MUTE TV’s debut single “Drag Me Down” arrives not as a calling card so much as a declaration of intent \u2014 or perhaps more accurately, a declaration of war. Against comfort. Against the smoothed-out, algorithmically optimised approximation of rock music that dominates the streaming charts. Against the very idea that a song needs to be sanded down before it’s fit for public consumption.<\/p>
The band \u2014 Tim James on bass and lead vocals, Joe Mountain on guitar, Ade Poole behind the kit \u2014 recorded this live, which is either an act of courage or of recklessness, and the finest music has always struggled to tell the difference between the two. Engineer Chris Ellul, who knows a thing or two about how a band sounds when it’s operating on instinct rather than calculation from his work with The Heavy, had the good sense to simply capture what was happening in the room rather than impose anything upon it. The result is a track that breathes, that sweats, that occasionally feels as though it might lurch sideways off its own axis.<\/p>
The guitars here are not pretty. They are the kind of sharp-edged, serrated-riff guitars that your neighbours would object to. They lock into the rhythm section with the grim purposefulness of something that has made up its mind and will not be talked out of it. Poole’s drumming drives forward with a physical insistence that recalls the great noise-pop rhythm sections \u2014 the Pixies at their most blunt, Ride before they got tasteful, perhaps a touch of Sonic Youth’s motorik aggression filtered through a very English sense of controlled desperation.<\/p>
Because desperation is the emotional key here. MUTE TV make what they themselves call “noisy love songs about joy, despair and desperation,” and “Drag Me Down” sits firmly in the latter two categories, the joy arriving only as a kind of perverse release \u2014 the relief of finally giving voice to something that has been pressing against the inside of the ribcage for too long. James’s vocals carry this tension with conviction, riding the track’s abrasive undertow without ever capsizing into melodrama.<\/p>
What is quietly impressive is how anthemic the whole thing becomes without ever sacrificing its rawness. This is not an easy trick. Plenty of bands mistake volume for intensity, or confuse noise with meaning. MUTE TV understand that the abrasion has to serve the song, that the distortion has to carry emotional weight rather than simply obscure the absence of it. “Drag Me Down” achieves both simultaneously \u2014 it is simultaneously a song you could bellow along to in a sticky-floored venue at midnight and one that retains a genuinely unsettling edge the morning after.<\/span><\/p> The production, with mixing handled by Joe Mountain himself alongside additional work by Jon Walker \u2014 who has brought his ear for texture to records by Overmono and Warmduscher \u2014 finds exactly the right register. Nothing is overcooked. The lo-fi impulse is honoured without becoming an affectation.<\/span><\/p> Formed only last year, MUTE TV operate in a lineage that runs from the Pixies through shoegaze through the noisier edges of Britpop and out the other side into whatever this current moment in guitar music is becoming. They are not reinventing anything, and they are not trying to. What they are doing is playing their particular game with uncommon conviction and very little patience for half-measures.<\/span><\/p> “Drag Me Down” is the first release on Medical Grade Music, and if this label intends to continue in this vein, it is one worth paying attention to. The debut single of a band is rarely their most complete statement \u2014 it is usually their most anxious one, the one haunted by the fear of first impressions. This does not sound anxious. It sounds like a band who know exactly what they are doing and are daring you to keep up.<\/span><\/p> Loud, tense, and resolutely unsmoothed. Quite right, too.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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