is released on lead singer Jehn's label Pop Noire digitally on 28 May. The 7in vinyl will follow in June.
File next to: Pop Group, Joy Division, Liars, Slits.
