!!! (Chk Chk Chk)

About

Wednesday 5th October | 2022 | 7pm - 11pm
Metronome
General admission: £16.50 + booking fee
Student members: £5.00 + booking fee

There's this thing about making art where in order to make it feel exciting for yourself, you have to reinvent yourself each time. You have to keep pushing. Go at it like a beginner. Take a white wall and color it in. Every new thing you make has to feel like a statement, the best new version of yourself. Dance punk royals !!! know the feeling well—they've been releasing urgent, obliterative music for 25 years. Music, for !!!, has to be a place where anything can happen. To quote frontman Nic Offer "We've always been pushing towards something stranger and weirder. We had to keep pushing on."

The band's ninth record, Let it Be Blue, takes that feeling of constant, radical transformation to new, untapped zones. It's a record of sparse dance music. The kind of stuff you want to put on loud, let loose, go to the bar to get a drink only to abandon your plans because the song that just came on was too good not to dance to.

Let it Be Blue is a computer record, but it doesn't feel like it. Featuring production from Patrick Ford, Let it Be Blue is the product of file sharing, trading stems, song particles, little ideas on their way to being fully realized dance tracks. It was conceived during the past two years, with dreams of future dancefloors very much on the brain. The resulting 11 songs are some of the band's most production focused offerings to date. They're crystalline, full of sub-bass and drums.

Let it Be Blue is a record about discovery, uncovering new parts of yourself, going there.

How many dance records start off with an acoustic track? Let it Be Blue does. If serious in intent, it's cheeky in placement at the beginning of a dance record. It's like taking a first step in a new place before everything changes in weird and excellent ways. It's kind of like a Pandora's Box. Open it up, the whole world shifts and transforms around you. There's also a sense of melancholy and hope on the record. That's where the title comes from. Instead of the finality of let it be, blue adds a feeling of acceptance that things will pass, that melancholy and tragedy are temporary. Mostly though, Let it Be Blue will make you really want to get down and dance.