Portsmouth-via-London band Hotel Lux have shared their debut EP Barstool Preaching via Nice Swan Records (Sports Team, Pip Blom, Fur). The EP follows a series of singles over the past few years like “The Last Hangman,” “Berlin Wall” and “English Disease.”
The five-track release spans slow-crawling, introspective rock (“Charades”), self-aware post-punk (“Loneliness of the Stage Performer”) and even jubilant organ-led guitar-pop (“Ballad of You & I”). There’s self-deprecating humor (“I scroll through pages upon pages on eBay to find the biggest ego and I beat the highest bidder”), stark frankness (“It’s just another day / Wasting our lives away”) and moments of clarity (“Sometimes I forget the people I meet are not the people for me / You see”). It’s also just a jolly good time with rollicking guitar lines and frontman Lewis Duffin’s cloak-and-dagger vocals.
“It was good fun working on a release that’s a bit bigger than what we’ve done before,” Duffin says. “The tunes seemed to come in pairs when writing ‘em—we’d make a little playlist of 5-10 tunes as inspiration and go from there. The songs are more introspective lyrically than we’ve been in the past, more personal as opposed to stories so the EP has an air of vulnerability to it—to us at least.”
Listen to “Eddie’s Gaff” below, and stream the full EP here. Buy the EP on 12-inch vinyl here.
