Scrounge’s trial and terror

They both arrive slightly late, throwing arms around me in genuine apology as if we’d been friends for years. It’s a thread that will shoot through our conversation about their first full-length album: community, friendship, authentic connection. With Almost Like You Could, Scrounge get loud, but in the echo of distorted guitars and frenzied sing-shouting, it’s their connection that rings vivid and true.

Over 18 months, Almost Like You Could was born in the spare time between Cartledge’s study and Alexander’s primary school classes, between countless live shows and their well-received 2022 EP Sugar Daddy. A bucket-list trip to play a festival in New York – The New Colossus Festival – turned this dream into reality; the pair snuck instruments on budget airlines as hand luggage and slept in dust-ridden apartments to, eventually, garner the attention of Ba Da Bing! Records. They laugh with hazy half-nostalgia: “Everything we do, we have to really scrounge.”

Despite their American label, Scrounge are a London band through and through. Alexander and Cartledge met at Goldsmiths, after which Cartledge played guitar in Alexander’s solo band for a while. A deeper thread than even this connected them: they both “studied the sound of the city,” reminisces Alexander, “which was moving towards jazz, with the new notoriety of Ezra Collective, or trip-hop production, with the rise of early PC music.” They landed on the same conclusion: “there wasn’t really a space for anyone who liked guitar music, or loud music.” It was painfully evident that this was a job for the new friends, who quickly formed a collective called Fame Throwa and created the scene they so craved. Working together creatively was only the next logical step.

Cartledge takes a beat, and cautiously broaches the current state of the London music scene. Or, more specifically, the hegemony of trendy spaces that devour authentic connection through posturing innovation that, in practice, operates more as elitism. “I’d like to preface this by saying I love The Windmill scene,” he states, “but it also sucks the energy out of everywhere else. There’s so much else going on.” The implication is that, a lot of the time, The Windmill will miss the mark, or draw attention away from other cultural moments that are doubly important but half as showy. Surprisingly, Cartledge juxtaposes this with a retelling of a gig at gay super-club Heaven, in which he saw the late hyper-pop sensation SOPHIE, who “turned me inside out.”

It isn’t the first time that the pair have bonded over SOPHIE, despite their own art-punk aesthetic. Sure, Scrounge consider themselves a live band and SOPHIE’s performances were therefore paramount, but it was also that SOPHIE “thought about the actual sound of music; not many people consider form any more.”

In the same way, Scrounge’s new record is thoughtfully formed, the band experimenting with textures, influences, and post-production techniques. “It’s a bit of a collage in that way,” Alexander muses, before flipping out of herself. “Wow! Deep, that!” she laughs, but the mature, meticulous cadence of their work can’t be undermined by this humility. Take the final track on the album, “Nothing Personal”, which appears to be a simple guitar ballad written by Cartledge, but to Alexander it sums up the whole process: “It’s got a phone recording in the background, including loads of samples of us throughout different stages of making the record.”

It’s almost unbelievable that this complex wall of sound is at the hands of the two people blinking back at me through the sunshine. One thing they tried to work out immediately was how to make a “huge” sound with just two bodies; whilst trying to forge new community space across London, they were also dead-set on filling their own. “We could have sounded like the Juno soundtrack,” they laugh, but the “frantic energy of just trying to make it work” between two people lent itself to their intense sound.

This isn’t the only thing making their aesthetic frightful, thick, and forceful; both musicians weren’t comfortable or familiar with their instruments at the start of the project. As they learnt on the job – or, as Lucy aptly puts it, “through trial and terror” – the discombobulated, frantic USP was teased out through art in its infancy. “It sounds poetic now, but maybe the first few gigs didn’t sound so good,” Cartledge chuckles.

There’s enjoyment and enthusiasm baked into all the stories the band share, all the splodges that make up the Scrounge mirage. In fact, the day we meet, their State 51 set is released. On it, a Rihanna cover is nestled between two singles. The choice was a testament to their close proximity to bouts of insanity, driving up and down the continent to make shows that, most likely, only a handful of people would attend. “There was always a certain point, as we were crammed in our manager’s tiny car, where we hit a wall, and only Rihanna could get us through. And we asked our mate to sing on it with us,” Alexander smiles, “because why not?”

The State 51 session also features album opener, “Higher”, that rallies against the repetitive doom of modern consciousness, and “UTG”, a confession about the lived reality of Queer shame. “What’s the point in trying when you’re known by many, loved by few?” Alexander sings. She speaks eloquently about the deeper meaning, taking time to choose the right words: “when you’re part of the Queer community, you never really stop coming out.”

In “UTG”, amongst many of the other tracks, Alexander has, she says, “processed my own exhausting experience of constantly coming out, until it’s become something I’m really proud of, because I’d never really spoken about my queerness before.” Furrowed brow, deep in thought, Alexander continues: “I recently bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for ten years; they said to me, when you came out, you were really angry about it. What a crazy thing to hear,” she exclaims, still in the process that she tackles via much of the album’s vulnerable lyricism.

That anger doesn’t go away, especially not on Almost Like You Could. But in the dreary droop of despondency, somehow hope is what’s left. When I congratulate them for remaining hopeful at such a dystopian point in history, they seem shocked, like it’s an unintended coincidence. Cartledge reminds me, as if it were obvious, “if you are interested in any kind of radical process, you have to bear in mind that things can change. Poor choices by those in power have got us here. But it can change.”

Alexander agrees, flipping the hopeless zeitgeist I talk of as evidence of a larger refusal to be dragged down, or as an opportunity for growth. “Everything going on around us is just chaos, isn’t it. But take comfort in the fact that chaos gives us the best moments of culture. Sometimes, things are so stacked against you that even the smallest wins can make you the most hopeful.”

They could be referring to Almost Like You Could, so earnest is their attempt to reach even a handful of people who might find solace in the noise. But Scrounge have more than a “small win” on their hands here. This triumphant release proves that there’s hope everywhere. All it takes is trial and terror.