Van Houten
Founded on seven years of friendship through times thick and thin and a shared obsession with exploring the fuzziest, far-out corners of 90’s guitar music, Leeds-based sextet Van Houten are ready to show us what they’ve been busy cooking up...
Having distilled their choicest lo-fi, shoegaze and garage rock inspirations into eight eagerly-awaited tracks of dreamy pop perfection, Van Houten are all set to release ‘The Tallest Room’, the band’s debut full-length album, via groundbreaking new label imprint Clue Records / EMI North.
The last seven years have seen all manner of ups and downs for Van Houten, but supporting each other through it all has been key to the band defining themselves and their distinctive sound, which is at once melancholic, carefree, upbeat and furious. The rising wall of feedback that introduces album opener ‘Black and White’ gives way to hypnotic grooves and laid back hooks that surround the listener in fuzzed out nostalgia and the electrifying feeling of potential energy. However, singer and guitarist Louis Sadler’s refrain of “I wonder where you’ve gone / Where you’ve been all along'' is insistent and direct; tapping into the band’s impressive musical maturity and perspective, introducing a collective disdain for the increasingly prevalent cultural close-mindedness that serves as a recurring theme throughout the album.