Crawlers are here to be an album band. They might have had a day in the sun on TikTok, but they’re not here for fleeting moments that pass in a second and are instantly forgotten in the single flick of a thumb. They want something more substantial to their name – they want their Sempiternal, or their Black Parade. “There’s been this idea that artists are built on singles,” Holly says. “There’s no sonic coherence. But we’ve always gone in and used albums as references, we’ve always said we wanted to make an album.”
“Our manager always says that we’ve made the album that we wanted to make, and that’s so true,” adds Amy. “We’re on a major label, so it can be quite scary to think that we’d get pushed in a certain direction or to be told we have to write a certain kind of song.”
Incidentally, the label offered Crawlers the chance to fly out to America to make their debut, but the band sharply turned it down in favour of staying in Liverpool and producing something they perceived as being truer to themselves. “It would have been shit,” Amy reckons, if they’d gone with the big bosses’ plan.
They weren’t after an ultra-glossy, over-produced album with a list of collaborators longer than a Marvel credit sequence. “We ached for the nostalgia of growing up in that 2014-2016 era, with those low contrast, low saturation photos on Tumblr, where we grew into where we were,” says Holly.
Sonically, The Mess We Seem To Make owes as much to the gritty riffs of Nirvana, Queens Of The Stone Age and Muse as it does the unsparing emotional self-dissection of Boygenius or Adrienne Lenker. “Sometimes it’s hard to think, ‘Shit, where do we sit?’, but the answer is, we sit where Crawlers sit.”