British Birds: Silence Daedalus
(Self-release)
LP | DL
Out now
Chosen as ones to watch in our 25 of 2025, Chorley’s British Birds return with album number 2 – a wonderful collection of garage-pop tinged with northern psych.
Since we first picked up on Chorley’s British Birds with the release of their debut album, the band have really started to fly. The end of 2024 saw them release a new EP, head out on tour with LTW favourites The Lovely Eggs, and get picked up by BBC6’s Marc Riley for a live session. It is no surprise given the kind of joyously infectious songs that they are putting out, and new album, Silence Daedalus, is a massive leap forward for them in many ways. While retaining the lo-fi charm of their debut, there is a focus in the sound, the delivery, and the overall confidence that makes the album brim with verve and energy.
Recent single, This Bin, is the perfect early case in point. It harnesses everything that makes the band so instant – great, simple riffs, a driving rhythm that powers the song forward, fantastic vocals from the whole band, everything you could put on your lo-fi garage-psych wish list. Coming after the wonderful Sheena’s Locket, which flits between surging choruses and verses that would make Stephen Malkmus proud, and the dreamy opener Baby Blue, arpeggios and light cascading through acoustic guitars, the band sounding like they should have, if born twenty years earlier, been Twisted Nerve’s greatest discovery, they deliver an opening triplet that proves beyond doubt that we were right to include them in our list of bands to watch out for this year.
Drunk Dancing To The Ramones, Merry-Go_round, and Reaction Time show the band at their most quirkily garage-pop, akin to the current cop of bands like Delivery. These are songs that are no doubt going to get people moving when the band head out to play them live, while there are also moments when they seem to have been walking through the northern hills with Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane on repeat, such as on Spinning Jenny Forever.
But still, there are jewels here that shine even more. When singer Bobby Mambo takes a backseat and keyboardist/percussionist Emma Townson stands in the spotlight to deliver the wonderful Mother Of Jeanne, channelling her inner Françoise Hardy, she delivers a beautiful song about a “broken witch of words”, a wonderfully lush lounge-psych song that leads perfectly, this time with bassist Ellie Winstanley to the front, into Chivalry. With Bobby coming back to provide backing vocals in the chorus, the song glides effortlessly out of hypnotic verses into a pure Super Furry Animals-circa-’96 sound, the interplay between the two perfectly encapsulating the lyrical play, the conversations through the minds of the song’s two protagonists.
On Silence Daedalus, the band have put to one side the folkier side of their songs that they seemed more steeped in on their first album to embrace the side of their songs that want not to sway you, but to take you by the collar to dance. Like they sing early on, and of course, where the album takes its title, Daedalus didn’t say do not fly / He just said you’ll need to build better wings / Stronger arms, stronger mind / Unlock it and you’ll find…
Unlock this and you will find a true gem of an album by a band that are continuing to carve their own lo-fi DIY path, making their way through the thicket to find meadows of summer expanse where anything is possible. Whether British Birds stay a secret known only to the twitchers or take things further remains to be seen, but whatever they do next, we will be waiting and watching. Based on the leap they have made in the last year, and on this new album, British Birds are a band to keep firmly in your sights.
British Birds are on Bandcamp, Facebook, and Instagram.
Catch them live here:
23/09: George Tavern, London
24/09: Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
25/09: Gullivers, Manchester
26/09: Bootleg Social, Blackpool
27/09: Float Along Festival, Sheffield, UK
03/10: JT Soar, Nottingham
01/10: The Glad Cafe, Glasgow
03/10: JT Soar, Nottingham
04/10: Royal Hotel Whitby, Whitby
08/10: The Prince Albert, Brighton
09/09: The Music Hall, Ramsgate
10/10: The Lanes, Bristol
11/10: The Grayston Unit, Halifax
16/10: The Deco, Portsmouth
~
Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.
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