On the Rise
Dutch Criminal Record

Recorded over the course of two years as the trio juggled day jobs and degrees, the album is a lesson in tenacity, self-belief, and showcases a love and understanding for the tenets of great British guitar music.

The now trio who make up Dutch Criminal Record, Sam Thrussell, Joe Frampton and Joe Delaney-Stone, all went to the same school in Chichester, Bishop Luffa, which is “not a private school,” as Thrussell jokingly points out. He and Delaney-Stone were in the same GCSE music class and decided to form a band.

Alongside a shared love of The Beach Boys and The Beatles, Delaney-Stone had grown up on Queen, an influence enforced by his parents, while Thrussell is a proud Coldplay fan. “I'm not ashamed to say Coldplay are my favourite band. That's what got me into playing guitar,” he smiles.

After a few years playing with a cast of school friends, Frampton, who was two years below, was enlisted as the band’s permanent drummer. “I would occasionally cover gigs when the OG couldn’t make it. I was covering so many they asked me to officially be the drummer,” he says. “I think how DCR got the signature sound is through all the early comparisons to The Beach Boys and Vampire Weekend. That’s how we got pigeon-holed as surf-rock/surf-pop. Once you get that pigeonhole, it sticks.”

After school the band, then a quartet, went their separate ways to uni across the South of England, releasing a couple of singles a year and gigging infrequently. “In those days the band just needed a little bit of elbow grease every now and again to keep singles coming out and a few shows here and there to make it feel like it was kind of trundling along,” says Delaney-Stone. “I think if we were trying to do this kind of thing we do now at the same kind of volume, we'd have mental breakdowns.”

It wasn’t until 2020 when they started to get serious, putting their energy, free hours and hustle into prioritising the band. “We had a couple of members in the band who were dear friends of ours from when we formed but who were all kind of more into their jobs at the time. I think it really felt for the first time since we left school that everyone in the band was like, ‘We're gonna do this,’” says Delaney-Stone.

As the pandemic set in, the trio found themselves with more energy to focus, their manager at the time suggesting they put their efforts into TikTok. They began making videos for their own amusement. “Obviously it didn't get any traction at all,” laughs Frampton. “Then Joe [Delaney-Stone] made a video doing the Soviet Union National Anthem in the style of The Smiths, and that did really well. We started playing to this guy called Sam’s Eats, and he kind of cuts his food in a rhythm, and that was doing really well. Then in between these videos that were going viral, we’d put up little clips of us either playing in my parents’ garage or from gigs. There was so much attention on our profile, the videos of our own music were doing really well as well.”

It was a video of the band playing their hit “Stuck Between” that really blew up, racking up millions of views. “I was at Spoons that evening, five pints deep, having meetings with heads of A&R,” laughs Frampton. “It happened so quickly. I think fortunately, looking back, we didn't commit to anything. I'm sure we would have signed our lives away to something terrible if we had signed something at that point.”

Without new music ready to go, the band took a step back and focused on building a team around themselves, continuing to dedicate their free hours to writing and recording a debut full-length. “It's kind of taken this whole two year period between that happening and this for us to actually feel like we're confidently in a position where we can be like, right we're ready to do it,” says Delaney-Stone.

Working out of Ford Lane Recording Studios in West Sussex, where they recorded their first ever single, the band continued their longstanding relationship with producer Rob Quickenden. “We've been working almost exclusively with Rob since we started because he's just a really nice personality to work with and I think it's also a little bit of a refuge,” says Delaney-Stone. “You've got to have a personality who's very calming and level-headed to make it enjoyable and to actually feel like a nice creative process.”

Recent single “Gaslight” is a striking statement. A knowing nod of spoken word detailing the wearing end of a relationship in the context of real world fatigue, it eschews the band’s surf-pop casting for a sound that sits somewhere between Wolf Alice and Los Campesinos! It’s clever, impactful and far too relatable, it also sets the tone for what’s to come. “Yeah, it was a risky one, wasn't it?” laughs Delaney-Stone. “I remember writing the instrumental and I don't know if I sent it to the band for a month or two after I'd written it. That song is probably a bit of a risk in terms of what our audience might expect from us, but I'm glad we took it. There's no reward without risk.”

Novium, out this summer, showcases not only the band’s experienced musicality and unity, but also their tenacious DIY spirit. Having finished mixing the record in March, it took them the best part of two years to complete. “We're actually quite good at finishing, but it does take time because we've got other things going on. Unless you're very successful, you've always got something else on the boil. We can only do one day a week in the studio, so considering that we're quite efficient,” smiles Thrussell. “The funny thing is, although this is our debut album, the amount of music we put out in EPS, it's our fourth album, really. If we were The Beatles, this would be our Revolver.”