Spotlight On... Current Affairs

Current Affairs' new album Off The Tongue is, as they put it, "the kind of music you can shriek and dance around your bedroom to". The Glasgow-and-Berlin-based four-piece fuse dark, gothic sounds with new-wave pop sensibilities and plenty of post-punk edge – the result is 10 tracks that will have you out of your seat shouting about the injustice of it all one minute, and bobbing your head back and forth the next. 

With Off The Tongue out now and a UK tour kicking off in Glasgow this weekend, the band – Joan Sweeney, Sebastian Ymai, Gemma Fleet and Andrew Milk – talk us through the album track-by-track.

Introducing Off The Tongue

"Off The Tongue took a long time to get itself out there and at the same time seemed to happen pretty urgently for us. We started writing the album during lockdown, writing and sharing parts over voice memos, but it didn’t fully come together until we could. Over a couple of practices and few days recording with Ross McGowan at Chime, that was when they took their shape, made sense and got exciting. In fact, most of the band hadn’t even heard the final vocal melodies until recording; Ymai and Gemma were so shocked they burst out laughing. I think there’s a life to the album because of that, that we didn’t tend to labour on the elements too much. Not to say we’re flippant though, we care very much.

"The sound of the album switches and changes a bit, but overall we want it to be the kind of music you can shriek and dance around your bedroom to. Our influences come through naturally from the music we listen to and learned our instruments from (which isn’t always exactly the same as each other) and I think that’s what makes it our own rather than sounding like a cover band, although it is admittedly retro. For me [Joan], writing the album was a chance to flesh out my feelings, give them purpose and find them some community. Different songs had different intents, but across them all is a wanting to build something more in a new way. If we’re witnessing the end of our present conditions, then there could be hope in that for people who think like we do. And if you do, we’ve got you!"

No Fuss

Joan: "The way this song opens is my favourite thing about it – the bass/drum thump into those verging on over-bright guitars, and then we take ourselves away with it. As we were writing, the energy of the song put me into a Cyndi Lauper fantasy, albeit not with the same range! It became a love song with a maniacal edge – on the verge of being out of control and head over heels, but full of positive energy, gravitating toward something you’re sure will feel good any which way it happens. It’s probably the most energetic point on the album so we put it first to start with a bang."

Reactor

Joan: "It’s… another love song! We can’t do without them. The song was written with our original bass player and is a sort of a bridge between our previous releases and this one. I think you can hear us sort of becoming more direct with the sound that we wanted. The song itself is all in the tension of a 'will we/won’t we' that explodes through the chorus when you admit to yourself that the feeling itself is the power of it all. Loving someone while knowing you might not get it back is kind of a beautiful thing."

Right Time

Gemma: "I can’t quite recall, but pretty sure this chorus bass line came first. I wanted something really melodic, with more of a new wave, poppy feel. I was thinking of The Go-Gos and The B-52's, something that you might want to dance on a surfboard to in a colourful shirt dress."

Joan: "Musically and lyrically it switches between those double voices of support: one with sympathy and the other to get you out on and up. When we play it, it always creates this strong energy and make us feel ready for most anything you could chuck at us! It’s sort of a statement of intent for the rest of the record: propulsive and hook-focused, caterwauling and catchy, but with a positive disposition more from the darker side."

Riled

Joan: "Life with a temper can be difficult! When we wrote this song I think I remember us talking a lot about Killing Joke around the guitars. It has this riff that feels to me like a dry heave in action, but prettier. Building on that I wanted to explore anger and how it can kind of come up out of you. I used to be a very angry child, but I’ve (mostly) learned to focus it now and make it useful. I really think any emotion has its time and place, you just have to find it a purpose. This song is the harness, so you can use it later."

Current Affairs. Photo: Catriona Clegg

Get Wrecked

Andrew: "'Out of all of the wreckage, I’d keep the cannonball.' This is the first line of the song and I think it’s a brilliant visual trigger. It’s a great metaphor with real defiance and straight away you’re in the song’s world. Destruction can be beneficial, you might need to completely rip it up and start again."

Regardless

Joan: "Ymai put a lot of spacey sounds at the start of this one which I love. I remember thinking I wanted to pull from Denim a little but I think that lost itself over to our own sound on the way. There might be a crumb or two around still. It’s got a really sassy feel to it on the whole, swinging out on its way to the chorus, so I gave it my brattiest vocals. It’s about literally carrying on regardless… As much as criticisms deserve to be turned over in your mind, they can start to rot and sometimes you need a moment to remember yourself, rise up and push it out."

Cahoots

Joan: "I love the drums on this one and interweaving guitar and bass, it gives a cool, spiky, sort of flow that splashes over in the verses. Lyrically it’s a song about the clamour of gossip that can get to a really black and white place. Not going to even pretend I’m above a gossip, but running wild it can really close out the grey areas and ‘turn everything into nothing’ which I don’t love."

Casual Radicals

Ymai: "It’s a song that completely embodies our joint playing. I find it to be our most sincere and unplanned group effort and it ticks all the boxes regarding musical moments that we have grown to like from our repertoire. It has a bit of everything we have done before but also doesn’t sound like any of our older songs."

Joan: "Lyrically, it’s a song about the Left. It’s that fragmentation and the in-fighting that totally decimates us and bums everyone out. I wanted to write something to pull us all together, and seeing as everything else is radical-something these days, why not do so casually and bump into one another a little more again?"

Big Limit

Joan: "To me, this is our biggest B-52's moment. It’s a pop song through and through, and gathers its moment as it flips through some quite distinct parts, with a middle-eight with a really gorgeous interplay from the bass and guitar. It’s a song moving off from Casual Radicals: if Casual Radicals is the soapbox then Big Limit is the rally. The main feeling is the limitations that are put on us all and bringing them down together."

Her Own Private Multiverse

Joan: "This is the only song we started during a practice for recording. We realised we hadn’t written a slow one in a while and wanted to give it a go. I remember wanting it to invoke a bit of Drivin’ On 9 by The Breeders, but it didn’t end up really like that at all. It’s about accepting all the parts that make you and I hope other people get that from it too."

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Off The Tongue is out now via Tough Love Records
Current Affairs tour the UK this month, including Stereo, Glasgow, 20 Jul and Leith Depot, Edinburgh, 30 Jul