“The mornings are pretty nice, before things get too serious,” The Bug Club’s guitarist and vocalist Sam Willmett says, his words tumbling out like ten small shrugs. “You can get up and bash out a song or two or something.”
Can you, though? Did you bash out a song or two or something this morning? Did you stand there, with toast crumbs stuck to the corner of your mouth, and whip up the sort of indie-pop hit that might get you signed to Sub Pop?
“I always feel like a dickhead when I say this, but I usually make a nice hot cup of tea and then try to smash [a song] in one go,” Willmett continues, before his co-writer, bassist and vocalist Tilly Harris, cuts in witheringly: “The arrogance, the arrogance.” They collapse into laughter before Willmett recovers to say: “It’s not even really on purpose.”
The beauty of it, of course, is that The Bug Club’s music retains this low-stakes energy: their songs have wonderful immediacy to them and their melodies whirr with the sort of tossed-off brilliance you can’t fake. There is nothing big time, no hint of a flex, about their work rate. It’s just people making stuff up because they enjoy making stuff up.
“Don’t even think about it, just do it. Whatever comes out is probably the best you could make anyway” – Tilly Harris
While they have been writing together since school, The Bug Club proper formed in Caldicot, a market town nestled between Chepstow and Newport in south Wales, in 2016. They released their fizzing jolt of a first single into the vacuum of the pandemic and they haven’t stopped since. Last year, besides playing hundreds of shows, they put out two records – one of them a live album by a fake group they’d invented to support themselves on tour, the other a 47-track odyssey called ‘Rare Birds: Hour of Song’, which they likened to “south Wales’ ‘Double Nickels On The Dime’.”
“If we didn’t have songs to write and arrange when we’re at home, I would go a bit stir-crazy,” Harris adds. “It’s nice to have a bit of structure. Weirdly, when you’re on tour, there’s loads of structure and you’re getting into a good routine. And then when you’re home it goes out the window.”
In August The Bug Club will return with another new LP. When compared with their previous outing, ‘On The Intricate Inner Workings Of The System…’ is lean and mean. Recorded with Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard’s Tom Rees at his Rat Trap studio in Cardiff, its 11 songs crackle with incisive melodies and funny pop culture-addled lyrics – they reference The Great Escape’s Virgil Hilts one minute, and move on to the horror of Lonsdale slip on daps the next – but they’re in and out in under 26 minutes. Zero fat.
“Our drummer [Dan Matthew] left so we’ve got a few friends playing at the minute,” Willmett says. “They keep telling us that the bars are weird, they’re all half-things. But it’s where it’s been nipped off for getting boring.”
The record balances stomping garage-rock for short attention spans with Guided By Voices-style weirdo pop made for shouting along to with your weirdo mates. Taking it in, it’s not a surprise that, during a trip to the US in 2023, the Bug Club caught the ears of people at Sub Pop, the Seattle label that reshaped modern rock as stewards of Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden and then did it all over again with the Shins et al in the early 2000s.
That history might weigh on some bands and leave their mark on the records that follow a dramatic shift in profile and circumstances for their creators. But you realise the idea is ridiculous once you spend a few minutes talking about music with Willmett and Harris. ‘On The Intricate Inner Workings Of The System…’ would exist with or without the Sub Pop logo beneath the cellophane, which you’d like to think is why the label cared about the band in the first place.
“I feel like it should be second nature to make stuff,” Harris says. “Don’t even think about it, just do it. Whatever comes out is probably the best you could make anyway.”
The Bug Club’s ‘On The Intricate Inner Workings Of The System…’ is out on August 30 via Sub Pop