Slowly generating a set of buzzsaw punk songs and heady hype over five years since forming in their school uniforms around the small Cambridgeshire towns that had no chance of containing them, bright and brand new, jam-kicking four-piece, HUNGRY release their new single, THE JIG. Out Now, the ripping rebuke of bad, elitist, dishonest, establishment rule shows a band of political head and heart, while the hooks and riffs of their wild new tune rattle through in party-starting, circle-pit cultivating fashion.
Believing that, if you’ve got something to say you should say it and that the least complicated of musical endeavours are often the most effective, the currently Manchester-based HUNGRY, led into the fray by front man and songwriter, Jacob Peck, have caused heads to turn with their direct approach. With live shows in the city sold out, early praise from grassroots writers published and a world turning on a bent axis enough to inspire more high-energy, cord-punk takedowns of sick society, the band’s impressive growth draws on fertile ground after less than a year in the city.
When it comes to The Jig’s less-than-three-minute highspeed joyride into the world of one of the most exciting of raw talents to emerge from any city in some time, it’s clear that HUNGRY are calling time on stuffy power hierarchies.
Peck says: “What has inspired the song? It’s 13 years of Conservative rule and a neoliberal orthodoxy that has given the UK a callous and self-righteous ruling class that views anyone beneath as overdramatic and lazy. It seems of late that the governmental system may be revealing itself, one of corruption, dishonesty and embezzlement. In many ways the lyrics call for a collective consciousness of that.”
Celebrating a happy union with producer, Dean Glover, whose experience producing cult punk legends such as The Membranes and Inca Babies appears to have fed into the vital capture of HUNGRY’s live energy, resulting in their first, four-take, rush and cut recording arriving as an authentic document of a band set to thrill with thoughtful, whizzbang punk rock and roll.
Peck is joined in HUNGRY by drummer Stan Rankin, guitarist Kit Thomas and bassist Jas Malig all of whom have enjoyed the shared experience of cross-country journeys with instruments in hand, nights sleeping on bloody sheets in cut-price hotels and placing the occasional musical firecracker in front of audiences at sleepy village festivals.