Wigan, UK · indie · indie rock

The Lathums

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Wigan four-piece with a chart-topping debut behind them — jangling, plainspoken guitar pop that reads like short stories about a northern town.

The Lathums formed in Wigan in 2018, when a tutor at The Music Project, a stage school in the town's Pemberton area, placed four students in the same project group. Alex Moore and Scott Concepcion already knew each other before the band came together. They took their name from a local venue they had played, and pronounce it "La-thums" rather than the more obvious reading.

Their songs pair clean, jangling guitar lines with Moore's plain northern vocal delivery, and the lyrics tend towards small-scale observation rather than anthem-building, even when the arrangements swell. The band has drawn comparisons to earlier British guitar groups from The Smiths onward, though their arrangements lean lighter and more acoustic than most of their peers.

An early single, "The Great Escape," caught the ear of Tim Burgess of the Charlatans, who invited the band to play a set. Island Records signed them in March 2020, with planned support slots for Paul Weller and Blossoms postponed by the pandemic. During lockdown they released the acoustic ballad "All My Life," written when Moore was sixteen and produced by the Coral's James Skelly at Liverpool's Parr Street Studio.

They released their debut album, How Beautiful Life Can Be, in 2021, which reached number one in the UK. Original bassist Lewis Halliwell had by then been replaced by Johnny Cunliffe, who left the band in 2022 and was succeeded by Matty Murphy. During that transition the Lathums supported the Killers, and Moore joined Brandon Flowers on stage for a shared lead vocal on the album's title track.

A second album, From Nothing to a Little Bit More, followed in 2023, trailed by singles including "Say My Name" and "Turmoil." "Say My Name" was named Radio X's Record of the Year in 2022, months before the album's release.

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