Lambrini Girls on going fast, breaking stuff, ignoring the rules and finding musical balance by “not being an egotistical wanker”
“Don’t think, just do,” might sound like the sort of phrase you’d catch on a tech bro’s tea towel as they sweep a creatine spillage into the sink, but sometimes there’s a grain of truth behind this sort of motivational boilerplate language.
When Lambrini Girls felt like they were stuck in neutral while writing their debut album against the clock, for example, the premise offered much-needed momentum. “We had to follow our intuition a little bit more,” bassist Lilly Macieira says. “We had to let the songs take on their own identity – it was about having an idea and seeing it through.”
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Having toured hard following the release of their 2023 EP You’re Welcome, the Brighton punk duo carried road-tested momentum into two short retreats at a farm in Oxfordshire. It didn’t last. During the first session they pulled together the bones of four or five songs that didn’t move beyond half-finished, and then they ran out of stuff to drink. “We were hitting a lot of creative walls,” Macieira adds.
During the second stint, though, they leaned into the pressure they felt building. They cleaned out the booze aisle of the local supermarket, chasing beers with the feeling that each grain of sand falling through the hourglass would help them make decisions that were economical and, therefore, true to their ideal of wrangling the kinetic energy of their live sets into a snarling whole. “You have to do something fast and you have to do it well,” guitarist and vocalist Phoebe Lunny says. “If you don’t have a choice, you don’t have a choice.”
Duly, Who Let The Dogs Out feels like pinballing around the sort of show that might leave you with a split lip bleeding into a beaming smile. It is ferocious and funny in equal measure, with the condensed writing process helping to bring out only the core tenets of what Lambrini Girls are about. There’s no fat here, nothing extraneous at all.
Image: Harv Frost
Force Multiplier
Baked into their approach is the belief that their music should hit with the same irreverent force as their lyrics, and they never lose sight of that. Of late, they have drawn comparisons to everyone from Idles and X-Ray Spex to Sleater-Kinney. But there’s this chin-out wit to their writing that feels entirely their own – a blend of gobby honesty and righteous fury that’ll rock you back on your heels just as easily as their teeth-gnashing arrangements.
“They go hand in hand,” Lunny says. “One can’t exist without the other. It’s about making sure they hold enough space. A lot of the time choruses won’t actually have that many lyrics because it takes away the impact, in the same way that the instrumentals really frame certain lines. I think the two are symbiotic.”
Broadly speaking, it’s a bad idea to try to build a house on a whirlpool. But here Macieira shows that it’s possible to do so. Who Let The Dogs Out is based upon a serious barrage of bass-driven craziness, with Lunny’s guitars treated chiefly as a textural or melodic element. “The majority is ornamental,” Lunny says. “It’s just there to elevate parts that need to be elevated. The bass is very much the foundation of the songs. I think the best way to balance the two is to not be an egotistical wanker about it, thinking I need to play all over the track. I put it where it needs to go.”
Macieira’s approach is often sound-first, with a feeling often trumping a riff or hook as an artistic spur. She is a pedal-head and a believer that the right piece of kit can be a creative tool at the start rather than further along the line. For evidence, look no further than the filthy, unhinged album opener Bad Apple and the jagged single Love, which were conjured while she got to grips with Randy’s Revenge, an analogue ring modulator created by the Québécois manufacturer Fairfield Circuitry.
“Pedals are really a big part of how I write,” she says. “I only started playing bass in lockdown and I listen to a lot of noise-rock. I take a lot of my inspiration from not having my instrument sound traditional. That’s where I find a lot of creativity, by messing around and using my effects for parts rather than tones.”
Speed Test
Embracing this noise-rock ethos further, the next move in Lambrini Girls’ playbook is to smash all these individual elements together at speed. In theory, that sounds like a lot of fun. In reality, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also about finding out if the rest of the world can take as much discordant chaos as Lunny and Macieira can. “Our tolerance for clashes is quite high,” Macieira says. “When things do, we’re like, ‘It works for me.’”
Recording for Who Let The Dogs Out began only a week after the second Oxfordshire session, with Daniel Fox returning to steer the process after earlier punching in for the 2024 single God’s Country / Body of Mine, which in retrospect looks like an important blueprint for album one in terms of both process and palette. “We didn’t have a lot of time for the songs to simmer,” Macieira says, noting that once they were in the studio they almost had to untangle them.
No stranger to a bit of mayhem thanks to his day job as bassist in the Dublin post-punk outfit Gilla Band, Fox frequently called Lunny and Macieira into the control room to figure out exactly what was going on structurally amid the carnage. “We were playing different things at all times,” Macieira adds. “That needed refining.”
But carving out real estate for each element was always going to represent a complicated balancing act given that Lambrini Girls’ approach isn’t about subtlety in any shape or form. Part of the experience is being overwhelmed by information, meaning that any feeling of fussiness might become terminal. “Refining” is a relative term.
“One thing that I love about recording with Dan is that he knows how to make my bass sound like a jet engine,” Macieira says. To wit, veteran mixing engineer Seth Manchester – fresh from collaborating with sonic envelope-pushers Mdou Moctar and Big | Brave – later observed that he’d never worked on a record with this many bass tracks.
Image: Derek Perlman
Three’s A Crowd
Fox and Macieira ran her go-to Mustang and live pedalboard through three amps at once: an Orange AD200 and a couple of Fenders in a well-worn Bassman and Macieira’s own Rumble Stage 800. “People get funny about modelling amps but it sounds fucking great when it’s paired with a head and an 8×10,” she says. “It adds some really good definition to the sound. There was a DI in there too and a couple of room mics. On some songs I overdubbed with a Moog, adding a bass synth underneath. There was a lot going on.”
Lunny also chose to keep things in the realm of tried and tested by calling on her Mustang through an Orange Rockerverb for almost every note. “I also used a Starcaster on some parts, just to give it a bit of warmth and body,” she says. “My Mustang is so scratchy. But I didn’t really have my work cut out for me compared to Lilly.”
At this point, Macieira jumps in. “You do have two jobs in the band, though,” she says. On paper, or in the liner notes, it’s true that Lunny does have two jobs. But, really, it’s more like three: guitar, vocals, bedlam. “The good thing [about being bass-first] is it frees Phoebe up to go out and do all the wild shit she likes to do live,” Macieira adds.
Stop reading this and look up a photo of a Lambrini Girls playing a show – you’ll see Lunny on the floor, in the crowd, on top of the crowd. As she told NME last year, “If you come and see us live, I’ll probably come into the crowd and punch you”. That is a cornerstone of their outsized, in-your-face approach to fun and meaning, as important as any ringing chord, needling lead line or crushing bass drop, and together they know it. Go beyond the eye-popping presentation, peel back a few gnarly layers, and the key element in all of this is trust in one another.
“Our sound is really chaotic and I find a lot of catharsis in that,” Macieira says. “But there was one instance during Special, Different where, in the outro, we go extremely atonal at the very end. We’re kind of ascending, abandoning all musical scales. That was something I really struggled to get my head around for ages. I had to rely on Phoebe to be like, ‘No, no, it works, it works.’”
Lambrini Girls’ Who Let The Dogs Out is out on 10 January through City Slang.
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