Photo by Stuart Peach
The alt-rock quartet Chicanes’ brooding, high-impact sound has been hitting live shows across their Norwich base. With more planned for the coming year, including further performances, interviews and visuals, the local scene is getting a boost to the national stage as they break out of East Anglia and set out new horizons.
‘Fray’, their latest single, offers a compelling final preview of their debut album, Something Beautiful, set to follow next week. Produced by the Grammy winner Adrian Bushby, there’s a sense of haunting vulnerability within the explosive alternative noise.
Carefully built guitars shift into dense, shoegaze-tinged choruses, unfolding with distortion, intricate rhythms and hypnotic melodies. Eventually spilling over into a cinematic finale marked by gut-punch intensity, they wear the disconnection on their sleeve, but mould a catharsis from the ashes.
The band dives in, “The writing of the track was inspired by Thom Yorke’s Hearing Damage and Loathe’s Sad Cartoon. We really wanted to blend some ethereal and atmospheric textures with a sense of energy and raw intensity.
Thematically, the track explores the pain of loss and emotional disconnection.”
Listen to ‘Fray’:
