Fresh off their new single, ‘I Raise You (The Price of Your Head)’, we speak to London outfit Folly Group, ahead of the release of their second EP, Human And Kind.
“Only self-imposed,” says Sean Harper, when asked if Folly Group ever felt any pressure to follow their celebrated debut EP. “I mean, I don’t know. It probably depends on which member of the band you talk to on which day.” Today, I’m talking to Sean – the band’s drummer and co-vocalist – so his answers will ring universal from here on out. But he speaks eloquently and openly, and as spokespeople go, I reckon he’s a pretty good one.
“We had a bit of a luxury with Human And Kind,” Sean continues. “When we wrote our first EP, we wrote things in a room without being able to gig and record them, so the songs changed and evolved and became better after they came out. [Human And Kind] was less about recreating the live show, and more about pushing ourselves to the absolute limit of what we can do as four individuals. Inadvertently – but for that reason – I think it has become an even more accurate representation of our live show.”
The band Sean is speaking on behalf of are a four man outfit from London, who have been together since 2019. Alongside Sean, Folly Group consists of Louis Milburn, Tom Doherty and Kai Akinde-Hummel. After graduating from Goldsmith’s in 2018, Sean, Louis and Tom moved to a flat in Leyton together, with the “vague intention of making music.” This intention remained vague for four or five months, until one night, when coming home from a show, Louis leant into the other two and said, “It would be a bit rude to not do this band by this point, wouldn’t it?” Kai, an old friend and incredibly talented drummer, was the missing piece of the puzzle. When he joined – incidentally not on drums, but on percussion and sampler – the Folly Group collective was complete.
Like so many emerging acts at the moment, the start of Folly Group’s music career has not just come in the face of Covid-19, but been shaped by it. Lockdowns and pandemic restrictions have changed the way they write and record music, as well as limited their opportunities to play live. The immediate assumption is that these will all have been negative development, but when you look at the quality of artists such as Folly Group, you wonder if it was perhaps better this way. The talent and drive, of course, exists beyond a pandemic, but the music made as a result of it is fantastic.
Folly Group are regularly described as post punk. It’s a vague term to begin with, and a label they feel is already better applied to their debut. “We had this intense infatuation with that post-punk sound for a couple of years and that fueled the first EP. We’ve sort of come back down to earth now,” Sean explains. “We like what we liked before. And we like new things since. I think we feel like we’d be lying to ourselves if we did another straight down the line post punk release. It would be very easy to toe the post punk line and capitalise on the fact that that’s quite in vogue, but I think we would probably hate ourselves and feel like imposters. It’s just not us.”
The new record certainly has a post punk feel to it, but has a broader, eclectic mix of inspirations. “We want it to showcase our love of noise rock and our love of trip pop and our love of dance music. There’s 303s on the EP, there’s a dream pop tune on the EP, there’s a as a six minute long, sort of sound design, heavy noise rock tune…as people who spend their whole lives in music, we’re too restless to obsess with one thing and only do one thing for years on end.”
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It’s clear, while talking, how seriously Folly Group take their music. I admire their ambition; not just to infuse various styles and strive to make music that they believe is an authentic reflection of themselves, but their readiness to change as well. This takes courage. Even when I ask Sean about Folly Group’s ambition, he answers: “It’s more ambition in the sense of a desire to provide an honest depiction of our tastes and where we’re at as music listeners.”
A further key development between Folly Group’s first and second EPs is the experience they’ve acquired along the way. Sean explains this obviously helps with their confidence, but also the knowledge of their own music. “Two of the tunes – ‘I Raise You (The Price of Your Head)’ and ‘Faint of Heart’ – we’ve been playing live almost the whole time the band has been together.
“If confidence comes with experience, I also think it comes with an audience getting bigger. Certainly, having a realisation that you don’t necessarily want your name and face to be on something that you settled for – something that you’re not totally chuffed with. I think, honestly, deep down, it probably does speak to some form of pride. I guess what I’m trying to say is just, when there’s more eyes and ears on it, you want the music that’s got your name and face on it to be representative of music that you that you’d enjoy, that you’d respect, and you’d appreciate being out in the world.”
I told you he was eloquent.
Folly Group’s Human And Kind is out 25/03/2022 via Technicolour.
Featured image credit, Alex Waespi
