Mewn

“Imbued with a deep intention to draw on emotions”
- DIY Magazine
 
“Not even the sky can limit the potential that Mewn have created”
- So Young Magazine 

Modern Sky UK

Manchester five-piece, Mewn’s construction site of song, precisely and elaborately fixing up a framework of prose and elongated pop, summarising the anxiety, longing, loss and resolution of what it is to have a human heart, reveals a new tower in the form their latest EP – Ask Me Now - OUT TODAY on Modern Sky. With the release of final track, Fake Retreat, the band commits their listeners to a breathtaking tightrope walk over voids of inky futility whilst holding on tight to hope.
 
Writing in the ornate, inner-city virtuosity of Durutti Column and Portishead, whilst linking arms with the parlour-room poetry of Pulp and The Smiths, Mewn are of and outside the city from which they absorb frequent sombre, dark winter-grey moods and more modern, neon-imbued creative sensibilities. Taking reviewers with them on an open road of possibility upon the release of their last single, Ask Me Now, the band’s lineage in looking up to brooding, chamber pop originators such as Perfume Genius and Tindersticks, the curdled beauty in Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, while looking across to contemporaries, Black Country New Road, wasn’t lost on any listeners.
 
Committing the entire EP project delicate piece by delicate piece to file in the company of Orielles and King Krule producer/collaborator, Joel Pratchett at Eve Studios in Stockport, Mewn cast their bridge over the chasm between analogue and digital worlds as readily as the gap between wonder and worry. Fake Retreat, the EP’s second track, is perhaps as good an example as any of the push-and-pull dynamics that keep Mewn aloft as one of the UK’s most interesting, still-emerging bands.

Pianist and co-songwriter, Matt Protz says: “We were due to record in a few weeks we had to come up with something. I started playing some chords on the piano and Daniel started playing a Latin-style drum beat he’d had for a while and very quickly we had a song. The start is perhaps reminiscent of Fat White Family’s ‘Surfs Up’ with its combination of darkness and rhythm, but as the song builds it becomes increasingly melodic, breaking into a stadium sized ending that draws on acts like Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen.”
 
Marking the release of the EP, their third following the 2021 release of their debut Landscapes EP and 2022’s Such As This EP, the band – made up of Daniel Bluer (lead vocals, guitar) alongside Rachel Bell (guitar, backing vocals), Protz (keys), Daniel Cowman (drums) and Tom Allen (bass) – have offered listeners further track-by-track insight into the collection’s songs.
 
In introducing the full, four-track collection, Bluer adds: “We have seen the EP stage of our career as a chance to develop our sonic and emotional range, whilst always taking inspiration from the clarity and the precision of the pop song. We are never stationary; we have and will continue to evolve and get down to the essence of what we are trying to make.”