Edinburgh-based band Redolent today release their debut album, Dinny Greet, via Post Electric. The album showcases their remarkable mixture of alt-pop and electronic sounds, offering an honest exploration of themes such as mental health, nostalgia, and personal growth.
Led by brothers Danny and Robin Herbert, alongside Andrew Turnbull on drums, Robbie White on bass, and Alice Hancock on live samplers and backing vocals, Redolent has already garnered significant attention from critics and fans alike.
To coincide with the album’s release, the band provide whynow with a detailed track-by-track breakdown, sharing the inspirations and stories behind each song. Dinny Greet captures the band’s atypical sound, merging skeletal loops and gently undulating synths with lyrics that delve into life’s complexities.
Dinny Greet
“Dinny greet” means don’t cry in Scottish. I think it’s technically spelt “dinnae”, but I thought that was a bit archaic. If I message that word to someone I write “dinny” so I went with that. Lyrically, and thematically I feel like it sets the tone for the album quite well, there’s a lot of modern Scottish slang in there. It’s a cheer-up song about making the best of the bad, keeping going, and pursuing creativity at all costs, which is also the overall message I wanted to put out into the world with the album. Sonically, too, it was the first song we made with the band that sounded the way it does now: synthy, happy-sad indie, pop-ish, with conversational, modern life-based lyrics. So yeah, that’s why it’s first on there and why the whole album’s named after it.
Just Trying to Relax
I’ve been very not well mentally at times lol, so I know what that feels and looks like, but it’s funny, I remember realising at one point a long time ago that there are loads of people who go through their lives without really feeling some of the extreme mental states that people who are affected by anxiety or depression or whatever can get into. You can live your whole life completely at the mercy of your seemingly random brain chemistry, and when it all kicks off, act in a way that people who haven’t felt that way will look at you and think, “What is this dafty doing, why won’t they just be cool”?
I found that shock quite funny, and it made me want to write a quite over-the-top POV expression of the frantic irrationality of a panic attack. I stylised the title like that because it looks a bit sarcastic to me. It took us a while to get the sound right. We wanted the usual thing with a sort of lo-fi, hip-hoppy touch. Andy got the drums right, leading us in the right direction.
Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to Me
I’ve always found jinxes quite funny so there’s one. I wrote it in January 2020 about how difficult but great it was to work in a shitty factory job and be able to buy things and live normally because of that. It’s about the contrast between work and floating around town with Alice at the weekend like a real human being, buying stuff for the flat with the money we’d made. Feeling invincible and letting yourself get carried away with that joy before Monday comes back. And then, just after, everyone was obviously forced to be indoors for a year, so that’s my bad.
Ravvy
‘Ravvy’ is named after the cliff that all the kids at my old school used to drink at. It’s a nostalgic song about teenage misadventure, linked to lots of places and people around Edinburgh: parks, long-forgotten under-18s nights, notorious bouncers, bus routes. It’s all built around a synth riff that I thought fit the vibe—quite light and nice, but with a bit of melancholy.
5 Days Til the Weekend
I didn’t get any qualifications and bombed my whole life into making music, so I have to take what I can get when it comes to work, which often means stuff in factories on assembly lines. There were some days when I couldn’t believe how bad things were getting or how much these jobs ruined my whole life (lol). ‘5 Days Til the Weekend’ is kind of a comically over-the-top expression of that feeling. Looking at the clock every minute in disbelief, people are crying around you, desperate to run away and throw your phone into the sea.
Congratulations for Getting Off the Drink
The story of this one is a bit weird to me. I “wrote” this riff when I was about fourteen. Years after that I had a strong compulsion to write some pretty heavy words to go with it, about addiction from a loved one’s perspective, even though the riff has this kind of daft, comical vibe to it. We released the song, and someone commented on an Insta post about it, saying, “Cool what you’ve done with this sample”. Turns out the riff was almost bang on an old Nokia ringtone from the early 2000s. So I shat it, and we tried to clear it.
READ MORE: From club bangers to social commentary | Home Counties share track-by-track breakdown of debut album
Our manager ended up in chats with Nokia and other phone companies, ringtone experts, and then somehow with the guy who invented Snake, the old mobile game. No one seemed to know who’d written it, though. I spent a while trying to work out how it had happened, I’d never owned the phone that had ‘Jumping’ on it. Memories of going through my uncle’s phone, playing the wee pixel games and checking out the ringtones came back to me. He’s not here anymore and used to be really unwell with addiction and addiction-adjacent stuff. I think that’s maybe why I picked those words to go with it. Because it was associated with worrying about that to me.
How Are You Making It Look So Easy? (Oshie-T)
This is another one with Edinburgh all over it. Oshie-T is short for Ocean Terminal, this sad old shopping centre in Leith. After lockdown a few of my pals got together to re-learn to skate. They’d race down the multistory car park of that place, and I’d film them. It was so fun and so good to see them all again. It continued for the whole summer; we’d go to the world-famous Livi skate park and other nearby spots, and I put together a video. The song’s about making that!
Dunno (_____)
As the title suggests, this is quite a confusing song about being unsure and lost. It’s about watching other people, sure in their actions and/or expressions, living proper lives with normal behaviours and just thinking, “How the fuck”?
Wherever
This is a very straightforward one. I tried to capture the holiday feeling. I associate little nostalgic snapshots of memories with getting away for an adventure.
Yaldi
Starting with Danny’s tweety riff, I wrote about how I felt during our whirlwind signing with a major label in 2022. It’s got adventure, euphoria, and camaraderie vibes. We thought it was a sweet note to end the album on!
Tour Dates:
London – Tuesday 21st May – Servants Jazz Quarters
Edinburgh – Wednesday 5th June – Sneaky Petes
Glasgow – Thursday 6th June – The Poetry Club
Aberdeen – Friday 7th June – The Tunnels
Photo credit: Rory Barnes
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