Allusinlove

allusinlove are a four-headed monster. A rock and roll band that play pop music in high-velocity assaults. They make music to move you. Music to fuck to. Music to fight to. Music to fall in love to.

The band – consisting of Jason Moules (Vocals/Guitar), Andrej Pavlovic (Guitar), Jemal Beau Malki (Bass), Connor Fisher-Atack (Drums) – has existed, under various guises, for around six years. Originally from Castleford, an old mining town in West Yorkshire, they were brought together by a mutual love of smoking weed and the hazy idea of forming a cross-dressing band, with little aim other than to shock people for the hell of it. When their first gig, on Halloween night 2012, resulted in eight bookings in as many weeks, they knew they were onto something altogether more special.

“So many people are just try-hards and wannabes,” Jason says. “I don’t mean it in a harsh way, but how many people do you know who say they’re in a band and practice once a week? We got together five times a week because we wanted to play music. So when we were ready to gig, people wanted to book us.”

The group quickly engineered a loyal following with their often shambolic, never boring live shows. As Connor puts it, “there was no trickery going on. It was just a raw performance”. And, what’s more, it connected, too – the band selling out shows up and down the country, with 300 people crammed into 100 capacity venues and a following that transcended any sort of tribalism or cliques. “After that there was never a point where it slowed down” Jemal says. “It was just tour after tour after tour.”

It’s an old fashioned slogging story that has parallels with fellow northerners The 1975: a series of line-ups; a succession of nearly-rans with labels, confusion over the band’s often disparate influences. “We don’t come from a scene. We’re from a town in the middle of nowhere, next to Leeds,” as Jason puts it. But rather than packing it in, they stuck to their guns, arriving fully formed at a time when young listeners want disparate. They want their bands to be multifaceted.

Case in point would be the sonically layered, psychedelic live favourite Sunset Yellow. A kind of stoned take on whatever you imagine the Stone Roses might have sounded like had they grown out of the same LA club scene as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, it was the first song the band ever wrote together, with most of the lyrics taken off the back of an Irn Bru can. “Everything we’re doing now if either a bit heavier or a bit lighter, but you can still feed it back to that one song,” Andrej says.

To that end, the band’s management have been careful to place them with people who can serve as conduits for the band’s sound, packing them off to London’s Assault & Battery studios, with legendary producers Alan Moulder (The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, U2) and Catherine Marks (The Killers, Foals, Wolf Alice). “We got discovered by an A&R who literally listened to us and paired us up with people who we’d previously researched ourselves,” Jason describes. “You hear so many bad stories about signing. For us, it was like, have a five-album deal and work with your idols. Alright.”

They recorded the album in July of this year, across a 30 day period that coincided with that great, never-ending heat wave, and the English national team’s improbable ascent to the last four of the World Cup Finals. “First album we’ve ever done, with some of the most critically acclaimed producers in the world, and we had a barbeque there on second day there for the football,” Jason says. “Got all the sofas out on the car park. Had all us mates down. Just had a party, man.”

Most importantly, perhaps, was the fact that they played everything live; retaining the wilder elements of a sound earned slogging it out on the UK gigging circuit. “Everything started with us four, all in a room, no drop-ins,” Jason says. What’s more, the band’s disparate listening habits, informed by those numerous journeys, snaking up and down the toilet venues of Britain in the back of a transit van, made for something properly singular. “You’d have Alan Moulder coming in after you’d done a take saying, ‘this is unique, man’. But it’s not! It’s verse, chorus stuff. We just do it our way.”

The first taste listeners will be treated to comes in the form of barnstorming lead single,All Good People, a blues-y rock stomper that combines all the swagger of Oasis with – in what may surprise you – the lyrical honestly of Perfume Genius. It’s ridiculous, it’s fun, and guitars have never sounded healthier in 2018. “It’s a song about mutual respect,” Jason says. “I want to fuck you, you want to fuck me and it’s good, man. It’s sick” (or as Andrej sums up its prospects: “Put it this way, we’re booked in to do the second album, and we’ve not even finished our first. So we’ve definitely got a guaranteed job for at least a year and a half”).

For now, the band is focused on the journey ahead. They want to go to the toppermost of the poppermost, but they want to do it their way, fed on a diet of Django Reinhardt and My Bloody Valentine. They want to aim squarely for the mainstream, but they want to do it without doing what anyone else aiming squarely for the mainstream would (bar writing really, fucking excellent music). “The last 1975 album did 38 countries, debuting at No. 1,” Jason says. “We want to do 50 with our second album.” You know what? It might just be the most modest thing he’s ever said.