Hailing from post-industrial Paisley, Poor Girls / Broken Boys is the debut album from art-pop quartet The Vegan Leather. Combining dancefloor-ready electro-punk anthems with themes of social anxiety and mental health, the long-awaited album is 2019 distilled into eleven classic tracks
Poor Girls / Broken Boys is out on 25th October 2019 via Midnight Pink/Believe Digital.
The disco ball is a thousand mirrors. We hold up our doubts, our panic, our black thoughts, all the mundanities we drag in from the dimly lit corners of the dancefloor, and it spits back light and glamour, refracting and spilling out in shards like smashed glass. When home is a post-industrial town with nowhere to go, those hot disco lights can become a vital source of energy to coalesce around. Drawn together from an open mic night in Paisley, The Vegan Leather are now expending that anxious energy back into the world with their debut album Poor Girls / Broken Boys.
It all started with two dubstep acts and a folk band, which perhaps explains the rainbow coalition of genres that spray across the album: punk, disco, metal, electronic pop – “all the main food groups” as bassist Matt puts it. “We all started going to a local open mic night called Create which ran in Paisley for young people,” Marie recalls. “Gian and Duncan’s dubstep band Crown of Storms became a crowd favourite, and the gigs used to attract over 600 people to them.” Realising the potential, Gian, Duncan and Marie began performing together, soon colliding with Matt on tour, and the four hit it off. The Vegan Leather was born.
With a string of critically adored singles and a reputation for incredible live shows firmly in place, Poor Girls / Broken Boys is as much a statement of intent as a victory lap. As well as showcasing the band’s musical versatility, it’s an album concerned with dualities: light and dark, love and lies, anxiety and euphoria. “The album discusses the ways in which people are sometimes broken down by different situations or pressures,” Marie explains.“The songs are a testament to how people learn to deal with hardships and tell stories of how we either succumb or resist to the world we live in.”
And what is the world we live in? Connected yet fractured, glued to terror stories on 24-hour news cycles, unable to look away as the rich get richer and the planet gets hotter. Opening the album and providing its explosive first single back in May, ‘French Exit’ is the perfectly jittery opening to a record that explores the way we deal with those pressures.“Lyrically, the song is about social anxiety, a sort of inner voice telling you to go out and stay out to the bitter end when really you need to go home,” Gianluca says.
Perhaps the most striking duality captured on Poor Girls / Broken Boys is one of pop’s oldest tricks: vibrant, upbeat music set against pitch-black lyrical themes. On ‘Flakey’ the protagonist is frantic with existential dread: “Your greatest fear is if you die alone… I wanna turn off this switch.” ‘Holy Ghost’ is equally fraught: “I’ll close the blinds, I’m doing fine.” All driven by a relentless rhythm section, stabbing guitars and the charismatic vocal interplay between Gianluca Bernacchi and Marie Collins, it’s a masterful example of the band’s ability to deliver a profound message through a brightly-hued veneer of dance-pop.
If one idea guides the whole record, though, it’s arguably from most recent single ‘The Hit’: the concept of “learning to exist” in a society that still doesn’t treat everyone equally.“I started to write the song from the point of view of myself as a woman of feeling passive and commodified, and only there for other people’s pleasure,” Marie says of the track. “I then started to think about how this is also true for artists. Art/music that has real integrity or intrinsic value is often turned into something commercial through the pressure of capitalism. Although there can be no comparison between an artist’s plight to the daily oppression, violence and discrimination of women, I thought it was an interesting way to explore commodification.”
A newly recorded version of fan favourite ‘Days Go By’ compounds the idea of being worn down over time, a life splayed between boring jobs, prescriptive home lives, and various attempts at sedation on evenings and weekends. Marie sees it as a thematic companion piece to closer ‘Zeitgeist’, which talks of having “your little red door and a house full of kids,” or the idea that – as the singer puts it – “your life is just set out in front of you from birth.” Both tracks, while still fired up on laser-shot disco guitars, admit that modern life can sometimes feel like a Groundhog Day that never allows the neat resolution of a new morning.
But it’s not all despair. Throughout the dark days and nights, the panic of going out and the anxiety of staying in, the imperative is that we carry on singing, dancing, loving, kicking against the hate. That, in spite of the pricks and the parasites, we exist. “The song is trying to turn that on its head by saying don’t let that bring you down and don’t ever quit. Life is a big crescendo and you swirl around in it trying to make sense of it all. The very last lines are ‘still you never quit’. You got this.”
TRACKLISTING:
1. French Exit
2. The Knife
3. Flakey
4. Unorthodox
5. Holy Ghost
6. Know It All
7. The Hit
8. Man Dies
9. Days Go By
10. Heavy Handed
11. Zeitgeist
Poor Girls / Broken Boys is out on 25th October 2019 via Midnight Pink/Believe Digital.
PRE-ORDER AND MERCH:
https://www.musicglue.com/theveganleather
UPCOMING DATES:
26th September – Notting Hill Arts Club, London
12th October 2019 – Twisterella, Middlesbrough
2nd November 2019 – King Tut’s, Glasgow (album launch)
January 2020 – Rockaway Beach Festival, Bognor Regis
CONNECT:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheVeganLeather/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheVeganLeather
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theveganleather/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4V6w7NBWU5GVyC7H5QEO6G
