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Waterloo Teeth is a mad idea. Like some kind of Bob Geldof of the UK underground, SUGAR HORSE have taken it upon themselves to squeeze as many of their friends as possible onto a single 20-minute EP. And not only that, they’ve made it work. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised given their track record, particularly off the back of last year’s stellar The Live Long After full-length, but look past the litany of guests and genres housed within the record’s four tracks and you’ll find a quartet of relentless drive and talent, no matter how much they try and tell you otherwise.
“We quite like the idea of constantly releasing things,” explains guitarist/vocalist Ashley Tubb of the band’s impressive work rate. “Since we kicked off properly with the DRUJ EP we’ve pretty much put out two things a year, whether it be a single and an EP or a single and an album or whatever. We wanted to keep that momentum going, but didn’t really have the time to do a whole album so we were like ‘we’ll do another EP’, but we didn’t want it to be just another EP.”
“We thought of doing a split or just working with a single band,” he continues. “And then we thought it’d be kind of nuts to try and put three on every song, which was a wicked idea at the start and then when you have to herd all the cats into submitting stuff on time, that’s when it becomes difficult.”
Of course, many of those cats have already found much love in the pages of Distorted Sound. Kate Davies from PUPIL SLICER, three quarters of CONJURER, Debbie Gough from HERIOT, two former members of BLACK PEAKS… the danger with starting a list is always that you’ll forget someone so we’ll stop there, but suffice to say SUGAR HORSE haven’t done anything by halves here. To get weirdly hypothetical for a second, if 30-40 years down the line your grandkids were to ask you what the UK scene looked like in the early 2020s, you could do a lot worse than point them to this brief yet brilliant snapshot.
“People were insanely receptive to doing it, which was crazy,” smiles Tubb. “We had an initial hit list of people that would be insanely cool to get on it, and we only got two no replies from two massive reaches, and then one person was up for it but then heard the song and they were like, ‘it’s not really in my wheelhouse’, so they bowed out gracefully, but I won’t embarrass any of those people by mentioning them here. But otherwise, we got the hit list, which is nuts. It’s mind blowing that people were so receptive to doing it for often very little or no money!”
Crucial to the record’s success is the fact that each of the guests, who we should add aren’t all from the UK – singer-songwriter Nuala Honan arguably provides the record’s real showstopper around halfway through Gutted and she’s from Australia – were given complete freedom. As Tubb tells it, “We were like ‘you can literally do whatever you want, but we’re not guaranteeing we’ll keep it’. But we didn’t cut that much actually. We were pretty free with it, and some people just did things that were already there and then other people brought entirely new things to it that we weren’t expecting at all.”
Perhaps as you’d expect from such a process, the results presented on Waterloo Teeth are stunningly diverse. That in 20 minutes we go from the noisy grinding of Disco Loadout to the melodic, proggy grandeur of Super Army Soldiers without the whole thing feeling like a mess is some feat indeed, and more than anything a testament to SUGAR HORSE’s refusal to stay in any one lane for any longer than they have to.
“We’re viewed as a heavy band, but I wouldn’t say that any of us view ourselves as heavy music fans,” suggests Tubb. “I don’t mean that we don’t like heavy music – there are tonnes of heavy bands that we all like – but we like quite a large variety of stuff. So the fact we dart between these things is just because we like a tonne of stuff. I’m not shitting on bands that are just heavy all the time, because I like a tonne of those bands, but I would get really bored if I had to do that. It’s just keeping ourselves interested more than anything else, and I like a vocal melody.”
As for the record’s life after release, Tubb laughs off our suggestion that the band might try and recreate it with all the guests live as taking the cat-herding to a whole new level, but he does offer the following, “Our songs are pretty easy and we pretty much know how to play all of them. So if any of them turn up to shows that we’re playing and they want to do one of the songs that they’re on, they’re more than welcome.”
Lastly, he concludes, “I think we would definitely do it again, just maybe not with as many people. I feel like for electronic artists and people in hip-hop, this kind of thing isn’t seen as a big move, they constantly do it. It’s fun. You get some kind of interesting result at the end of it most of the time, so why not?”
Waterloo Teeth is out now via Small Pond.
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