Casual Sex

Glasgow-based Neu favourites Casual Sex are set to follow-up a debut single on Moshi Moshi with a brand new EP, 'The Bastard Beat'.

Recorded and written at their second home - Glasgow's Green Door Studio - the EP gains release via We Can Still Picnic on 11th November.

'Nothing On Earth' is a fully-charged, near-rampant reminder of the band's studio knowhow and hook-heavy rejoice.

"We find their skins thicker, their musical ideas tighter, their instruments sharper and thoughts perhaps, a little darker," reads a self-referential statement from the band.

Stream 'Nothing On Earth' below and scroll down for the band's US dates with Franz Ferdinand & UK headline shows. - FAKE DIY

Casual Sex
Who: A thoroughly Scottish, wonderfully cheeky post-punk fivesome that manages to channel more than just Orange Juice and Josef K. Their "Stroh 80 / Soft School" single, out today on Moshi Moshi, is a sneering, smartly written debut that sews together elements of quilled krautrock, feathered glam, and roiling dub, while also striking poses by Lou Reed and David Bowie to devilish effect.

File Next To: Franz Ferdinand, Orange Juice, the Velvet Underground

Where to Start: "Stroh 80," heady A-side to that seven-inch, out now. - Spin Magazine

Casual Sex
Who: A thoroughly Scottish, wonderfully cheeky post-punk fivesome that manages to channel more than just Orange Juice and Josef K. Their "Stroh 80 / Soft School" single, out today on Moshi Moshi, is a sneering, smartly written debut that sews together elements of quilled krautrock, feathered glam, and roiling dub, while also striking poses by Lou Reed and David Bowie to devilish effect.

File Next To: Franz Ferdinand, Orange Juice, the Velvet Underground

Where to Start: "Stroh 80," heady A-side to that seven-inch, out now. - Spin Magazine

Today really has been a great day. First of all it is Friday, secondly – Casual Sex are now releasing through Moshi Moshi!
Our Song of the Day, ‘Stroh 80’ comes from the Glaswegian lustmeisters (yes, I have made up this word) and it is being released through Moshi Moshi on April 1st.
‘Stroh 80’ succeeds alone by its sheer force of style and intellect and merits as much attention as possible. If you want something to calm the inner demons that your working week of hell has conjured then this is the perfect antidote. - Glasgow Podcart

Today really has been a great day. First of all it is Friday, secondly – Casual Sex are now releasing through Moshi Moshi!
Our Song of the Day, ‘Stroh 80’ comes from the Glaswegian lustmeisters (yes, I have made up this word) and it is being released through Moshi Moshi on April 1st.
‘Stroh 80’ succeeds alone by its sheer force of style and intellect and merits as much attention as possible. If you want something to calm the inner demons that your working week of hell has conjured then this is the perfect antidote. - Glasgow Podcart

“I wouldn’t come to see us and expect to find a new Franz Ferdinand or Orange Juice,” Sam Smith, vocalist and guitarist for Glasgow’s Casual Sex, tells us in a backstreet pub in the heart of London’s Shoreditch. They’re one date into their summer tour, and so far the press that’s surrounded the emergence of their exceedingly raunchy sound has drawn comparisons to two of Scotland’s biggest success stories.

On the surface, the band's music is incredibly quirky and concise - they produce short, sharp, quintessentially pop songs that channel all of the greatest post-punk and art rock bands, falling somewhere on the spectrum between XTC and Devo rather than the more mainstream indie acts comparisons like Orange Juice suggest. “In good grace, you do except that when you have a couple of guys [from Glasgow] playing guitar… the comparisons are going to happen, and we don’t wear it with any bad shoe – I just hope that people will see beyond that.”

Smith, along with the rest of the band – guitarist Edward Wood, bassist Peter Masson and drummer Chris McCrory – all met through the studio where Sam is the main sound engineer. It’s in this same studio that the band practice as well as record their material, making the recording and writing processes far easier for everyone. “It’s a primarily analogue studio. Not because I’m an analogue fascist, but mainly because I was getting frustrated going into ProTools studios,” Smith clarifies.




With a team assembled that formed around studio knowledge, the band is logically self-produced. But they’re not necessarily set on sticking to the same formula they’ve established forever and always. “If [a producer] came around that we liked I’m sure we’d be up for mixing things up a bit,” Smith says. The same goes for the band’s stance on location, with bassist Masson saying “I know in particular that certain members of the band, myself included, want to get a place where we can have a house or a cottage or something like that. Because as much as we enjoy the studio, we’re still within our home comforts – we’re only a phone call away from someone asking us if we want to go for a pint. I think we’d like to immerse ourselves more.”

The band’s debut single, ‘Stroh 80’ – which was released earlier this year on Moshi Moshi – gleams with skewed, heavily warped guitar lines that remain crystal clear and polished now matter how far left they get. It’s a slinky and seductive tale, one of being caught with your mate’s girlfriend after a drug-fuelled party, and it’s that dark sense of humour that sets the tone for the rest of the band’s material.

“They’re completely 100% genuine,” Smith says on the authenticity of his somewhat promiscuous lyricism. “It’s all drawn from a real place. We’ve had our wild moments and still might occasionally dip our toe in the water, but certainly we’ve all become a little more civilised. Sadly, the people who are involved are aware that the songs are about them. You always kind of wonder ‘hmm, I wonder if they know this is about them?’” - This is Fake DIY

“I wouldn’t come to see us and expect to find a new Franz Ferdinand or Orange Juice,” Sam Smith, vocalist and guitarist for Glasgow’s Casual Sex, tells us in a backstreet pub in the heart of London’s Shoreditch. They’re one date into their summer tour, and so far the press that’s surrounded the emergence of their exceedingly raunchy sound has drawn comparisons to two of Scotland’s biggest success stories.

On the surface, the band's music is incredibly quirky and concise - they produce short, sharp, quintessentially pop songs that channel all of the greatest post-punk and art rock bands, falling somewhere on the spectrum between XTC and Devo rather than the more mainstream indie acts comparisons like Orange Juice suggest. “In good grace, you do except that when you have a couple of guys [from Glasgow] playing guitar… the comparisons are going to happen, and we don’t wear it with any bad shoe – I just hope that people will see beyond that.”

Smith, along with the rest of the band – guitarist Edward Wood, bassist Peter Masson and drummer Chris McCrory – all met through the studio where Sam is the main sound engineer. It’s in this same studio that the band practice as well as record their material, making the recording and writing processes far easier for everyone. “It’s a primarily analogue studio. Not because I’m an analogue fascist, but mainly because I was getting frustrated going into ProTools studios,” Smith clarifies.




With a team assembled that formed around studio knowledge, the band is logically self-produced. But they’re not necessarily set on sticking to the same formula they’ve established forever and always. “If [a producer] came around that we liked I’m sure we’d be up for mixing things up a bit,” Smith says. The same goes for the band’s stance on location, with bassist Masson saying “I know in particular that certain members of the band, myself included, want to get a place where we can have a house or a cottage or something like that. Because as much as we enjoy the studio, we’re still within our home comforts – we’re only a phone call away from someone asking us if we want to go for a pint. I think we’d like to immerse ourselves more.”

The band’s debut single, ‘Stroh 80’ – which was released earlier this year on Moshi Moshi – gleams with skewed, heavily warped guitar lines that remain crystal clear and polished now matter how far left they get. It’s a slinky and seductive tale, one of being caught with your mate’s girlfriend after a drug-fuelled party, and it’s that dark sense of humour that sets the tone for the rest of the band’s material.

“They’re completely 100% genuine,” Smith says on the authenticity of his somewhat promiscuous lyricism. “It’s all drawn from a real place. We’ve had our wild moments and still might occasionally dip our toe in the water, but certainly we’ve all become a little more civilised. Sadly, the people who are involved are aware that the songs are about them. You always kind of wonder ‘hmm, I wonder if they know this is about them?’” - This is Fake DIY

With a new single out on Moshi Moshi and an album on the horizon, we sit down with Casual Sex to discuss the Glasgow band's past, present and why winging it can yield the best results
FEATURE BY CHRIS BUCKLE.
PUBLISHED 02 APRIL 2013
Granted it’s usually intentional, but some band names make innuendo nigh impossible to dodge – Throbbing Gristle (snigger!); Helmet (tee hee!); The Strokes (OK, that’s enough…). The latest act of naughty nomenclature to trigger titters is Glasgow-based four-piece Casual Sex – a straight-up mono entendre that’ll leave the bashful sheepishly clearing their search history after every Googling.

So, lest smut run rampant, we’ll get it out of our system upfront: recently, The Skinny has been getting into Casual Sex. In fact, The Skinny finds the sounds of Casual Sex most enjoyable. So much so, that The Skinny decided a first-hand introduction to Casual Sex was in order. “I think when we picked the name we kind of knew that, well, obviously we’d get some kind of jokes,” says vocalist, guitarist and Casual Sex-instigator Sam Smith (known in a former life as Mother, of disbanded art-punks Mother and the Addicts). “I suppose with a lot of people, you say it to them, they go ‘hahaha’ and you’ve got their attention, so it serves its purpose at that level. My sister hates it though,” he laughs. “She’s a mother of two young children. She said ‘Sam, why can’t you call a band something nice like The Village, which I think sounds bloody creepy… So yes, puns around the name are always taken in good humour, but we just hope that when people eventually get over the ‘ho ho, Casual Sex!’ reaction, they’ll actually listen to us.”

There’s plenty of incentive to do so. Across their slim-but-ace catalogue of available tracks, the band have synthesised a thrilling mix of sounds, including rockabilly, post-punk, glam rock and shades of dub-indebted new wave in the Police/Clash mould. This medley is reflective of the diversity of tastes amongst the members (in addition to Sam, Edward Wood on guitar, Chris McCrory on drums and Peter Masson on bass), with dozens of acts and scenes dropped into conversation across our interview: from Sparks to PiL; Detroit electro to northern soul. Their tunes present a rich soup of influences, recut in vibrant ways: from the crisp space-surf of North to the strutting, sleazy come-on of We’re All Here Mainly for the Sex; the spidery guitars and motorik rhythms of National Unity to the disco-tinted groove of The Bastard Beat. Lean, arch and assured, the band’s appeal is immediate and infectious.

Casual Sex began life as a series of demos that Sam had worked on with colleague Emily MacLaren, a fellow engineer at The Green Door recording studio in the city’s West End. “We just muddled it together really,” says Sam, “and afterwards she was like ‘you’ve got a body of work here, it’d be a shame not to get a band together.’” Ed was brought in first, initially to do a drum session but soon switching to his six-stringed comfort zone. Chris and Peter, meanwhile, came into the fold via a course they were both enrolled on at Green Door.

“SOMETIMES I DO JUST MAKE STUFF UP…” - SAM SMITH
“When I was in the studio doing my session, someone let me hear what he was working on,” says Peter, “and then basically, whenever I’d see Sam out I’d be like ‘oh come on, let me come and play guitar.’” With that corner already covered, the position of bassist was offered instead. “I just said ‘aye’ and then learned really quickly,” says Peter. “I could play guitar, and imagined it would be about the same, but I remember at the first practices my fingers were getting really sore but I’d kid on they weren’t…”

Almost immediately, Casual Sex shifted from being purely an outlet for Sam’s solo ideas to a fully-fledged collaborative affair. “As I started working with these guys, the majority of what I’d done on my own got pushed aside,” says Sam. “Originally, Ed was just coming in to learn the parts, but very quickly I thought ‘actually, this is fucking boring, all this stuff’s really old.’”

As a result, “warm-up sessions became writing sessions,” with new material coming together fluidly. “One of the keys to our writing,” reckons Ed, “is we’ve got such a strong rhythm section – like, Chris can pretty much play any style of drumming, whether he likes the style or not. So Pete will throw out a bass line and Chris will immediately pick up on the style, and then it gets embellished with guitars and Sam just drops lyrics on it – it seems to flow like that every time. Plus, our rehearsal room is a studio, so when an idea gets formulated it’s really quickly recorded and set in stone. I’d say that the majority of the tracks we’ve done in the last few years have been written and recorded in the same day.”

Ed credits Sam’s foundational material as key to this healthy creativity. “The narratives of Sam’s early songs have pretty much been the platform for everything up to now,” he states. “There - The Skinny Mag

With a new single out on Moshi Moshi and an album on the horizon, we sit down with Casual Sex to discuss the Glasgow band's past, present and why winging it can yield the best results
FEATURE BY CHRIS BUCKLE.
PUBLISHED 02 APRIL 2013
Granted it’s usually intentional, but some band names make innuendo nigh impossible to dodge – Throbbing Gristle (snigger!); Helmet (tee hee!); The Strokes (OK, that’s enough…). The latest act of naughty nomenclature to trigger titters is Glasgow-based four-piece Casual Sex – a straight-up mono entendre that’ll leave the bashful sheepishly clearing their search history after every Googling.

So, lest smut run rampant, we’ll get it out of our system upfront: recently, The Skinny has been getting into Casual Sex. In fact, The Skinny finds the sounds of Casual Sex most enjoyable. So much so, that The Skinny decided a first-hand introduction to Casual Sex was in order. “I think when we picked the name we kind of knew that, well, obviously we’d get some kind of jokes,” says vocalist, guitarist and Casual Sex-instigator Sam Smith (known in a former life as Mother, of disbanded art-punks Mother and the Addicts). “I suppose with a lot of people, you say it to them, they go ‘hahaha’ and you’ve got their attention, so it serves its purpose at that level. My sister hates it though,” he laughs. “She’s a mother of two young children. She said ‘Sam, why can’t you call a band something nice like The Village, which I think sounds bloody creepy… So yes, puns around the name are always taken in good humour, but we just hope that when people eventually get over the ‘ho ho, Casual Sex!’ reaction, they’ll actually listen to us.”

There’s plenty of incentive to do so. Across their slim-but-ace catalogue of available tracks, the band have synthesised a thrilling mix of sounds, including rockabilly, post-punk, glam rock and shades of dub-indebted new wave in the Police/Clash mould. This medley is reflective of the diversity of tastes amongst the members (in addition to Sam, Edward Wood on guitar, Chris McCrory on drums and Peter Masson on bass), with dozens of acts and scenes dropped into conversation across our interview: from Sparks to PiL; Detroit electro to northern soul. Their tunes present a rich soup of influences, recut in vibrant ways: from the crisp space-surf of North to the strutting, sleazy come-on of We’re All Here Mainly for the Sex; the spidery guitars and motorik rhythms of National Unity to the disco-tinted groove of The Bastard Beat. Lean, arch and assured, the band’s appeal is immediate and infectious.

Casual Sex began life as a series of demos that Sam had worked on with colleague Emily MacLaren, a fellow engineer at The Green Door recording studio in the city’s West End. “We just muddled it together really,” says Sam, “and afterwards she was like ‘you’ve got a body of work here, it’d be a shame not to get a band together.’” Ed was brought in first, initially to do a drum session but soon switching to his six-stringed comfort zone. Chris and Peter, meanwhile, came into the fold via a course they were both enrolled on at Green Door.

“SOMETIMES I DO JUST MAKE STUFF UP…” - SAM SMITH
“When I was in the studio doing my session, someone let me hear what he was working on,” says Peter, “and then basically, whenever I’d see Sam out I’d be like ‘oh come on, let me come and play guitar.’” With that corner already covered, the position of bassist was offered instead. “I just said ‘aye’ and then learned really quickly,” says Peter. “I could play guitar, and imagined it would be about the same, but I remember at the first practices my fingers were getting really sore but I’d kid on they weren’t…”

Almost immediately, Casual Sex shifted from being purely an outlet for Sam’s solo ideas to a fully-fledged collaborative affair. “As I started working with these guys, the majority of what I’d done on my own got pushed aside,” says Sam. “Originally, Ed was just coming in to learn the parts, but very quickly I thought ‘actually, this is fucking boring, all this stuff’s really old.’”

As a result, “warm-up sessions became writing sessions,” with new material coming together fluidly. “One of the keys to our writing,” reckons Ed, “is we’ve got such a strong rhythm section – like, Chris can pretty much play any style of drumming, whether he likes the style or not. So Pete will throw out a bass line and Chris will immediately pick up on the style, and then it gets embellished with guitars and Sam just drops lyrics on it – it seems to flow like that every time. Plus, our rehearsal room is a studio, so when an idea gets formulated it’s really quickly recorded and set in stone. I’d say that the majority of the tracks we’ve done in the last few years have been written and recorded in the same day.”

Ed credits Sam’s foundational material as key to this healthy creativity. “The narratives of Sam’s early songs have pretty much been the platform for everything up to now,” he states. “There - The Skinny Mag

Hometown: Glasgow.

The lineup: Sam Smith (vocals, guitar), Edward Wood (guitar), Peter Masson (bass), Chris McCrory (drums).

The background: Casual Sex are a Glasgow outfit in the Orange Juice/Franz Ferdinand tradition rather than in the Alex Harvey sense. Theirs is a spiky, tart pop music inspired by that moment in early 1981 when the penny dropped and UK post-punk bands began to realise one way out of the art of darkness was through the charts. They have a singer whose voice channels Lou Reed's droll spirit and some of Edwyn Collins's arch wit, and the way their players negotiate their instruments suggests an affinity with all manner of pop and rock styles and eras from glam to white reggae.

The joint CVs of these late twentysomethings include stints in record production, studio engineering, other groups as well as "the fashion and telecommunications industries", as their press release has it. They were brought together through chance meetings (and other Josef K song titles) before gathering at Glasgow's Green Door Studio, where the idea of Casual Sex took shape. Observers reliably inform us they "look like they've walked out of Edinburgh/Glasgow circa 1979", a reference to the formative stage of the careers of Orange Juice, Josef K, Fire Engines et al when Scottish bands resembled sexily dishevelled bank clerks straight out of the pages of a Franz Kafka novel.

Fortunately, the music backs up the playful hyperbole. Their single Stroh 80 – "about being caught doing the nasty with your girlfriend's pal in the aftermath of a drug party on the floor of a local occultist", according to frontman Sam Smith – is great. Based on a Velvets-simple chord sequence that Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs, to name but one of their peers, would kill for, it features handclaps and feedback, and elements of disco and discord. Smith's voice is quite Steve Harley – Dylan at his most cynical put through a louche glam filter – and the music is equal parts Chinnichap and CBGBs. The other track on the single, Soft School – inspired by Smith's dad's exploits teaching in the rough classrooms of the 70s – opens with choppy Police-circa-Roxanne guitar, which is then overlaid by a menacing, angular riff worthy of Magazine as Smith does his best impression of Jarvis doing Bowie. It sounds like funk as played in 1975 by white rock musicians, or the Glitter Band impersonating Neu! at the height of punk. Extra track National Unity is excellent, with its echoes of white post-punks high on dub and a rhythmic propulsion that conjures the title of XTC's album Drums and Wires, all tinny clatter and a guitar line so wiry and thin it could pierce your skin. Casual Sex? We predict a long-term romance.

The buzz: "Succeeds by its sheer force of style and intellect and merits as much attention as possible."

The truth: Potentially the best Scottish indie band since Franz.

Most likely to: Simply thrill.

Least likely to: Rip it up and start again.

What to buy: Stroh 80/Soft School is released on 1 April by Moshi Moshi Singles Club.

File next to: Franz Ferdinand, Orange Juice, Josef K, Bourgie Bourgie.
- The Guardian

Hometown: Glasgow.

The lineup: Sam Smith (vocals, guitar), Edward Wood (guitar), Peter Masson (bass), Chris McCrory (drums).

The background: Casual Sex are a Glasgow outfit in the Orange Juice/Franz Ferdinand tradition rather than in the Alex Harvey sense. Theirs is a spiky, tart pop music inspired by that moment in early 1981 when the penny dropped and UK post-punk bands began to realise one way out of the art of darkness was through the charts. They have a singer whose voice channels Lou Reed's droll spirit and some of Edwyn Collins's arch wit, and the way their players negotiate their instruments suggests an affinity with all manner of pop and rock styles and eras from glam to white reggae.

The joint CVs of these late twentysomethings include stints in record production, studio engineering, other groups as well as "the fashion and telecommunications industries", as their press release has it. They were brought together through chance meetings (and other Josef K song titles) before gathering at Glasgow's Green Door Studio, where the idea of Casual Sex took shape. Observers reliably inform us they "look like they've walked out of Edinburgh/Glasgow circa 1979", a reference to the formative stage of the careers of Orange Juice, Josef K, Fire Engines et al when Scottish bands resembled sexily dishevelled bank clerks straight out of the pages of a Franz Kafka novel.

Fortunately, the music backs up the playful hyperbole. Their single Stroh 80 – "about being caught doing the nasty with your girlfriend's pal in the aftermath of a drug party on the floor of a local occultist", according to frontman Sam Smith – is great. Based on a Velvets-simple chord sequence that Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs, to name but one of their peers, would kill for, it features handclaps and feedback, and elements of disco and discord. Smith's voice is quite Steve Harley – Dylan at his most cynical put through a louche glam filter – and the music is equal parts Chinnichap and CBGBs. The other track on the single, Soft School – inspired by Smith's dad's exploits teaching in the rough classrooms of the 70s – opens with choppy Police-circa-Roxanne guitar, which is then overlaid by a menacing, angular riff worthy of Magazine as Smith does his best impression of Jarvis doing Bowie. It sounds like funk as played in 1975 by white rock musicians, or the Glitter Band impersonating Neu! at the height of punk. Extra track National Unity is excellent, with its echoes of white post-punks high on dub and a rhythmic propulsion that conjures the title of XTC's album Drums and Wires, all tinny clatter and a guitar line so wiry and thin it could pierce your skin. Casual Sex? We predict a long-term romance.

The buzz: "Succeeds by its sheer force of style and intellect and merits as much attention as possible."

The truth: Potentially the best Scottish indie band since Franz.

Most likely to: Simply thrill.

Least likely to: Rip it up and start again.

What to buy: Stroh 80/Soft School is released on 1 April by Moshi Moshi Singles Club.

File next to: Franz Ferdinand, Orange Juice, Josef K, Bourgie Bourgie.
- The Guardian