Luke Branch, frontman and songwriter of Asylums, has gone solo – his debut single Guttermouth came out on 6 October, free to download from lukebranch.com, with both a sung version and a spoken word version up there.
Asylums made 4 studio albums – Killer Brain Waves (2016), Alien Human Emotions (2018), Genetic Cabaret (2020) and Signs of Life (2022) – working with Steve Albini and Dave Eringa along the way, and the band are currently on a recording and touring hiatus.
Guttermouth is a loose one to pin down – the press release says the title could mean the man in the Oval Office, the media machine feeding him the mic, or just the voice in your own head at 3am that never has anything nice to say, and Branch isn't telling you which. Whichever it is, the song doesn't waste a second – it's put together with a real economy, so every idea counts and nothing hangs about. Tight, memorable, and all the better for knowing exactly when to stop!
He made the whole thing himself – every instrument, every voice, every word – over 2 years, squeezed into the gaps around running Cool Thing, scoring films and being a dad. It was recorded at SS2 Recording in Southend-on-Sea (nice to see an Essex studio get a credit) with engineer Rees Broomfield, then mixed by Dave Eringa, whose credits include the Manic Street Preachers and Wilko Johnson. Even the cover art is his own – an oil painting he manipulated in Photoshop. It comes out via a brand new label, Obtuse Records, a Cool Thing subsidiary set up just for his solo work, spoken word, visual art and soundtrack projects.
Branch has had a busy year away from Asylums – he co-scored this summer's US film 40 Dates and 40 Nights, starring Bailee Madison and Joel Courtney, and last year's Crossroads, both directed by Andrew Delaney, on top of running Cool Thing Music. Guttermouth has already had a premiere on John Kennedy's Radio X show, a play on BBC Introducing Essex/Cambridge and a nod from Rocksound, who called it "addictive melody upon addictive melody".
On the record, Branch says: "I'm sure the world didn't need a Luke Branch solo release, but I needed it. After years of making albums and touring, I wanted to be a student again, to take time out to learn, improve and experiment."