'It's About The Horror of Banality': Bdrmm Dissect Their Innovative New Album 'Microtonic'
Tuesday, 18 February 2025
Written by Tom Morgan
Photo: Stew Baxter
Bdrmm think that their new album is their best yet. Now, while you pick your jaw up off the floor, consider that the Hull-based nu-gazers aren’t the sort of band to lean into empty cliches. There really is something behind their belief that with the inbound ‘Microtonic’ they’ve “finally cracked it”.
“We’ve always loved making music,” explains bassist Jordan Smith. “But with the first album we didn’t even feel the confidence to record it. Then, for album two, we all wrote tunes individually and you can hear the lack of cohesion.”
Jordan’s being more than a touch self-deprecating. The band’s first two albums (2020’s ‘Bedroom’ and 2023’s ‘I Don’t Know’) are glorious, ambitious shoegaze efforts, with the latter a particularly impressive fusion of dreamy guitars and electronic adornments.
Amid a sea of revivalists in a genre that refuses to die, Bdrmm have carved out a path forward with a bold and singular approach. Their music, more so than ever on the impressive ‘Microtonic’, eschews familiar instrumentation, structures and textures, while pushing strange, off-kilter tonal buttons. The whole thing adds up to a singularly oneiric experience.
Reflecting on how they arrived at their unique palette, Jordan acknowledges the influence of Hull’s “genre-crossing” music scene. “A mate of ours wrote a thesis on Hull music and pointed out that there’s no ‘Hull sound’ or a band to look to like in, say, Manchester,” he says. “There’s The Housemartins, but no one’s really saying, ‘I want to sound like The Housemartins’.”
Still, it’s fun to imagine bands sounding like the areas of the world they hail from, either in terms of the colours they conjure or the textures they present. Think G-funk and California, or Sigur Rós and Iceland. Jordan and his brother Ryan, who sings and plays guitar in Bdrmm, have made use of field recordings from “near the Humber” as a way to fit into this lineage. “I like to think that, like people in Hull, we’re kind and don’t take ourselves too seriously,” he also acknowledges. “That’s how we want to present ourselves in this cut-throat industry.”
If said industry wasn’t already alert to Bdrmm’s ambitions, ‘Microtonic’ is the sort of statement that will wake people up to their brilliance. These nine new tracks are an intuitive leap forward, one that finds the band wholly embracing their love of electronic music. “We love and appreciate the shoegaze label,” says Jordan. “But it was important to go into making it without any idea about what anyone other than the four of us would think about it.”
While the LP’s intuitive fusion of rock conventions with synths, drum machines and ideas from the rave playbook — the back half of Snares is a genuine reach-for-the-lasers moment — feels new and striking, the band’s interest in electronica dates back to Bdrmm’s earliest days. John On The Ceiling, for example, features elements recorded by Jordan in his first year of uni. “The entire song was made by samples and me humming,” he explains. “The bass on the tune now is my voice from when I was 18, played through a synthesiser, which is really weird.”
In the present day, Bdrmm cite one specific experience as an influence on their electronic excursions: a trip to Field Day festival. “We hadn’t experienced much of it before, so it was humbling and exciting,” Jordan says. “It’s important to explore new things. I can only watch so much of someone play the same type of guitar music on stage before just wanting to die.”
Jordan cites Hull’s comparative lack of rave culture as a factor in why the band have had to gradually immerse themselves in the world of dance music over time. However, he also highlights the musical tastes of his and Ryan’s dad as their earliest introduction: “He had three CDs in the car — Arctic Monkeys’ first album, Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ and Ministry of Sound’s Electro House [Sessions]. That shaped our understanding of music.”
Bdrmm’s increased musical adventurousness has also been bolstered by the incorporation of some equally eclectic thematic touchstones. One is an interest in the work of the late, great filmmaker David Lynch. “Ryan got well into Eraserhead and Twin Peaks around the time of writing,” Jordan explains. Duly, a dreamlike and sometimes eerie tone pervades ‘Microtonic’. “It’s about the horror of banality,” Jordan continues. “A lot of stuff Ryan writes about is day-to-day stuff, existing with this sadness while you’re chopping onions or something.”
On a more intellectual level, the band also point to the influence of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Bdrmm’s music seems to reflect Fisher’s concerns about the slowdown of cultural innovation in late capitalist society — they’re searching for something, reaching around in a void for new and exciting ideas. “It was nice to read something and feel safe within this guy’s ideas,” Jordan says.
Is this need to innovate something that the band actively think about? “There’s a dichotomy in my head,” Jordan explains. “There’s one side that wants to innovate and be new, then there’s another lazy creative person who thinks, ‘I like that thing I heard, I want to do that.’ In those latter moments you have to catch yourself.”
While also speaking positively of the genre fusions that the internet has given rise to, Jordan posits an interesting thought experiment: “I’d love to know what it’d be like if you could just eradicate the internet and all the accessibility we have to everything. Would there be a cultural revival where things got weird and different?”
We may never know. But ‘Microtonic’ impressively captures the vibe of our strange, ever-shifting and, yes, often Lynchian present. It’s a melancholic but simultaneously hopeful listen. Above anything else, it’s proof that rock-adjacent music has room for innovative thinking. But does it represent Bdrmm’s final form? Maybe. “You could argue that we’re a band that’s found itself across the course of our records,” Jordan says. “Our current process is definitely the closest to what we set out to achieve when we started out.”
Bdrmm’s ‘Microtonic’ is out on February 28 through Rock Action.
Bdrmm Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu March 06 2025 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE Wylam Brewery
Fri March 07 2025 - HULL Welly Club
Sat March 08 2025 - LEEDS Project House
Sun March 09 2025 - GLASGOW QMU
Tue March 11 2025 - MANCHESTER Gorilla
Wed March 12 2025 - NOTTINGHAM Rescue Rooms
Thu March 13 2025 - BIRMINGHAM Castle and Falcon
Sat March 15 2025 - BRIGHTON Old Market
Sun March 16 2025 - SOUTHAMPTON Papillon
Tue March 18 2025 - BRISTOL The Fleece
Wed March 19 2025 - LONDON Electric Ballroom
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