‘The Mess We Seem to Make’ is the debut album from Crawlers, an exciting alternative rock four-piece from Warrington, an English town equidistant between Manchester and Liverpool. As a Mancunian, the reason I knew of Warrington as a child was that it was home to the nearest branch of IKEA. Then, in 2006, an IKEA store was built in Ashton-under-Lyne, in the suburbs of Manchester. Local residents complained in their thousands about the giant International-Klein-Blue eyesore, Ashton’s economy boomed, Manchester’s Metrolink was extended to grant the public easier access to cheap furniture, and this writer never thought about Warrington again. Until now…
I’m sitting in an aggressively trendy café in New Cross, South London, on a video call with Crawlers’ charismatic frontwoman, Holly Minto, who I’m told is speaking to me from the corner of her gym. “What do you think you guys, as a band, need to do to ensure you overtake IKEA as the most famous thing in Warrington?”, I ask her. Holly laughs. “Oh my god, that’s killed me off,”, she says. “I think we should start a rival furniture brand called, um, Crawlers Couture.” I was always told to open with a joke, and it seems to have gone well. Holly is on board.
“You’ve just released your debut album, ‘The Mess We Seem to Make’,”, I start. “Who’s ‘we’?” “‘The Mess We Seem to Make’ is everyone that has been part of my life up until I was 23,”, Holly tells me. “The band, primarily. I think as Gen-Z, we’ve experienced a lot of generational trauma together – and because of that I think as a generation we’re much more politically aware.” I agree with Holly that every generation seems to be more switched on than the last. Just a week ago, I’d been having a conversation with my 14-year-old sister, a huge Swiftie, about whether it’s possible to be an ethical billionaire. When I tell Holly about this she seems as impressed by my sister as she is concerned about her. “Are we talking about this stuff more because it’s just entertaining?”, she asks, “or because it’s in the current zeitgeist? Or is it because we have to have these conversations now in order to survive? It’s no longer just about outward politics, where you’re not involved. It’s about inward politics – politics around our personal lives and our sex lives”.
“The album has a lot of lyrics that are vulnerable about sex,”, I point out. “And it strikes me that while there are a lot of songs out there about sex and have been for many years now, a lot of them – to me at least – don’t feel like they’re about the material reality of sex. It’s always about sex as a commodity. Do you feel like the way we talk about sex in art needs to change? And what makes you want to write about it so often?” “You know what? It’s been a weird growing period where I’ve been reflecting a lot in my life,”, says Holly. “When you’re a kid, sex is discussed as something that just happens and is there, but when you get older, you realise how much it affects the way you perceive relationships with others and your sense of self.” “It’s why we’re all here,”, I laugh, before Holly replies: “Well, exactly. And I had this big realisation that my first sexual experience inspired this whole album because it was so bad and traumatic, and what’s crazy is that at the time, I didn’t even think of it as anything other than normal. Then I took a step back and realised it explained a lot about my relationships.”
“There’s this really, really thin line between liberation and sexual objectification,”, Holly continues. “It’s way, way too thin. It’s as thin as the fucking bread of Christ. Sometimes you can think what you’re doing is liberating and it’s lifting you up, when in reality it’s the thing weighing you down. And that’s ‘The Mess We Seem to Make’ too. There’s a mess in the sheets, but there’s also a mess in my fucking brain after all of it happened.”
“You talk about the distinction between empowerment and objectification,”, I mention, “But the record seems to reject that dichotomy entirely. It seems to be saying this is how I feel, this is what’s happened to me, and you can kind of take that or leave it.” “That’s been something I’ve been learning to do,”, Holly states. “When I first started as a writer, I used to love hiding behind metaphors, but as a songwriter, I want to say exactly what is on my mind. It’s hard being honest, but it’s made me feel so much more, it’s made me want to heal more.” I ask Holly if the songs dealing with such vulnerable topics have strengthened the relationships between Holly and her bandmates Liv May, Amy Woodall, and Harry Breen. “We’re all such emotional people, and we’ve always been so intertwined with each other’s lives,”, she explains. “The band has been through so much, and we’ve come from this Northern working-class world and been suddenly thrown into the music industry, which is fucking terrifying. Sometimes you can exploit your own trauma for art and not actually get any healing from that, but I’ve avoided that because of how incredible the band are at looking after each other.”
Because of how wide the genre spectrum can be, I’ve always been suspicious of the label ‘guitar music’, so I’m worried my next question is a reductive one, but I ask it anyway. “It feels like guitar music is back,”, I obnoxiously declare. “What do you think is making people want to make and hear music with guitars again? Has it ever gone away? It feels like we did have a few years where people were a bit icky about guitars.” “I think fads change, but whatever you grew up listening to as a kid will always come back when you’re becoming an adult,”, Holly points out, before jumping into the world of fashion. “Everyone is so obsessed with indie sleaze right now. Everybody is regressing”. “Everybody is wearing low-rise jeans,”, I lament. “What the fuck!”, Holly exclaims, “Let me live with my bloat!”
“I think there’s a temptation to regress to something you weren’t even a part of,” she continues. “I was watching Bloc Party at Glastonbury Festival in 2007 on YouTube the other day and it’s like, I was seven years old. I didn’t even really know what music was. But you want to relive that moment. However, music’s got to change – the guitar music of today isn’t identical to the music of the 2000s.”
I’m hesitant to bring it up because I’d told myself I wouldn’t ask Holly the inevitable ‘women in music’ question. But here it seems relevant. Because one way guitar music seems to have changed since the early 2000s is that it’s for everybody now. “Everything’s become less taboo I think,”, Holly exclaims. “Women and queer people are being heard now. Because here’s the thing – it’s never been that they weren’t around. We’re fortunate to be in an alternative space, but you look at the mainstream and it’s like…Sam Smith literally just breathes and everyone gets fucking pissed off because the mainstream isn’t ready to accept that yet.”
With ‘The Mess We Seem to Make’ having reached number seven in the UK album charts, I ask Holly if she considers Crawlers to be ‘an album band’. “A hundred fucking percent, man,”, she replies. “When we first ever met in that shed in Warrington – it’s the most famous thing in Warrington apart from IKEA, that shed – we said we wanted to create albums. Every artist we’ve ever looked up to has had a body of work. There’s something so incredible about creating music that exists in its own world. There’s no better way to do that than albums, and I feel like albums are coming back. It’s exciting to be able to tell a story.”
The band is already working on its sophomore effort. When I suggest that they might have to bring in a string and brass section and a full gospel choir this time around, Holly says they are actually paring things back. “It’s very early days,”, she tells me. “But I think it’s going to be a grungy, old-school rock kind of vibe. This is what’s so special about being in a band – it’s not just about the songs, it’s about the sound. It’s about all the individual parts that make it so special. And I’m fortunate to be in a band with the best people ever.”
Written by Molly Marsh // Photography by Claryn Chong & Megan Doherty
GEM Magazine 