Carousels’ Nick Benton is a fan of shoegaze. “I fucking love shoegaze!” he tells ClashMusic. “More than anything, more than any other genre and I always have since I was really young.”
The last couple of years have seen a slew of young pretenders pursuing revivalist dreams and drenching their pop tunes in reverb but Nick says this is where Carousels stand apart from their contemporaries. “You’ve got a lot of new bands coming out now that are just fucking coated in reverb and I hated that. I want to make a good, dry shoegaze band that has really familiar songwriting and you can actually hear the melody a little bit more than someone like Slowdive. I wanted to reference old shoegaze bands but not let it be a revivalist thing.”
Our Track Of The Day is ‘Sweet Honey’, taken from the band’s forthcoming debut EP ‘Pop’. Coming in at under the 3 minute mark it encapsulates Nick’s description, “Very short, sharp, loud pop songs”, of what people should expect from the release.
Like the other tracks on the EP, ‘Sweet Honey’ was mainly recorded at Carousels HQ in Cambridge. Nick describes the band’s set up. “It’s my Grandad’s old house, he passed away last year and I moved in with Lucy and now just rent the rooms out to the rest of the band. It’s become the Carousels hub, it’s where everything gets written and recorded. We’ve got a big, open lounge and dining room which we’ve just filled with gear, it’s just a really simple set up that suits us well. If we didn’t live here I think things would be a lot more difficult.”
For a limited time you can download 'Sweet Honey' for free HERE.