London alternative/indie quartet Stereo Honey only have one EP (Monuments, 1st December 2017) to their name thus far, but they have already done poetic justice to their stage moniker. (This was inspired by a song title from The Daysleepers and their affinity for band names such as Audioslave, Soundgarden, and Deftonestheir). The output from vocalist/guitarist Pete Restrick, guitarist/keyboardist Nicky Boiardi, drummer Jake Black and bassist Ben Edwards strikes a fine balance between the intimate and the anthemic, with hauntingly angelic vocals adorning stadium-sized melodies. They have been compared to fellow British musicians like Radiohead, The Boxer Rebellion, and Raised By Swans, while also falling in tandem with the soul-baring honesty and light-at-end-of-the-tunnel aesthetic of contemporaries like Aquilo, Face+heel, and BANNERS.
The band excels at carving out a rare breed of melancholy that is heart-wrenching yet delicately sublime. Dark undercurrents often inform their work, e.g. an abusive relationship in “The Heart” and the unsubtle “Through the Dark”. Restrick’s riveting falsetto is put to particularly searing use on “The Bay”, which was inspired by the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster that took place when he was growing up nearby:
“A lot of what I write is almost story based. We’ve got this track coming out called “The Bay”, and I grew up in the North and my grandparents used to have this caravan on Grange-Over-Sands near Morecambe Bay. I used to play there when I was a kid on the beach and the tide’s really dangerous, like, it comes in like a pincer, and in 2004, 23 Chinese migrant workers drowned.”
“It’s proper deep, man. I remember when it happened and it just, it cut me, because I used to play there, so I had like a physical connection and a memory of that…. And honestly, I find it easy to write stuff like that, that’s not necessarily about my own feelings or my own emotions, but I try and create a narrative or a story and write a song around that. So “The Bay” is like, out of the 23 people that died, they didn’t recover two of the bodies and so it’s like a love story about these two people. I imagined that they were together and holding onto one another. But basically, yeah, we write really happy songs, don’t we?”
Pete Restrick, Wonderland
Even without knowledge of its historical reference, the song strikes you with its haunting and strangely uplifting desperation: ‘I'm just a drop in the ocean/ A tiny grain of sand/ I'm tryna' run for the shoreline/ But we're miles away from land’. The energetic drum beat and guitar strings quieten as Restrick spells out the doom that awaits his drowning (you can interpret this literally or metaphorically) lovers: ‘Where death greets you/ Like a long lost friend’. The ocean offers a warm yet potentially fatal embrace as Restrick insists that his protagonists hold on to the possibility of returning to the shore - and of decades of life ahead, to be cherished as a couple: ‘Here comes the tide/ Wait for a lifeline/ Place your fingers in mine/ Wait for a lifetime, again’.
