London emotional noise-rock quartet paper hats share debut single ‘D’Artagnan’
paper hats
London emotional noise-rock quartet share debut single ‘D’Artagnan’ before Windmill Brixton headline.
RIYL: Unwound, Shellac, Black Midi, Gilla Band, Mitsubishi Suicide, UNIVERSITY
paper hats are Clemente Contreras (guitar, vocals), Sam Eccleston (guitar, vocals), Gabe Khitarishvili-Awde (bass, vocals) and Conn Perry (drums).
Swimming strongly against the tide of Post-Punk revivalism, paper hats look to further shores for inspiration. Influenced by the crunching dissonance of ‘90s emo and post-hardcore and the liberating vocabulary of noise-rock, in their debut single ‘D’Artagnan’, the band carve a pugnacious four-minute odyssey out of walls of feedback. Dynamic and cathartic, the song already has audiences screaming its lyrics.
The band had this to say about the single: “We’re not afraid to be vulnerable, whether we’re embracing a sound that’s hushed and tender, or boiling over into abrasion.”
Having built a reputation in South London’s fertile Windmill scene for explosive shows, where glitched-out guitars, frenzied drums, and precise noise collide under red strobes, paper hats’ raucous live act has won them support for acts including Man/Woman/Chainsaw, The Orchestra (For Now), and Automotion.
Describing the track’s inception, the band’s Clemente Contreras said: “D’Artagnan is our oldest song, it’s almost four years old now. Writing started just a few weeks after my previous band with Sam had split up, and I was in turmoil trying to find something else to do – nothing was working. Meeting Gabe at Wide Awake motivated me to search for a new direction, and I started writing guitar parts that blended rhythm and lead into one, reflecting the Unwound and This Heat tracks I was into at the time. I was really embracing this change in my songwriting, but I inserted the last lyric of D’Artagnan from a past song as a sort of goodbye to my old self.”
The band’s Sam Eccleston recounted the recording process: “It was just the four of us playing our instruments as hard as we could. Even in all that noise, there weren’t any synthesisers – no parts added to fill space. It means nothing is lost when we play the song live, and that’s exactly the energy we wanted to catch in the recording. That’s our philosophy: we’re a live band first and foremost. We’ve got flanger pedals feeding back into themselves, delays self-oscillating, and pitch shifters stuttering, but it’s all simultaneous. Noise is ingrained into our parts, they’re not just embellishments.”
Upcoming Live Dates
24 June // London, The Windmill Brixton (Single Release Party) TBA
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