This is our favourite new band. If you’ve never come across this East London trio then we imagine they’ll become your favourite new band too in a few minutes time. You have been warned. So delightfully irresistible and jammed with gorgeous merriment is their music that we dare you not to be dancing around your living room with a broad smile.
This is what we need in music, and it doesn’t happen nearly often enough. With Real Fur you get all sorts of influences cleverly congregating like a like a flock of well-trained pigeons ready to shit on the bands around them. Their congruous parts creating something altogether more original and interesting than their individual components.
Take the track Birds for example. You can start counting up the ingredients, as it begins with a little bit of winding, flicked guitars that The Edge or John Frusciante would be proud of, before Matt McGough’s funked basslines break it all up like a playful rugby tackle. Then Leo Duncan’s vocals come in, sounding somewhere between Jim Kerr and David Byrne. However, once the coil’s wound up to the chorus you reach a very special twist, as the voice switches up to a high pitched call, as Leo speaks to the skint millions, “every penny I spend is a penny I owe“.
They’re still at the early stages, with only a few demos floating around, but everything we’ve heard holds that magical, light touch, of the kind that wouldn’t feel out of place on Paul Simon’s Graceland. Two of the trio used to be in the band Cheka, but left to form this new outfit one year ago, playing their first show last February. They remain unsigned to date, although there is understandably a fair bit of interest – are you reading this Mr A&R man!?
We adore bands such as Foals, Two Door Cinema Club, Tanlines, Fiction and Loose Talk Costs Lives, as the seriousness is removed more and more with each new band’s arrival, until you get to Real Fur and find the fun button permanently switched on. Just like all these bands, with their Talking Heads-inspired oddities, you still find the twinkle inside the tropical guitars, with a hatful of contagious choruses and an ability to create hooks so addictive you’d think there was a Coca-Cola-inspired illegal secret ingredient.
One unusual but impossibly charming point of interest, is that Real Fur host these special events around London, called ‘Safari Funk parties‘, in everyday establishments such as launderettes. They plan to support their debut single, Animal, which is planned for a release in May, by touring launderettes around the UK, including one in Brighton. However, before all this you can watch them play our beach-side home on Thursday 24th February in support of David’s Lyre, at the more sensibly-traditional venue, The Hope.
This kind of band, with this style of adorable, intelligent music, delivered with this brilliant, energising attitude is an absolute find. What seals the deal though, is not the boundaries being pushed, or the addictive satisfaction of hitting play once more immediately after each song ends, but that in music we have something that can truly transform your mood and positively affect your spirits. It’s their ability to create smiles, as much as they create fantastic music, that we think earns them the moniker of our ‘new favourite band’. (MB)
REAL FUR – BIRDS
REAL FUR – ANIMAL
REAL FUR – PRIDE
