Toby Furlong
I’m a writer hailing from the distant land of Norfolk. With a deep love for vinyl, currently standing at over 100 in my collection. When it comes to picking a favourite artist, it will always be the sounds of Trish Keenan and Broadcast.
With Grandmas House celebrating their debut album ‘Baby You’re A Winner,’ we sat down with the group responsible for the fire and fury
If you’ve been paying half an inch of attention to the world of indie-rock you might have spent the last few months desperately counting down the release of Bristol’s fantastically thunderous up-and-coming prospects Grandmas House. The last few months have been a whirlwind affair for the group, catching eyes across the continent and beyond and scorching across live stages in Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, and France before returning home to rapturous applause at UK festival dates including The Great Escape, Dot to Dot and Bearded Theory.
So what’s all the excitement about? Across their much acclaimed live shows and, more importantly, across their debut album ‘Baby You’re A Winner’, the group have produced some personal and powerful work that speaks with all the urgency and heart of musicians who take too much pride in what they do to simply join the cold, commercial calculation of recent British rock. Across the brisk 37 minute run time, the songs are tantalising, conjuring, and full of bite, like an innocent sugar cube, just waiting for a tongue.
Funnily enough, the first time we interviewed you guys was back in 2021, which is a fair old time in the industry now… What’s been the highlight of performing as Grandma’s House have been so far?
Poppy: Recording the album was a really big deal for us, that time we were in the studio recording, just feeling overwhelming excitement and happiness. Polly joined around two years ago now, and the album has all four of us on it.
Zoe: I just loved having us there in that space together.
Poppy: Also, a recent one was a gig that we did up in the Swiss Alps, and that was such a crazy gig. We cable car-ed up the mountain, and had this insane view and suddenly realised how lucky we are to perform in this band.
Zoe: We had come off a really hard week, when everything just feels difficult.
Poppy: Everything is hard and the music industry is getting us down etc.
Zoe: We were literally living our dream.
I can imagine when you first started performing you were slumming it around various Bristol pubs and bars, so to suddenly be up a Swiss mountain is a real change – how do you conceptualise that journey?
Poppy: Similar to the feeling of performing in the Alps, we are all just so blessed to be able to tour Europe. It’s crazy to us that people across Europe might know our music.
Zoe: It’s funny to go across the world and have your music sung back to you. If we ever feel disillusioned, we just think about the next opportunity awaiting us.
A debut album is a fantastic and lasting achievement; can you recall the exact moment you had the project in “it’s perfect, nobody touch anything” territory?
Zoe: After everything was recorded. You get so involved in the process and you almost can’t hear them anymore. We got our mixes back and we thought “okay nice!”
Poppy: The last two months of the process we were really under pressure, leaving things to the last minute as we do really well. We thought “oh we’ll figure it all out” and then that turned to “shit we have to record in a month, lets figure it out”
Zoe: We really tried to push ourselves to make everything as good as we could make it.
Poppy: Then you get the mixes back from being produced, and you listen and then you can relax and celebrate.
It’s really refreshing to hear a project with such alive and alert vocals, returning to the spirit of 90’s PJ Harvey.
Polly: There’s a lot of crossover in our music tastes as a group, but we have our own areas, covering a lot of bases. The one thing that we all agree on is a love of melody, it’s really important.
Poppy: We didn’t intentionally aim for that sound. On our first projects you could say it has that shouty approach. We’ve all grown in confidence so much such the beginning and it’s allowed us to use Yasmin and I’s vocals in a softer way. At the beginning I had no confidence in singing, I only felt like I could shout [laughs].
I would say the album is post-punk influenced but also by an entire other list of genres. The title track is a great example of the quiet and loud, push and pull approach where you have Yasmin’s gritty vocal with those gentle backing vocals.
How did you arrive upon the title of the album?
Polly: It’s about trying to bring somebody up who might be feeling unconfident, it sounds affirming: “Baby you’re a winner”.
Poppy: We tried to push it away, it didn’t seem right at first, but then it just made sense in the end, the idea had been kicking around for ages. You can do loads with the phrase “Baby You’re a Winner”, it’s let us have a lot of fun with the visual side of things as well.
I’d like to push you by asking what your favourite songs off the album are?
Poppy: I could never say one definitely, but today I’ll say ‘Spring,’ it’s such an unexpected inclusion and it ends the album really nicely.
Polly: I really like ‘Blue Oblivion’ that was released as a single recently, I can’t choose either though. What sensation do you get from working tirelessly and then eventually getting to go out and play the songs around the world?
Polly: We’ve played half of the album live so far, it’s great to bring them into the set and move the older songs on a little bit, playing all the fresh songs.
Listen to ‘Baby You’re A Winner’ here: