Hometown: Peckham.
The lineup: Dante Traynor (singer), Gamaliel Traynor (keyboards), David Noble (bass), Joe Minden (guitar), Matt Barnes (drums).
The background: New London band Sweat are not a million miles away from the 1975, in terms of references – 80s pop, glam swagger, Bowie in Berlin – and could achieve success in their slipstream. “Someone did make that comparison, which I found a bit upsetting,” says mildly affronted frontman Dante Traynor, who moved here from Australia (with his equally colourfully named brother Gamaliel – it’s a biblical thing) in his teens. “They’re just not great,” he adds of his would-be rivals. “They’re not terrible, it’s just that I wouldn’t want to be them.”
Traynor formed Sweat under two years ago as a vehicle for his twin obsessions: sex and the apocalypse. And in his mind, Sweat are more Bolan and Bowie, even Prince and Frank Ocean, than the 1975. “It’s sexy – dance music for clubs,” says Traynor, who used to be in a band called Rhythmic Thrust. Are the songs about sex? “Some of them are,” he says, recalling that the video shoot to their recent single Acid Rainbow, a lurid affair directed by the delightfully named Beatrix Blaise at an old people’s home in south London, quickly devolved into an orgy. “There was a whole carpet of people having sex with each other,” he says, depicting a sleazy scene straight out of Mick Jagger’s Performance. “There was soft bossa nova playing in this apocalyptic club set, and purple soft lights and fag ash everywhere. It was quite beautiful.”
He describes Sweat in terms of their “intensity” and “the sense that things are gonna go wrong at any moment”. They are, he decides, “unpredictable … risky and exciting.” Dangerous? “I think so. The shows are pretty full-frontal.” Meaning? “Very full-on, aggressive and trance-like. People jump off balconies, there’s crowd-surfing and stage invasions. Equipment breaks, people get hurt, the building gets damaged … It’s very sexual music – people get down. Bumping and grinding. It can get quite lust-filled.” You can see for yourselves in December, when the band head out on tour in support to Hinds, formerly Deers. Dress accordingly.
Meanwhile, there’s their music. It’s quite indie-dance Madchester 1989, with psychedelic inflections and the bass-heavy midtempo grooves of Happy Mondays, only with a primping, preening singer – a Brett Anderson type – on top. “We like to wear a lot of leather,” Traynor warns. “And see-through shirts.” It’s baggy via glam and Britpop.
PLW VIP is a song about a fictional club – Pink Love World – “which is a kind of club of love”, but the club closes and leaves the two protagonists (“Burnt-out shells like me and you”) searching for meaning in their relationship in the aftermath, worrying that “all the best things go bad eventually”. There is a techno pulse throughout, and the track moves at a 90s house pace, but Traynor insists it’s more of a Bowie 77 thing. They even study old Bowie/Iggy album covers for clues. “We come at electronic music more from a Low/Idiot angle,” he says, explaining that the band use “all old analogue shit” to record. “Technologically speaking, our music could have been recorded in the 70s.”
Acid Rainbow is a monstrous baggy groove, all shimmery psychedelic colourmotion disguising another song about the end of the world (“The lights begin to glow … Feel the crush of people fleeing … The sky is darkening – we’ve got to get away while we can”). “They’re all about the apocalypse, really,” he says of Sweatsongs. Dance till the bomb drops? “That sounds about right.” Sweat are apparently in the process of making a concept album about our imperilled planet. It is, he reassures, “Like prog without the prog” – more Frank Ocean than Topographic Oceans.
They also have a song, Generous Guys, “about a pathetic, insecure man complaining about pathetic insecure men”, and an anthemic, climactic ballad, This World – their Purple Rain, no less – written from the point of view of native Australians. “It’s about taking the world back to a time when we lived in more harmony and symbiosis,” says Professor Traynor.
They have another song, Tambourine, about “how the the world is dying and people are getting fucked and having meaningless sex”: “We’re morons together, baby,” croons Traynor.
Are Sweat having their cake and gorging on it – having a hedonistic time while moaning at people for being hedonists? “Probably,” he says, but what should he care? Lady Gaga likes Sweat so much she recently stole their end-of-night slot at London’s Moth Club, and their audience. “We were meant to be headlining and when she turned up she took it,” he says. “I walked up to her and said, ‘Hello Mrs Gaga.’ She said, ‘It’s Stephanie.’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, you took our slot.’ Actually, she was really nice and apologetic about it.” He sounds almost disappointed. “She even sang me a song.” He adds, that when it comes to the sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll triad, “Rock’n’roll probably figures highest, unfortunately.
“But,” he continues, “sex and drugs are equal second.”
The buzz: “Sweat’s new song adds more weight to the ‘Sweat are the best new band of 2016’ theory.”
The truth: Think Syd Barrett “on one” at the Hacienda, in 1989.
Most likely to: Perspire.
Least likely to: Retire.
What to buy: Acid Rainbow is out on Meno.
File next to: The 1975, World of Twist, Happy Mondays, Suede.
Ones to watch: Mallrat, Wendy Bevan, Rømans, Klyne, Swims.
