INTRODUCING Jawn Ladder: a new three-piece band from Glasgow who are here to provoke, inspire and shake you to your very core.
This week they released their bruising debut single ‘Scarything’ – appropriately on Halloween – and it’s a rousing statement of intent if ever we’ve heard one.
Reformulating from several other local outfits that you’ll know and love – namely Blindfolds, Alligator, The Van T’s, The Bar Dogs and Tijuana Bibles – the trio have emerged with heaps of ambition and a revitalised enthusiasm for their craft – and ‘Scarything’ is an incendiary introduction.
Citing Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys, Tom Wait, Wolf Alice and Kate Bush, this is a band taking us back to rock & roll at its most raw and visceral, emerging from the darkness in a fiery swirl of heavy guitars, pounding rhythms and growling vocals. It’s dark, primal and utterly formidable.
The urgency of the track is matched by the personal themes it explores. Speaking about the song, the band’s frontman John Gerrard O’Neill says: “I wrote this song for a friend suffering from mental health. I wanted it to be a kind of mantra for people feeling like that. We are all born into this world that throws lefts and rights at us from our first breath. We hope to help bring people to a moment where they recognise their worth. Scarything was conceived as a letter to a friend, then was adapted to music written within four-bedroom walls on an acoustic guitar, focusing on the message and the melody. It then made its journey to rehearsals with the band where we bled our fingers to find its heartbeat and built it up from the floor to what it has grown into now”.
Recorded in Castle of Doom alongside Chris Marshall, the track marks the first of many from the newly fledged outfit – with an EP slated for arrival in the coming months. Watch this space.
