Breton @ Holocene
Don't miss this London-based group, with a sound which NME describes as "vital" and a "bold, promiscuous approach to art-rock"
When Breton first emerged from their south London, all-purpose base - dubbed BretonLabs - with a series of EPs and last year's full-length debut 'Other People's Problems', their intensely creative, multi-disciplinary approach rendered them difficult to pigeonhole. A band who made films on the side? Filmmakers and visual artists with a fully-realised soundtrack? A 'collective'? But sod the pigeonholing. Because all you really need to know to understand Breton is contained in singer and chief songwriter Roman Rappak's impassioned assertions above. Breton, completed by Adam Ainger, Ian Patterson, Ryan McClarnon and Daniel McIlvenny, are simply a band that put their life and soul into every little detail of 'it'.
After their inception Breton quickly established themselves as not only musicians, but a team of artists interested in all realms of the creative process. Having produced a series of their own short films with the gritty, uncensored aesthetic of their locality, a selection of video and sound design work for the likes of The Temper Trap, Penguin Prison and Tricky followed, as well as remixes for Local Natives, Alt J and Lana Del Rey. Breton's three early releases (2010's 'Sharing Notes' and 'Practical' EPs and 2011's 'Counter Balance' EP), meanwhile, slowly began to flesh out their own musical direction.
Initially performing live largely because it was more practical to project their film work behind them at readily-available gig venues than to find traditional, less available media spaces, it soon became clear that the band were developing a musical following in their own right. A further EP — 2012's 'Blanket Rule' — began to pique interest on a wider scale, with early support coming from The Guardian, Xfm and NME, while 'Other People's Problems' (recorded in the Labs and released in March 2012) garnered widespread critical acclaim, cementing the band as one of the year's most exciting breakthrough acts. NME declared the record to be "casually brilliant" and "vital", remarking that the album's wealth of ideas hinted that the band "have barely scratched the surface of what they want to, and what they can, achieve." BBC Music, meanwhile, praised the record for possessing "mass appeal on its own terms", while Clash labeled the band "agitators of sound".
Following a year spent touring incessantly and playing festivals across the world, Breton then retreated in early 2013 to create their second long player 'War Room Stories' — written over the course of the last year and recorded this summer in an abandoned broadcasting building called the Funkhaus in the grimmer side of Berlin.
