Since forming in a Brixton pub garden nine years ago, London quartet Fightmilk have become a mainstay of the UK’s indie punk scene. While their first two albums showcased a plucky indie-pop side, their third outing, ‘No Souvenirs’, proves to be a more raucous affair.
Partly inspired by a shared love for Jimmy Eat World, Lily Rae (vocals/guitar), Alex Wisgard (guitar/vocals), Healey (bass), and Nick (drums), ‘No Souvenirs’ retains Fightmilk‘s lyrical wit as the quartet adapt to becoming thirty-somethings. Throughout its eleven songs, Rae’s self-awareness and humour are used as catharsis to difficult situations. Whether that’s being fired from Bridesmaid duty on ‘My Best Me’, or the persistent questioning of possible parenthood (‘Eating For Two’) or simply accepting the fact she’s turned ’30’. Moments such as ‘Back From Tour’ and ‘Yearning and Pining’ musically thrive with a youthful spirit, yet maintain a lyrical rawness and honesty that threads ‘No Souvenirs’ together.
When it is paired with an array of luscious melodies that are delivered in various forms. ‘Summer Bodies’ is a spunky mix of indie-punk and doo-wop. ‘Inferno’ swirls with a laid-back power-pop quality. While ‘Canine’s interpersonal relationship metaphor is joined with a favourable chord progression.
Much like the album’s lyrical nature, the artwork for ‘No Souvenirs’ is also personal to the members of Fightmilk. As the band explain in this ‘Behind The Artwork’ feature, the album cover consists of “nostalgic trinkets” that have a link to the band in some shape or form. Some are direct links to songs on ‘No Souvenirs’, and others are in-jokes or references to old songs.
As Fightmilk explain, documenting their friendship is an important element of their DIY collective mindset, as is moving forward together, both as people and as a band.
‘No Souvenirs’ means exactly that – you can’t take it with you. Lily wrote the song as a way of tackling grief before we’d realised what the theme of the album was even going to be, and it turned out to be the message of growing, the acceptance of aging and death kept appearing… and I guess the theme of being bitten on the arse by a dog. So with that in mind, it made sense for ‘No Souvenirs’ to be the album’s centrepiece and to steer us conceptually.
The artwork is a display case full of… well, souvenirs. It’s so easy to place memories onto objects and sometimes impossible to part ways with them, when in reality someone will probably put them all in the bin when we leave this mortal coil. But despite telling ourselves this, we’re really sentimental as a band. The cover is full of these nostalgic trinkets, they each represent the song’s themes (The lifeguard whistle for ‘Paddling Pool’, for example, or seashells for ‘Banger #7’), or are a very direct lift from a line in the track – the inhaler is a less subtle one (on ‘Yearning and Pining’, Lily yells “LEGS SO GOOD I REACH FOR MY INHALER”), whilst the ‘scorched flannel’ is a reference to a line in ‘That Thing You Did’.
Lily and Alex are our resident archivists. If you want to know what the seventh song we played at our first gig was, one of them will know (it was ‘NYE’). Between them, they have Polaroids, letters, birthday cards, empty perfume bottles, button badges, and all sorts from years ago that would mean nothing to anyone else but can instantly take us back to a memory only the four of us would understand.
Anything on the cover that doesn’t represent a song is either a callback to older material, a slightly tongue-in-cheek in-joke or a treasured scrap of scribbles that one day became a song. Finding a setlist we’ve saved from a show can make us relive the time the car broke down on tour, and we had to physically push it around a car park to jump-start the engine. Or a matchbox from a venue in Germany acquired from a bar in Hamburg where the air was chewably thick with the smoke from continental cigarettes.
A frequent conversation topic in the tour van is which venues have closed, which practice spaces rent has gone up, and which bands have called it a day. DIY music is constantly up against so many challenges and it’s an ongoing fear (especially in a digital landscape) that if we don’t document our small music scene, we’ll lose any memory of it. How does that Kinks song go again? “People take pictures of each other just to prove that they really existed…”
Fightmilk has always been, and will always be, a labour of love, and we wanted the inner sleeve to document the band and our friendship over the years – you’ll notice how many different haircuts appear in all the photos. Once the last server goes offline, what would a historian have to work with if they had to prove we were a real band? How many moments did we fail to capture, and will they all blur into one when we look back years later anyway?
With this in mind, a huge theme of the album is looking back and also moving on. The hangover from our twenties is still lurking and we’re all trying not to bring any of that angst, self-doubt and uncertainty into the future. You can’t take it with you. But why would you want to? Much better to keep the past under glass, to be broken in case of emergency, and admired when you want to remember that you really were there.
BTS photos taken by Alex. Band portrait taken by Carl Farrugia
‘No Souvenirs’ by Fightmilk is out now on Fika Recordings / INH Records.
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