The Bloody Muppets

The Bloody Muppets have cut their teeth on performing covers, often on the QMU’s stages, which is perhaps why their sound appears to have sprung from the ground so organic and fully formed on their debut EP, When the Movie Ends. The band’s tastes, style, and inspirations – which range from My Bloody Valentine to Simon & Garfunkel – are already realised and refined, and have been crystallised into this five track release.

The band’s experience and unity of artistic vision is clear from the moment the drums come in on opener Your Boy, an aching song of young love in which vocalist and songwriter Matthew admits “I’m no man, but ask me darling, I will be your boy”. The record is full of tight instrumentation with looping, hypnotic guitars and drum lines, mixing a traditional indie folk sound with shoegazing pedal work and judicious synths. Matthew’s soft vocals bleed into the wall of sound The Bloody Muppets create, becoming one in the maximalist production on songs like Maybe I Won’t, a roiling, treacly six-minute track that best showcases the band’s slowcore influence, and Purple, a dreamy and melancholy track of droning guitars and regretful lyrics.

Calmest of all is Everything We’ll Do, an idealistic dream of an eternal Summer. This love song’s timbre resembles its subject, with bright, sunny guitar licks that tap into the EP’s nostalgic ethos. Indeed, this feeling dominates the release: longing – for a person, for a moment in time, for that first love, for things to stay the same – is its essence. However, true to its name, When the Movie Ends also possesses a keen awareness of looming finality. In the final, eponymous track, that young voice found in songs like Your Boy and Everything We’ll Do has to reckon with the inevitability of change, of endings – “will you have anything to say at the end of the day, when the movie ends?”. 

The EP closes as it began, with a gentle, acoustic guitar lick, creating a bookend, a loop for this album to exist in, running around as memories run around in our minds. When the Movie Ends is a bildungsroman in record form, a journey into a world of love and regrets, and as it winds down, the lights come up and we too must acknowledge that all good things must come to an end.

[Grace Murray, they/them]

Instagram: @gracefrom._space