Nape Neck

Reviews

Nape Neck The Shallowest End LP

I won’t beat around the bush, folks—Leeds trio NAPE NECK’s first LP The Shallowest End utterly and totally stunned me. This thing is a perfect mess of puzzling bass lines, proudly no wave guitars, and incredibly fucked-up drum beats. What’s crazier is the fact that all three members are singing while breezing through those dazzling signature changes and sharp turns in composition. I mean, how? How is it possible for three people to make that much noise and make it make sense? It’s an absolutely explosive and electrifying noise rock freakout, and I’m head over heels in love with it. Ring-ring: Hey Alex, I know I already submitted it, but is it possible to make a few changes to my year-end top ten?

Nape Neck Nape Neck LP

You can skip reading this review and just buy the record. NAPE NECK is the realest shit, and I have already bookmarked this for end-of-year top ten season. Outstanding collection of post-punk meets no wave squall that sounds like a GANG OF FOUR, TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS, and ERASE ERRATA tag team against your brain. There is a forward propulsion to these tracks that is effortlessly compelling and enormously fresh. Syncopated drums lock in with heavy bass grooves, while guitar lines tangle in and out and transform into a percussive element of rhythmic palm muted strumming. All three members sing, usually at the same time, their voices weaving an urgent tapestry of sound that comes together in ecstatic, unified chants on tracks like “Demonstrations” and “A Worm.” This LP compiles two previously released cassettes, and is bewildering in how fully formed the band emerged from the beginning. Essential urgent punk for right now.

Nape Neck Look Alive cassette

The UK’s leading jabbers and scrabblers NAPE NECK return with the follow-up to their absolutely bruising self-titled 2020 cassette debut, and somehow they’ve managed to squeeze the vice even tighter on Look Alive. Vocals from all three band members push and pull against one another, fighting for space in a claustrophobic crush of caustic sheet metal six-string scrape and a frenetic, lockstep rhythmic rumble, like the DOG FACED HERMANS or the EX if they had come up through artist lofts rather than anarcho squats. The exquisitely ERASE ERRATA-esque “Aim Slow” scratches and slides through a cycle of needling guitar and staccato bass grind before breaking down into abstracted-from-language shouts punctuating the title imperative; blink-and-you-missed-it chorus clangs of cowbell provide some limber post-punk-funk release in the otherwise hermetically pressurized “Kiss Me Boy, I’m Dying;” “Warm Air” spirals around a Möbius strip bass line, bisected by an anxious and agitated/coolly collected call-and-response vocal tradeoff—but anxious almost always wins out with NAPE NECK. No wave for the now!

Nape Neck Nape Neck cassette

NAPE NECK is a trio from Leeds playing post-punk that’s simultaneously tangled and taut, danceable and destructed, all while resisting any attempts to be easily situated as the latest addition to a specific geographic and genre-based continuum that stretches back to GANG OF FOUR and DELTA 5. There’s definitely some echoes of Andy Gill’s razor-edged guitar scratch in the mix, but if anything, NAPE NECK’s knotted rhythms and the intersecting/overlapping vocal shouts from all three band members bring to mind the mid ’90s neo-No Wave revival led by bands like MELTDOWN and SCISSOR GIRLS (or in the early ’00s, ERASE ERRATA), who drew inspiration from the spiky tension of first wave UK post-punk but translated it through the more wild and free tendencies of DNA-descended downtown art-noise. “No Platforming” and “Paperweight” are all clipped Morse code rhythms and sharply punctuated lyrical declarations, while the delirious, snaking guitar and dueling vocals in “Job Club” push against steady bass throb and stark, calculated beats as NAPE NECK effortlessly walk the tightrope between chaos and calm. An absolutely savage debut, and probably the most exciting new band I’ve heard in at least a few years.