Treeboy And Arc keep the post-punk train rolling.
After forming in 2016, Leeds quintet Treeboy And Arc released two singles on the city’s Come Play With Me Records label and the infamous Speedy Wunderground respectively before they set about recording their debut album.
After four days, recording live with each track bleeding into the next, the band entered 2020 in high spirits with plans well underway for the album’s release and subsequent touring activity. You know the next bit.
Afforded the opportunity to reflect on their work, and as the lockdowns wore on, the five members of the band (drummer Isaac Turner, bassist James Kay, synth player Sam Robinson and guitarists George Townsend and Ben Morgan) bravely decided that their sound had moved on and opted to scrap the whole project.
Instead, they sent demos back and forth to one another over 2020/21 and, restrictions permitting, recorded the Life Preserver EP before developing this new ‘debut’ album. A long and complicated road to get to where they are, but where is that?
The answer is post-punk heaven. Stabbing guitars, looped basslines, observational lyrics, cavernous drums…all are contained within Natural Habitat.
The intriguing electronic loop which announces the album on opener Midnight Mass (‘Is it benign or will they find something so sickening it rots from the inside’) gives way to intermittent bursts of stabbed guitar which shake, jangle and clang all at once with all combining for a dramatic finish.
Elsewhere the angular, ragged riffs on Virtual Reality Check are a foundation for the lyrical slogans (‘powerful control the powerless’) which Morgan asserts with matter-of-fact delivery like a twitchy Gang Of Four with wobbling bass and incandescent drums.
Similarly on Box Of Frogs, on which Turner displays some excellent tom-tom skills before the song completely turns on axis with a hurricane-like change of pace, even if the metaphor is stretched a little too thin (‘I used to be as mad as a box of frogs, now I’m just as sad as a box of dead ones’), but the sense of whimsy is welcome.
Unlike many of their peers, Treeboy And Arc convey a multitude of moods: there’s a building sense of dread on Retirement, with a resolute beat held together by a stoic bassline and garnished with some snappy wordplay, while on Human Catastrophe there is a sense of eerie surrealism, but still with some political diatribes.
Behind The Curtain is a tricky track to pin down, with cathartic vocals blending well with powerful, chugging art-rock musicianship, but either way it is immensely satisfying. Saving the best for last, closing track Winter Of Existence is bombastic and startling, as art rock and heavy metal combine for a bracing finale.
There is much to enjoy on Natural Habitat and it’s a very accomplished album, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that unfortunately having bided their time for so long, Treeboy And Arc may have missed the boat.
Yet given their work rate and ethos, there can be confidence that the best is yet to come.