Caldicot, UK · garage pop

The Bug Club

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Welsh garage-pop machine — two-minute songs, endless charm, home-crowd advantage, and a work rate that shames most bands.

The Bug Club began as a friendship between Sam Willmett and Tilly Harris, who met at school in Caldicot at fourteen and started playing music together. The band became official in 2016, while the pair were at university, when Sam's brother Ross joined; the name comes from Ross's childhood circle of friends who collected insects. Early sets were blues songs written by Ross, played at small local shows, including one supporting Status Quo at Caldicot Castle.

By the time those early self-released EPs came out, the lineup had settled to Sam, Tilly and drummer Dan Matthew, still working the college circuit around Cardiff. The blues gave way to something tighter: two-minute songs, jangling guitar, simple basslines and call-and-response vocals, with a clear debt to the Velvet Underground, early Jonathan Richman and the deadpan end of British indie.

The band's debut single, 'We Don't Need Room For Loving', appeared in 2021, followed quickly by the EPs Launching Moondream One and Pure Particles, both on the Sheffield label Bingo Records. Another EP, Intelectuals, arrived the following year alongside UK touring and a show in Madrid.

Their debut album, Green Dream In F#, followed in October 2022, promoted by the singles 'It's Art' and 'Love Is a Painting', both drawing far more radio play and streaming attention than anything they'd released before. Around the same time the band signed to We Are Busy Bodies for North American releases and later to Sub Pop, and played their first shows outside the UK, in the Netherlands.

In between, they recorded a set of entirely new songs under the pseudonym Mr Anyway's Holey Spirits, released as a live album never meant to be repeated. Their second studio album, Rare Birds: Hour of Song, came out in October 2023, running past an hour and adding spoken-word interludes and instrumentation beyond their usual jangle.

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garage pop