Picky New Promotions Second Anniversary Show featuring BDRMM

Event information

Picky New Promotions are proud to welcome Hull quartet BDRMM to headline our Second Anniversary show at the Black Prince in Northampton!

The genre-splicing four-piece have just released their third LP, Microtonic, on Mogwai’s Rock Action label.

“I think this is the best thing we've ever done,” says singer Ryan Smith. “It's a proper step up.” It’s immediately clear that the Hull band – also made up of Joe Vickers, Jordan Smith, and Conor Murray – have broken new ground on their latest album, which is, as Ryan correctly points out, the band’s most fully realised, complete, and greatest work to date. “The last album was essentially like a bridge between the two albums,” explains Joe, of 2023’s I Don’t Know. “With that one we knew what we were trying to do but with this one we've fully cracked it.”

The 10 song Microtonic, recorded with long-term band collaborator Alex Greaves and featuring guest appearances from Sydney Minsky Sargeant of Working Men's Club and Olivesque of Nightbus, is unquestionably a bold leap for the group, who have embraced a fuller spectrum of tones and atmospheres. “I felt very constrained writing a certain type of music to fit the genre [we were known for] but something lifted and I felt more free to create what I want,” says Ryan. “And what I seem to be doing at the moment is a lot of electronic music – taking influence from different spans of electronica, from dance music to ambient and more experimental sources.”

Bdrmm’s trademark sound hasn’t disappeared by any means, the band's more guitar-heavy beginnings a blueprint and influence on many of the groups breaking through in the here and now, a time when shoegaze is enjoying its strongest revival since its inception in the 80s, but those guitars are now incorporated into a broader, more expansive and varied sonic palette.

Microtonic is the sound of a band finding confidence and feeling comfortable but using that position to thrust themselves into the unknown rather than rest on their laurels. It’s an ambitious album that is rich in scope and teeming with ideas yet also thoughtfully coherent. It is the sound of the band being themselves in the purest form possible says Ryan: “I think we've gone from people saying that we sound like other bands to hopefully people saying: this is what bdrmm sound like. It’s a true expression of who we are.”

Support comes from Northampton's finest up-and-coming shoegaze/grunge band THISTLE. and London shoegazers THE YOUTH PLAY.

Tickets £20 plus fees.