On the Rise
deep tan

It’s ironic, given that Deep Tan have benefitted rather well from that wave, and they’re a lot weirder than Wet Leg, poppier than Black Country, New Road, and a little goofier than Yard Act. After returning from their recent tour supporting Bodega and Bambara, they continue to find their audience consists of “younger queers” or “older, cishet, white men.” Some may be quick to characterise them as a band of stark contrasts, but they always miss the third option: Deep Tan are a band of false dichotomies.

Although drummer Lucy isn’t with them today, I’m able to chat with Celeste and vocalist/guitarist Wafah. Celeste has a soothing, lilting rhythm to their voice, often answering my questions with a pleasant loquacity. Wafah's voice is warmer, and she speaks when she feels passionate about the question, asking me some of her own, too: What do I think of the music? What do I interpret?

Together, the pair chime in on each other’s thoughts and laugh. It’s easy to see that they’re genuine friends; friends who probably would have written music for a laugh regardless of media attention. But, before the debated theory of a lesbian club night which united the band together, Wafah, Celeste, and Lucy lived entirely separate lives.

Lucy tells me over email that she “started playing the bass and guitar when I was 15 at school and started writing my own music then decided to do music at uni which is where I started playing the drums.” Celeste, on the other hand, got their start after some guitar lessons from their neighbour that evolved into an obsession with the bass. But before Wafah had picked up the guitar, she was constructing songs. “I didn’t start that young, but I remember I always had little things to record,” she reminisces. “I was recording songs, but there would be a verse, a chorus, a topline, a middle eight, [and I was] thinking, ‘maybe I should change this melody and verse’.”

This inquisitive, analytic approach has made Wafah the principal producer of Deep Tan’s songs. Even when she was young, she was concerned with layers, championing bands such as The Cure and Crack Cloud: “Every little detail in the song is considered,” Wafah says of The Cure. “Robert Smith and the others were like, ‘I’m not going to add anything in this song that is not there to enhance the song’… [Deep Tan] are only a three piece. Everything is really considered.”

Although you could loosely categorise Deep Tan as a “post-punk” band, you’ll find their music described with wild sonic juxtapositions which have seemingly nothing to do with the genre itself. The first track of their latest EP, "diamond horsetail", sounded like “Primus and The Police had a baby,” Celeste laughs, quoting a tweet from a few years ago. The band themselves were quoted describing one track as “Britney does math rock”, though that one was partially a joke.

They’ve only released ten songs, but their style has shifted since their first single – 2019’s “Air”. Back then, Wafah was the original member who played with a different band under the same moniker, yet you can hear the difference. “Air” is dreamy, but with a hint of nightmarish atmosphere and crystalline guitar lines which ring clear as she sings: “No, they cannot swim - they pretend.” The following Shimmer EP ran along similar, pop-minded lines - it was around this time where Deep Tan formed into their current lineup.

2021’s creeping speedwells was where the band started to come into their own. Written during lockdown, the EP was named after the perseverance of its titular weeds, which are able to thrive under difficult conditions. Although there’s a certain intentionality to their music, intuition was also vital to the creation of creeping speedwells.

“When we’re writing a song, we’ll create a specific mood and afterwards, we’ll talk about what subject matter would work with that,” explains Celeste. “For me, when we were writing ‘do you ever ascend?’, there was a section where Wafah was playing guitar. We were like, ‘should we call this the bell section?’ Because her guitar was sounding quite like a Tibetan bell. I was thinking, let’s think laterally here: we’ve got Eastern bells, we’ve got transcending. We’ve got the meme page, @doyoueverjustfuckingascend.”

"There’s just rich, fertile ground for collaborative song writing when we are all netizens of the internet. It’s also kind of exciting to be in a generation of musicians who’ve grown up with the internet" - Celeste

diamond horsetail acts as both a lexical and conceptual complement to creeping speedwells, where their usual areas of inquiry are pushed to different logical ends. The disturbing tale of “deepfake” mirrors the comically seedy delivery in “rudy ya ya ya”. They shout out yet another meme page, @trashbagastrology, on “device devotion” - but this time, it’s inspired by the dread of watching The Social Dilemma.

“One of the things that they really focus on is phone addiction, and how manufacturers of smartphones essentially build in features in phones that make them as addictive as, say, gambling software can be,” says Celeste. “So the center of [‘device devotion’] is phone addiction. Then the lyrics are things that you might come across in your browser based on the things that we have in our browser. Lobster erotica is a personal favourite.”

“Cats in sinks” nods Wafah. “I love watching cats in sinks.”

The band aren’t just following trends for the sake of being current: they really do love talking about it a lot. “It was quite a deliberate decision to start talking about it because there are lots of bands who specifically won’t talk about things internet-related, because they want their songs to have a classic timeless feel – which I understand and respect,” Celeste adds. “There’s just rich, fertile ground for collaborative song writing when we are all netizens of the internet. It’s also kind of exciting to be in a generation of musicians who’ve grown up with the internet. That’s a huge, huge thing.”

When I ask them about what memorable things they’ve seen on the internet recently, Celeste tells me a rather morose anecdote about some Soviet Tonikas and Urals they bought online. “I bought two and they both got sent from Ukraine, and then obviously the war in Ukraine started. I suddenly started thinking about this person – at any time in my house, the TV was reporting the latest on Ukraine, these two guitars were staring at me from the other side of the room. It's like, where is this person now? Like what's happening every day? Do I reach out to them…

“Out of the blue last week, I got an email from the guy who sent me one of the guitars. And they said, 'I'm reaching out to all the people who've been my customers. As you know, Ukraine has been facing some very difficult times at the moment, the Russian army is 50 km away from our house… But I am raising money for people who actually just have no money, that are just spending anything they've had and there's no way of making it…' basically, I bought these guitars from reverb.com, and he had listed two piccolos for sale. He said, 'I’m asking previous customers if they would like to donate. You can donate by buying a piccolo - I'm not going to be sending any piccolo's, it’s just a donation link, but if you'd like to donate, that would be really kind in your heart.' It hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Although the band are relatively fluid about how they build instrumentals, they have no qualms poring over the song, trying to get it just right: “With the second EP, we wrote a fair bit that we never ended up using,” says Wafah. “A lot of what’s on the internet has been rewritten a few times.”

“gender expansion pack”, for instance, has landed in a very different place to where it started. The title takes its inspiration from The Sims (Hot Date is Guinness’ favourite expansion pack, for those who want to know). Its old working title, however, was “Cosmic Booty Slap”, in which beloved drag queen “Jaida Essence Hall slaps her booty so hard it starts a new cosmos.”

Again, they started with the instrumental, but Celete quickly thought it could be more than that. “I thought, you know what? Our audience is either younger queers or older, cishet, white men. The cis music dads are the ones who will most probably buy our vinyl, and we have no problem with that, but I was thinking it would be quite punk to think: if I was a cishet white man, what would scare me a little? Maybe if you were more on the toxic masc end of the spectrum…I can’t remember how I got to this point, but I thought we could make this song like a hypnosis tape, and have Wafah speaking...” “-hypnotising cis people to question their gender with low-pitched vocals,” Wafah finishes.

The band all identify as queer, and being a queer in a male-dominated genre has proven to be an interesting balance. They enjoy writing about the odd parts of queer culture, and their feminism is staunchly inclusive – their first line of merch raised money for sex worker rights (“Fuck SWERFs,” as Celeste puts it). But like everything with Deep Tan, just don’t make the mistake of pigeonholing the band into useless binaries. So far, Wafah recounts, “I think we’ve been quite lucky. We’re just doing our thing. We are queer artists, but we’ve kept our identity.”

“If people come to us and say, what’s it like being a woman in a band…” Celeste jumps in, “That question has been done a million times. We’ve got more interesting things to talk about.”