Roxy Girls - 'Spanners For Hands'

Sunderland four-piece preface their upcoming mini-album with a stripped-down, no-nonsense exercise in accessible post-punk.

It’s something of a purple patch for the post-punk oeuvre at present, with all manner of sonic and aesthetic approaches expanding its appeal and reach, landing as it presently does somewhere between a kind of indie-friendliness, working-class agitation, and wilful, challenging noise at its farthest reaches. For Tyneside four-piece Roxy Girls, approaching upcoming mini-album ‘A Poverty of Attention’, releasing on September 6th via Moshi Moshi, means landing more toward the middle of the aforementioned Venn diagram.

The record’s second leadoff, ‘Spanners for Hands’, picks up where previous single ‘Trials and Tribulations’ leaves off, furthering what we’ve heard of the record’s observations of modernity and the question of purpose in a world where the ideas of permanence and consensus are not only changing, but doing so at an unprecedented pace. On its own, it’s a lithe and limber piece of work that leans in on the band’s poppier impulses and influences, clocking in at just under three minutes and built on an odd, stop-start song structure, that leave odd hooks and a sense of humour room to sink in, without becoming overfamiliar. A welcome portent of things to come from the band, right as we find ourselves in need of just such a proposition.

Words by Mike McGrath Bryan

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