London Post-Punk Advance Guard Legss are back Kicking and Screaming with new single ‘The Landlord’.

The band’s return pounds with unapologetic heaviness while developing Legss’ commentary on bands like their own.

Photo: Will Reid | Words: Lloyd Bolton

Swaying bedraggled between driving rain roars and winded gasps for air, ‘The Landlord’ is a fierce return from Legss, eminent London post-post-punks who continually bring genuinely original developments to the genre. Amid the pounding rhythm beaten out by Louis Grace, Ned Green delivers hangdog vocals that gasp and burn with the fury of a nasty hangover.

Legss have always been confidently self-critical, not only of their own music but also of the movement from which it comes. As Green howls, “I feel like I’m owed some sort of legacy”, we might read a reflection on the post-punk style and the inherent self-importance written into certain strands of it. It recalls a comment in earlier release ‘Local God’ bemoaning, “bands like ours that do nothing, songwriters who can’t sing”. On ‘The Landlord’, it feels as if his offerings of wisdom are deliberately lost in the torrents of noise blasted out by the four band members.

Where the music softens to put a spoken word section centre stage alongside Max Oliver’s arpeggiated guitar, Green offsets his share of the limelight in comments on his own unoriginality. Herein lies the rather more original take of the song (felt across the band’s output to date) that captures a weariness in the face of the kind of sweeping statements liable to crop up in less self-conscious interpretations of this style of music.

Named in part for the symbolic potential of the overbearing power of landlords, and in part for a favourite pint among the band, this new cut finds Legss inhabiting more brutal heaviness than ever before.

Written by HARD OF HEARING MUSIC