bdrmm are happiest amid the gloom

Ryan Smith is rather coy when asked about this shiny corporate company they work with. “We’ve been made to sign a non-disclosure agreement and if we talked about it, we’d just be a three-piece,” he winks, bordering on a Two Shell-level of mysteriousness. But Smith’s witty reply conforms to MicroTech’s vision of removing individuality. Its fake Instagram account is flooded with soulless stock imagery of the pharmaceutical industry combined with clips of mock adverts endorsing AI to help you socialise and sync your dreams. It’s all with the end goal that hopefully you will “become more by becoming less.”

The quartet’s satire on the ridiculousness of everyday life through their MicroTech marketing campaign superbly promotes the dystopian themes of their third album, Microtonic. Indeed, guitarist Joe Vickers doesn’t take long to rant about Elon Musk as BEST FIT chats to him and Smith on the day of Trump’s tech billionaire-populated inauguration.

“You just sit there wide-mouthed at the stuff that happens now, in disbelief,” he says. “There’s no accountability.” To Smith, it’s become “quite natural” to write about a world hellbent on becoming a Black Mirror or Brass Eye episode. “It now seems like a fucking source of entertainment, despite the fact it’s real life,” he says.

“The first two records, I was speaking about a lot of personal stuff going on, whereas now I don’t have anything personal left to give,” Smith continues. “I wanted to hone in on real world problems instead of just me, because there’s a lot of pressure on yourself when you’re trying to talk about all the stuff that’s gone wrong and be honest and relatable.”

The band’s first album, Bedroom, was one of the better things to come out of the pandemic, thrusting post-rock and shoegaze into a wall of sound that analysed the aftermath of a break-up. Its escapism still resonates on Microtonic, but the sound also builds from album number two – I Don’t Know – on which the band started exploring how to make electronic music together. Smith’s only lament is that all this intricate experimentation is “making it hard on myself… you’ll see us look a lot more worried on stage – we can’t just fucking ‘Sonic Youth’ it.”

But Vickers adds, “To make another guitar record wouldn’t have been true to ourselves – we’ve all been into electronic music since we first found the band… and it’s definitely a continuation of what we always wanted to achieve.” Smith says that shoegaze “overtook” the first album, and on the second album they wanted to just dip their toes in, which helped bridge to this more confident, exciting-to-make third record.

On Microtonic, bdrmm have used the endless possibilities of electronica to rework the quintessential yearning that has always underpinned their sound. “Lake Disappointment” is a more rave-friendly track with distorting, whirling bass that would sit snugly on a Joy Division album, and album opener “goit” starts out in the dance realm too before it spirals into acidy undertones accompanied by a searing sense of dread, with these more expansive textures of ambient and IDM pervading most of the album. Syd Minskey-Sargeant of Working Men’s Club offers grim lyrics of “mortality / spasms / terror / death / there’s nothing left” to bring the topic of dystopia into sharp focus immediately – something that never relents.

Standout tracks “John on the Ceiling” and “Snares” both use harsher, industrial sounds to emphasise the dreariness of Smith’s conscience. On the former, synth gushes filter through his fixations on “thinking of the / ways to escape / what’s said and done,” and on the latter, he uses spoken word to understand “the jarred clarity of our identities” post-pandemic.

But Smith and Vickers both feel “The Noose” best captures the album’s message: that the world we live in isn’t real anymore. “That was written from insomnia,” Smith explains, sharing how he used a loop pedal to produce the song’s intense mechanical whirring sound. “That’s how we are nowadays: anything that sounds fucking rubbish, we’re like, ‘let’s get that on the album!’”

Sticking with long-time producer Alex Greaves contributed to this comfort, too, with Smith calling him a fifth member, while Vickers appreciates his honesty throughout the process: “He was never afraid to tell us when something was shit and sucked, which was quite difficult to hear sometimes, but it’s really healthy and pushes you to be better.” Smith looks back to their origin story with Greaves, when “he’d come over to mine and Jordan’s, just listen to music, write demos, get twatted, and our tastes have developed as his have too.”

That last point is apparent as you move through their music over time, too, with obvious touchpoints such as Ride and Radiohead giving way to Floating Points, Portishead, and Massive Attack. It was gigging with electronic producer Daniel Avery that helped bdrmm understand how to expand their shoegaze sound; working with him and having him remix a track was on their pie-in-the-sky wishlist as big fans of the British DJ’s album Drone Logic.

“And then when it happened [on “Port”], it was like, fucking hell, we must be onto something!” Smith says. “He’s got a big interest in shoegaze, and looking through his playlists you’d have some obscure IDM track followed by Cocteau Twins. That was where the electronic shoegaze melded over. If you can listen to both, you can write both.”

Despite steadily establishing themselves over the past five years, bdrmm are still deeply grounded to their northern roots in Hull, with Smith sharing how he feels it’s the “biggest respect” to be associated with their beloved New Adelphi Club, a storied 200-cap venue where they still play, joining alumni such as Green Day, Oasis, and Radiohead. Similarly, Vickers says that starting out on the Sonic Cathedral before moving to independent label Rock Action “suits our character, being from Hull.”

“Being on a major label would be lovely and I don’t think anyone needs more money than we do,” Smith jokes, “but I wouldn’t change it for the world because you get to do what you want and work with like-minded people.” He notes, by way of example, how this has helped his brother and fellow bandmate Jordan Smith use his creative vision for the band’s overall aesthetic. “He is fucking unbelievable. To see his artistic talent grow and match the vibe – that first album cover is a packet of quavers on a scanner, so he’s a genius.” It’s this freedom and space to grow that has helped bdrmm build their confidence to evolve their music quite early on into their existence. “The biggest thing is just the confidence within us to feel like we can try new things,” says Smith.

“Just as a collective, we’re all much more comfortable in each other. We’ve all grown up and can tell each other how we feel, rather than getting absolutely fucked and fighting each other. We all appreciate the fact we get to do it as none of us are in it for the money, so we all purely do it for the love of actually making music and getting to play it live.”

We can take comfort from the fact that bdrmm still know how to find their niche and spread joy through their music to both themselves and to everyone else – even while its doom-and-gloom overtones echo the terrifyingly satirical world we’re all living in.