The world is brutal but there are cherry trees in blossom. This is the philosophy that underpins Yorkshire-born post-punk poets Deadletter, and their bruising, beautiful debut album Hysterical Strength.
“It's punishing but there's also fucking beauty out there,” explains frontman Zac Lawrence, who, with life-long friends Alfie Husband and George Ullyott, may just have turned in one of 2024’s most urgent and vital listens – a record that, right down to its title, relishes the contradictions of modern life. “Being able to take something disgusting or disgraceful and make it sound nice through the power of music, that juxtaposition appeals to me,” Lawrence adds. The result is twelve tracks of motorik rhythms and angular guitars, adorned by smoky saxophone and baritone-belted lyrics about flickering television sets and dilapidated town centres decked with decapitated bodies. Its strengths are hysterical indeed.
For the trio, this album has been a long time coming. “We started this band in 2020, but it’s an amalgam of the past ten years of our lives in a lot of ways,” says Lawrence, who began playing music with drummer Husband and bassist Ullyott on the streets of their hometowns, Moulton and Robin’s Bay. “We’d get a lot of people on hen-do’s, shouting: ‘play this and I’ll give you a tenner!’” laughs Husband, reflecting on those early days – a far cry from the frenzied, sweaty communions that their live shows resemble today.
Their transformation from Bob Dylan covers to one of Britain’s most exciting new bands began one afternoon in Lawrence’s teens, with the accidental discovery of one Mark E. Smith. “I came across The Fall – the song Wings, it was – and I’d honestly never heard anything like it before. I’d grown up in a house where my mum’s favourite band were The Stranglers but I’d never heard anything as out there as this. The guitar line at the start making me think: ‘What the fuck is this?!’ and I fell into a proper Fall hole from there,” he laughs. The Fall led to Captain Beefheart. Beefheart led to German experimenters Can. The singer’s penchant for winding lyrical mazes atop post-punk instrumentation was beginning to take shape.
“We’re all quite different in our tastes,” says the Nick Drake-inspired Ullyott, with the Massive Attack-obsessed Husband nodding next to him in agreement. “If you were to isolate the words, you could tell where it comes from. If you were to isolate the rhythm section, you could tell where it comes from…” But together, “it becomes a bit of a magic combo,” adds Lawrence, “not really like anything else.”
He can say that again. On the group’s rise to the brink of breakout success, outlets like Dork, God Is In The TV, DIY and Yuck Magazine have championed the group as equals to acclaimed acts like Fontaine’s DC, Viagra Boys and Yard Act, not to mention clear inspirations John Cooper Clark and Lawrence’s beloved The Fall. But where many British post-punk bands over the years have rebelled against the here and now, documenting the drudgery and inequality of British life over glorious noise, Lawrence’s lyrics are Russian literature-inspired studies of human anthropology. Bygones, for example, on Hysterical Strength, is a treatise on “how lenient death can make you towards a person who did wrong.” Elsewhere, you’re never more than a verse or two away from a “daggered devil” or vomiting florist.
There is real world political fury beneath his colourful rhymes, however. “I am definitely heavily influenced by my environment,” says Lawrence. “One way or another, what’s going on around me finds a way into my lyrics. Deus Ex Machina was written while we were on tour. We were in Italy in a little town and I remember checking the headlines and seeing that Rishi Sunak had just come into power, replacing Liz Truss. So it’s a song about us being a fucking joke really, in all honesty.”
“We’re always hunting for that simple thing that sounds great,” says Husband, explaining the group’s bold, direct sound. “There's so many complicated listens around nowadays, where you really have to fucking brace yourself before you listen to the album. We try to steer away from that. Even though it's angular, it's not up its own arse,” he laughs. Complimenting that sound are the additions of the group’s newer members: guitarists Will King and Sam Jones, and saxophonist Poppy Richler.
“Zack has always got his lyrics ready to go,” says Ullyott, describing how the group’s songs come together. “Then we get in a room together and just kind of grind it out. We like to work fast. No time for sitting around thinking about fancy chords. It’s all about the energy of a song.” Translating that energy to tape was their biggest priority when it came to recording Hysterical Strength, which they crafted over two intense weeks in a studio on an industrial estate in Saffron Walden. “It’s one of those things where you’ve gotta remember why people turn up to our gigs, why they pay to see us: that energy. So it was like, let’s just play to our strengths, get it down then fuck off,” grins Husband.
Which might make Hysterical Strength sound like a scrappy DIY noise album. Make that mistake at your own peril. Produced by famed British producer Jim Abiss (Arctic Monkeys, Adele), there’s clarity to the chaos across these twelve tracks. “We could have just done it on our own and recorded it in some fucking shed. But we wanted it to be something that sounded good,” Husband laughs.
Good is one word for this scintillating debut. Confrontational, adrenaline-spiking, enveloping – these are others. A lot of pain and effort went into making Hysterical Strength worthy of these adjectives, Lawrence explains. “There were some great moments where things all went smoothly. And then there have been some moments where it was like pulling out your hair, your teeth, your nails, and then eventually moving on to your eyes. Gouge away!” Now, the band are setting their sights on taking their sound to the masses, welcoming more and more people into the frenzied communion of their live shows. “Before we were musicians, we just loved music,” Husband says. “The feeling that we get from the music we love, it makes me so happy to think we can give people those sorts of emotions too.”
In other words, in a brutal world, Deadletter want to represent to listeners a cherry tree in blossom; a poetic post-punk provocation of a band that makes you think and makes you dance, as a refuge from the terror.
