SNAYX - 'Better Days'
Brighton trio SNAYX continue their sweat-inducing brand of alt-rock swagger with new single ‘Better Days’.
These days coastal Brighton seems quite the location for emerging guitar music with an edge. Glimpse the town’s exports produced over the last decade and all you can admit is that this otherwise tranquil side of England is deceptive, in that it’s also the site of and haven for alternative and indie rock. Royal Blood, Tigercub, Demob Happy and Black Honey: these names you’ve heard, surely? And let's not forget the emerging groups building on this evolving scene - Lime Garden, Beachtape, Egyptian Blue – I could continue. In fact, I will. The subject of this review is an outfit fully embodying this ever-evolving scene, a trio by the name of SNAYX (pronounced “Snakes”), and their most recent offering ‘Better Days’.
The band comprises three members: vocalist Charlie Herridge, bassist Ollie Horner and Drummer Lainey Loops. If you came here looking for another offshoot out of the well-worn indie rock playbook (swirling guitar ambience, reverb-soaked soundscapes and all else in between) you came to the wrong place. The band operates on a tight, abrasive, three-pronged concoction of ribcage splitting bass noise, huge drums, and a frontman who glides seemingly at will through punk-rock snarls, angry spoken word and conventional singing. They’re operating on a rulebook all their own making, drawing from such distant fountains of musical inspiration its impressive howthey’ve managed to draw it all into one distinct sound. Most recent EP ‘Weaponized Youth: Part 1’, alongside more recent releases ‘Boys In Blue’ and ‘H.A.N.G’ capture this bottled-lightning sound that’s garnered them the notice they’ve earned.
With their most recent single ‘Better Days’, you have the clear trajectory of the band now complete with a well-established sound. Vocally the track is an observation and overall statement around friendships formed and company kept, and the stark realisation that said company is actually harmful or unworthy of holding onto. Taken alongside the drum and bass performances, this starkness also becomes an angry proclamation and promise to move outward and beyond these friendships, now newly discovered as toxic. Ollie’s bass and Lainey’s drums are constant, propulsive and thunderous. They both just as easily reduce in volume in the tracks more wistful pre-choruses alongside Charlie’s repeated desire ‘Life feels, life feels far away. And I need better days, I need better friends and faces...’ before all then erupt, drums now a thudding wall, bass drowning in several doses of low-end distortion, and Charlie’s second promise to ‘Cut you out, cut you out...’ fills the spaces in between.
The track, in its essence, divides into a hopeful longing for purer friendship in its quieter parts, and a decisive call to action over this hope and desire when the chorus and other louder elements kicks in. It’s a fitting duality of emotional discourse around the subject of toxic company. Throw in several raucous bass riffs, and a decidedly mountainous drum sound, and you have an alt-rock track heavy both in sound and subject matter, marking it as another emotionally dense and sonically furious track in the expanding SNAYX discography.
Words by Harry Meenagh
