We haven’t checked in on London trio Voka Gentle since they were known as Wovoka Gentle, but things are in motion for the group. Next month they’ll release an album called WRITHING!, the follow-up to their 2019 debut Start Clanging Cymbals. Its latest single, “Respect My Eccentricity, Pt. 2,” is out today along with a performance video recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath. The twilit, guitar-driven indie rock track evokes Yo La Tengo or the Clientele, with some gritty guitar work that was inspired by Pavement but ended up sounding a bit like Radiohead.
The band explains:
There was a chord pattern that William [J. Stokes] was playing around with but just didn’t know what to do with- it was quite a Pavement-y, fast aggressive sequence. Then it was decided to try playing it really quietly and slowly instead, and “Respect My Eccentricity” is the result. When we came to record it fully we were convinced that we wanted to divert from the “indie-rock-ness” of the chords by putting more acoustic instruments in there, things like mic-ing the electric guitar strings (we used an old band favourite, a handmade junky semi-hollow guitar named Vashti — after Vashti Bunyan), hitting a small drum in a kind of tribal way, toying with the tonality by having a kind of sliding synth drone in the background…
The results are quite pretty. Listen below.
WRITHING! is out 10/22 on Leafy Outlook.
