PINS
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PINS

Manchester, United Kingdom

Manchester, United Kingdom
Band Alternative Indie

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This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

The best kept secret in music

Press


"Wild Nights review - an appealing mix of spikiness and swoon"

The hype that accompanied Pins’ early career, based chiefly on the lo-fi cool of their live shows, made you fear for their future. But the Manchester female quartet’s second record feels like a confident step forward. There’s an appealing mix of spikiness and swoon to their blend of distorted guitars, dazed harmonies and 80s-indebted indie jangle, and although derivative, they bring energy and drama to their source material. Dazed By You makes heavy-lidded doe eyes before building to a frenzied cacophony. Oh Lord combines a Pixies-aping bass line with punchy guitars and sexual unease. A certain blank-faced cool remains a part of their appeal, but it’s combined with some terrific songwriting. - The Guardian


"PINS - Wild Nights - A second album with plenty of bite"

Often pegged as indie pop, it would be easy to denounce PINS as another addition to the jangle scene's long, tenuous list of so-called revivalists. Yet the Manchester quartet's sound more often lends itself to agitated punk than the fey posturing associated with indie pop, particularly on the band's 2013 debut 'Girls Like Us': jangle pop comparisons are only subtly evidenced in the contrast between instrumental brittleness and occasional harmonies, and singer Faith's forceful refrains are anything but sugary or hushed.

The habit of lumping female rock groups into the more inoffensive, 'sentimental' bracket of indie is a recurring theme, but make no mistake - PINS are first and foremost a punk band with a propensity for melody and texture, and it's this pop sensibility that really shines through on 'Wild Nights'. While 'Girls Like Us' was a gripping debut of tempered, belligerent post-punk, their melodic instinct was distinctly amiss and, fundamentally, there was a real lack of memorable songs.

Still, the band exuded promise. Those grimy instrumentals and an ear for a good hook were sentient before, but loom even larger here; opener 'Baby Bhangs' very much carrying on where 'Girls Like Us' left off - moody, abrasive, and a riff that's far dirtier than previous efforts - only to be counteracted by the sprightly, poppy brilliance of 'Young Girls'. Their newfound optimism is a welcomed juncture, while the inclusion of more placid songs like the contemplative coo of 'If Only' and 'Everyone Says' add nuance to the chaos of most tracks here.

Although not exactly pared down, production is fine and not too polished. Lyrically, the band remain less adept than they are at crafting unfailing punk-tinged ditties, with all their vigour going into the instrumental side of things. Take the swaggering lull of 'Curse These Dreams', which recalls The Stone Roses but with added sass. Stand out 'Dazed By You' triumphs where the majority of 'Girls Like Us' failed: melodic and abrasive in equal measure, in the same way that The Buzzcocks' mix of smart, simple melodies and cutting youthful petulance prevailed.

Less caustic than their debut, and more of a 'pop' record in tone, PINS still have a long way to go, but they've essentially done what few bands achieve on their second album: made a record more focused and measured while retaining rawness and negating the use of effusive production. More importantly, though, they're as badass as ever.

7/10

Words: Hayley Scott - Clash


"PINS Wild Nights 4.0"

"What will we do, what will we do, what will we do when our dreams come true?" asks Faith Holgate in the middle of "Young Girls", from PINS' second album. The garage foursome hails from Manchester, a city whose post-industrial malaise is as famous for feeding its native bands' romanticized melancholy as it is for the textile industry that built it. While railing against your environment is stultifying, Holgate suggests ("Sick for days watching the rain/ Everybody looks the same"), that frustration is useful for the way it stokes rebellion and keeps imaginations hungry. It's punk 101, though not a lesson that Wild Nights heeds: its 11 songs betray little trace of insurrection or fantasy, nor PINS' bold presence in the UK indie scene.

PINS went out to Joshua Tree's Rancho de la Luna to record the follow-up to 2013's Girls Like Us with Eagles of Death Metal's Dave Catching. Despite being over 5000 miles from home, their attempt at making desert rock still sounds ferociously pedestrian. In almost every song, Lois McDonald's guitar lumbers over droning organ, and their collective dead-eyed girl-gang vocals hew rigidly to bassist Anna Donigan and drummer Sophie Galpin's unadventurous rhythm section, stripping away their debut's accented identity and self-produced scrappiness. "Young Girls" and "Dazed By You" have a little more surf-pop pep—the latter spiraling somewhere appealingly chaotic in its final minutes—but the lyrics are devoid of action or joy. "The best comes to those who wait/ I'm waiting, yes I'll wait," Holgate sings on "Dazed", which appears to be about being bored on a plane.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them. As it stands, the rhyme schemes sound indebted to Manchester's most famous son ("Glittered eyes like butterflies/ Yesterday so far away/ Sunday morning it's all distorting," goes opener "Baby Bhangs") and the total passivity is maddening. No-good boys are tolerated, girls look best when they're sad/bad, and indecision begets numbness and solitude. There's finally a little action on the rushing "Oh Lord", about a tryst with a stranger, but somehow they manage to completely smother any sense of danger or high-stakes: "He didn't know who I was/ I was a girl looking for love" feels like characterization that wouldn't even pass muster in the fanfic community.

When PINS released the video for lead single "Too Little Too Late", they said that the lyrics "spewed out like hot lava from an angry volcano." The cool result (remember the Duke Spirit?) doesn't match their pitch—it's a tale of infatuation gone sour that climaxes in a painfully weak ultimatum: "Yeah, you said you said you're sorry but I've heard it all before/ Yeah, you said you're sorry, but are you sure?" In a post-"Girls"/Cat Marnell age where messy female expression is such a marketable commodity—confession as currency, struggle as legitimacy—perhaps there's something faintly rebellious about PINS withholding emotional depth (while calling the record Wild Nights!). That's probably a stretch, though: their writing comes off as hesitant rather than any particular aesthetic choice.

However, Wild Nights' standout song makes a virtue of that hesitation, and in doing so, reveals a trace of inner life. Curdled '60s hand-clapper "If Only" is the only number that doesn't feature a "you", only "I", and Holgate conveys her isolation and awkwardness in the simplest terms: "Most of the time I feel wrong/ Like I am no one/ I get so lost/ I want it all to stop." It's the briefest glimpse of promise. PINS has become a halfway-notable British indie band (in domestic terms) because of their industriousness: they run their own label, HAUS OF PINS, and gig relentlessly, whether on their own small tours, or as the opening act for Sleater-Kinney, Babes in Toyland, and Drenge. If they've more like "If Only" in them, they might stand a chance of becoming more than perpetual supporting players. - Pitchfork


Discography

Still working on that hot first release.

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