Manchester indie/alt/shoegaze band Cruush have aired the video for their new single “Stick In The Mud“.
The song features on the band’s debut EP ‘Wishful Thinker’, set to arrive on April 14th via Heist or Hit. Get it here.
Speaking about it, they say: “This is our ‘relaxing’ song, A tune you can get lost in at full volume with big, dirty 90s slacker vibes. It has the kind of beat you can whip up meringues or mud pies to. We really wanted to keep it stripped back and non-busy. The power is in its simplicity. In the studio we threw the drums through a cool delay because it was sounding a touch too much like Queen. The words reflect on expiring friendships. No one speaks about the breakdowns of friendships all that often but they can be just as upsetting as relationships in our opinion.”
Watch/listen below.
Harbouring echoes of shoegaze bands such as Slowdive, it’s a breath of fresh air within Manchester’s typical indie scene. Creating shoegaze for digital natives, a generation for whom pluralism is commonplace, Cruush pull at the brain-bypass grandeur of the genre they love, while lacing the punch with a contemporary aesthetic.
While more traditional approaches to shoegaze suffocate the vocal and message, Lead singer Amber’s melodic splendour is antidote-like, stealing attention from the tidal waves of noise with queasy timbres of disillusion, doubt and confusion. It’s on this that the band are able to pivot into grungier textures, emerging once in a while to let sunlight hit the skin, before plunging back into the gloaming & grunt of distortion.