10 reasons why you need Crawlers in your life

Crawlers guitarist Amy Woodall has one word to sum up the band’s 2022: “Chaos.” From touring America for the first time, to supporting My Chemical Romance, to performing at Reading & Leeds, they’ve accomplished a hell of a lot in one year.

“It’s weird to look back because you forget what you’ve done when you’re so wrapped up in it,” Amy explains. “I was talking about it the other day and it was like, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve done so much!’”

“When it gets to December and it’s been a whole year it’ll be easier to look back and see what we’ve done this year, and what we want to do next year,” adds drummer Harry Breen.

There’s no time for reflecting just yet, though. As the band – completed by vocalist Holly Minto and bassist Liv Kettle – drop their excellent debut mixtape Loud Without Noise, here’s 10 reasons you need to get onboard if you haven’t already done so…

Since signing to Polydor at the start of 2022, Crawlers have been able to focus on the band full-time. But it wasn’t always that way…

Holly: “We’re all from working class northern places and we’ve all had that side hustle and other jobs to kind of fund what we were doing. Going to a major label meant that we could quit part-time jobs and fund ourselves. We’ve been working our whole lives, and it was really nice to have that change of pace where music was our full-time job and we could do what we wanted with it.”
Amy: “I think we were just ready for it. We had our thing and we still employ the same small team, and it just felt like we were ready for that next step.”
Harry: “But we still get called industry plants along the way!”
Holly: “We even got that before we signed to a major.”
Harry: “It’ll only get worse the bigger you get. People’s definition of that is just whether or not you blow up. By that logic, Nirvana were industry plants!”

Last year’s Come Over (again) exploded online, but Crawlers aren’t trying to go viral with every song they release…

Amy: “It’s weird when you compare songs, because we’d never write to be viral. With TikTok, it’s just another transitional thing, and all the artists that are writing music for TikTok won’t last. We’re just writing music that we all love.”
Holly: “I think that’s it, and if you look at Fuck Me (I Didn’t Know How To Say), that blew up too but not on TikTok; it was on Spotify and general streams. It was a song that we really believed in, and it had a completely different way of getting so much engagement. I love comparing TikTok to MySpace, because that was a thing that blew up lots of artists, but did they cement that fanbase, or was it just on a page that then died? TikTok’s amazing and we’re so thankful for its spirit, but you have to think of the long-term – and the long-term is, ‘Do you have a career without that stuff?’ We once had someone saying, ‘You’ve got all these followers and you can’t sell the tickets. I remember someone saying that, and our first tour sold out straight away!”
Liv: “That was so funny – we had a tour that sold out in like 10 days.”
Amy: “At first, it was just because we couldn’t afford to go on tour. We were with an indie and we had all these followers, but it was like, ‘We can’t sell any tickets because we can’t actually afford to go on tour…’”

While Crawlers are dreaming of massive production one day, right now they’ve perfected the important stuff: performing brilliantly and letting their personalities shine onstage…

Holly: “If you can do it without the big stage show then you’re already there. You see artists who don’t have to do much because they’ve got that charisma, and I want people to feel enthralled and part of our world without that. But then we can have the extra stuff to elevate that world.”
Amy: “The 1975 are a band I’m really inspired by – their show is just amazing. As musicians we always go to shows and analyse everything that’s going on, but when I saw them, or when we went to see Haim, I wasn’t even thinking about anything because the show was so amazing. Hopefully one day we can get a production that size!”
Holly: “Bring Me The Horizon as well. And My Chemical Romance – they were my everything in high school, and they’re so charismatic and they’ve having fun. When we first started I was so into having this ‘badass’ persona (laughs) and I was, like, moody! And my mum was like, ‘Why are you being like that?!’ And then I started having fun, and it made the audience have fun, and it made us have fun. And that’s who we are.”
Liv: “Like Holly said, we tried the whole different persona thing, and it just didn’t work for us. And even when we were trying to have these really moody personas, we’d catch each other’s eye and start giggling, and then go back to being moody again! It was like, ‘Why are we trying to be someone that we’re not?’ I think because we’ve all got such different influences, that kind of comes out when we play. When you see us all together, it makes sense and you get the whole picture.”

Sonically and visually, Crawlers are incredibly well thought-out. And it was a case of sitting down and working out how to keep everyone happy…

Liv: “We said, ‘Okay, here’s all our influences and here are the crossover bands who we all like – let’s just see what happens.’ It has changed over the years, and that’s because what we listen to changes, and we’ve developed as musicians.”
Amy: “In the studio you just throw everyone’s ideas and just see what sticks – that’s what we always do. We try as much as we can, and that might be something that one of us wouldn’t write – like Liv is a Tool fan, and I would never be able to write anything like what Liv writes. So we just try stuff, and if it’s shit then we do something else (laughs).”
Harry: “Sometimes one of us will have a clearer version than the others for a certain song, too. And then they can take the lead and be like, ‘Maybe you should play this, that and the other.’ It just depends on each song. On Come Over, the reason it worked is because we all knew what it should sound like, and so did our producer. We got it all done in a day and it sounded exactly how we imagined it.”

From having to be online all the time to the hardships of touring, the band understand the importance of hitting the brakes when necessary…

Liv: “You do get burnt out – Holly especially, because she’s basically been the face of our social media for a very long time. There are days where you’ve had a week non-stop of working, and we’re all just exhausted, and it’s like, ‘The last thing I want to do is put a face on and jump in front of a camera.’”
Amy: “You can just tell when an artist has been made to make a video and use this sound or this filter.”
Holly: “When you’re an upcoming artist and you’re still in that development process, and you’re still needing to get bigger for your own career, you do have to put yourself out there a lot more than artists who already have that platform. But younger artists need to do so much more, and it’s hard to find that balance of, ‘When can I step back?’ because we’re gigging, performing, writing non-stop… that’s probably the hardest thing for me.”
Harry: “Everyone in the industry is working so hard because everyone else in the industry is working so hard. You don’t want to fall behind. We’re at a stage in our careers where if we took a year out, a lot of people would start forgetting about us because momentum is so important. When you’ve got that momentum, you have to keep it going.”

Not only are Crawlers teaching new gig-goers the etiquette, but they’ve also created an environment that lets fans simply just be themselves…

Holly: “We didn’t even realise this when we were on tour, but we were having a conversation with some kids and they were like, ‘This is my first ever show.’ I went to heavy shows with my dad as a kid, and he kind of showed me the etiquette, but now we are teaching people that safe space. It’s a lot to have on our shoulders, but we want to do it because we’ve been in that situation.”
Liv: “The nicest thing for me personally was recently a fan was saying how they’ve never had a queer space that they’ve found, and we were the first that they’ve had. It was like, ‘That is exactly what we wanted when we were younger,’ and it’s so nice that we’re being that space for these young queer kids, because it’s a space that we didn’t have until much later on.”

When Crawlers shot a fan lyric video for Come Over (again) in London, its impact on those in attendance was huge…

Holly: “Atlanta who did our lyric video in London, once they came out from the video, they came out on social media and came out to their mum as a non-binary queer person, and they said it was because of the safe space that we gave them on that shoot, and it gave them the encouragement to do that. Fucking hell, that was a tearjerker! And then we did a fan video, and one fan was talking about how Fuck Me helped them, and I was genuinely crying. To put that song out anyway, I did tell everyone that, ‘This is really hard.’ The label were so nice and asked if I needed any support. But then to put it out and have that connection with people, that’s why you do it. That’s why you have to put yourself out there sometimes: to help other people feel less alone. It’s really special.”

Is Loud Without Noise an album? Is it a mixtape? No, it’s a collection of all the different sides to Crawlers…

Amy: “Why did we call it a mixtape? Because it’s a mix of everything (laughs).”
Holly: “When we eventually do our debut album, it’s going to have a concept. But with this mixtape, we have so much music that’s so different from each other – it’s all about the same thing, but musically we were still developing. I think right now we’ve got a bit more of a direction with our sound, and we just want to share with our fans this music that we’ve made that’s so different. There’s Prodigy-esque songs, Phoebe Bridgers songs, post-punk songs, all in one thing. We can’t call it an EP – it’s a mixtape, like you burn for your car with all your favourite random songs.”
Liv: “It’s like the pit-stop before the album.”
Harry: “If you heard some of the songs that are on this mixtape but on an ‘album’, you’d be like, ‘What the fuck is this album?’ (laughs). But because it’s on a ‘mixtape’, it’s like, ‘Yeah, fair enough!’”

Crawlers are so proud of all they’ve put into their music so far, and they know there’ll be more development to their sound…

Holly: “I think the one thing we set in stone was to put on the table that we hadn’t established a sound yet, and we can do everything. And I think that’s what’s so much fun: having this genre-fluid moment, because we are. I think it also made us go through a lot of self-discovery as individuals and as a band; I went into it and had a few meltdowns in the studio, but other people had other reactions, and it was this great balance where we all really fucking pushed ourselves.”
Amy: “When we were writing it, it was like, ‘This is what we want it to be,’ and it feels like we’ve achieved that. For us, it’s what we wanted to make.”
Holly: “And now it’s like, ‘Hey, this is what we’re capable of, and you have no idea what’s coming next!’ We don’t want to be big artists and we don’t want to be famous – that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we love writing music, and we love it when these young people come up to us and say that they feel safe at our gigs, and that these songs are something that have helped them. That’s what it’s about at the end of the day, and being able to live doing something that you love is something we’re so grateful for.”

Loud Without Noise is here, and so now focus will be moving on to that all-important debut…

Amy: “We’ve started writing – we’ll see what’s shit and see what’s good, and go from there (laughs).”
Holly: “Having a debut album is really special, and we want to be an album band so that’s why we’re taking our time. We’re in a position where we’ve already got this fanbase, and we want to do this fucking incredible album – especially when there’s been so many great debuts recently with this wonderful sonic cohesion. If we were to put out an album just because we’ve got ‘hype’, it’s just gonna be shit!”
Liv: “We need it to be everything that we hope for, and we don’t want to put something out there that isn’t that.”
Amy: “You only get one chance to do it. Even when we did Come Over, we hadn’t released anything like it at the same, and when we put it out it was like, ‘Well, it might do really badly if it’s not like anything that we’ve done before.’ But it did well, so it gave us the confidence to explore these new songwriting things that we wanted to do.”
Harry: “And it’s more enjoyable to do that, because it can be challenging to make things work and complement each other. With the mixtape it makes sense and you can get away with it, but with an album it’ll be like, ‘How do we make this work?’ We’ll see!”

Loud Without Noise is out now.

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