Catfish & The Bottlemen leader Van McCann has been discussing the band’s debut album ‘The Balcony‘s core theme of ‘escapism’ after the LP was officially released this week.
“I’m 22, a couple of months a go I was on the dole, it’s crazy,” he told XFM. “But we’ve proper proper worked for this, we’ve grafted for it and we’ve worked for it, and we’ve lost girlfriends for it, and we’ve been going for about 6 years doing like 200 gigs a year.”
“The whole thing is about escapism because we’re from a small town called Llandudno and everybody knows everyone’s business. It’s about chasing girls and trying to get out of a small town and just going out with your mates really.”
In our review, Live4ever reflected on the ‘against-all-odds’ story of ‘The Balcony’, and concluded: “It remains to be seen whether Catfish can grow into a band capable of chameleonic shifts in their sound as the Arctic Monkeys have expertly achieved over the years, but for now this album offers precisely all that is required of them at this juncture.”
“‘The Balcony’ provides a sonic reference for the youth of today while nostalgic elders can bask in the wide eyed observational imperfections of adolescent romance.”