When they first get up on stage, you may think they are carbon copies of each other, both sporting long blonde hair, baggy jeans and colourful belts. But when they start to sing, it’s impossible to doubt they’re two parts to a whole. Whether they croon a raw, nerve-ending original or belt a folky take on your favourite club banger, this up-and-coming duo’s harmonies soar effortlessly through any room and course seamlessly through their audience.
Sweet Thieves, a two-girl band comprised of Esme and Polly, performed their first headline show in Camden’s legendary Green Note at the end of November. Both multi-instrumentalists and lifelong music lovers, the pair has set out to fuse barebones production with unfiltered emotion. Both their enchanting harmonies and songwriting are underpinned by years of friendship between them – their debut single ‘Tourist’ seeking to express the “strange nostalgia of revisiting familiar places that now feel foreign”, specifically, their school.
At seven o’clock on the night of the gig, the Green Note is a quiet, cosy boozer dotted by a few early birds nursing a pint. But within the blink of an eye, it’s a loud, bustling live music venue buzzing with the warm chatter of aunties, cousins and schoolmates whose sheer force in numbers made it hard to get to the bar. On a short wooden crate decorated by a dusty red carpet, Sweet Thieves successfully capture the reminiscence, wistfulness and regret that accompany love and loss – not only in their new song, but in everything they play. Echoing the folky sounds of the Cranberries, Aurora’s ethereal vocals and Americana’s storytelling, Sweet Thieves are one, or rather two, to watch.
Kicking off with their spin on the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, the girls’ voices instantly fill the room in seamless, unforced synchronicity. With Esme playing the keys and Polly on the guitar, the 90s band’s triumphant, euphoric masterpiece is rendered introspective and meditative. As their stripped-back instrumental accompaniment yields space to their powerful, unified crescendos, an intimacy beyond that of friends and family develops between the pair and their audience. Their innate sonic chemistry is hypnotic, capturing the absolute attention of anyone who enters the room and bringing them onto their vibrational plane.
The second song the group plays is perhaps their best cover. Adding their own vocal ornaments to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, Parton’s vulnerable, anxious pleas are made more haunting and transcendent, almost as if they are a solitary prayer instead of a confrontation. The pair’s knack for replacing female insecurity with wisdom shines through in their other interpretations of popular music, such as Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, which they sing with a confidence and nonchalance that resembles 1950s soul jazz. As the duo takes contemporary music through space and time with their vocals and folk-inspired backing, they remind us that the struggles women face in love are truly timeless.
However, nothing quite captures the room like Esme and Polly’s originals. When they play their debut single ‘Tourist’, their intuitive harmonies frame them as one single entity. Written over three years, the song tells the story of both girls revisiting their old school, but as their voices complement and supplement each other, you are transported into the mind of one person. When they aren’t singing the same thing, they layer lines and vocals over one another in a way that mimics the crowded, overwhelmed and dissociative mind when it remembers how it felt to exist in a certain part of the past. When they debut their new song ‘Breathe’ for the very first time, nostalgia echoes through what sounds like a lullaby, or the songs that accompany retrospective montages at the end of a film.
No matter what they play, Sweet Thieves are a musical force to be reckoned with. As they traded their melancholy for light-hearted folk throughout the show with numbers like ‘Eight Days a Week ‘and ‘Say YEAH’, their energy adjusted accordingly. No matter who’s on the guitar and who’s at the piano, their playing is expressive and impassioned, and it’s fun to watch them switch between instruments multiple times in the night. As they end their show with George Michael’s ‘Freedom’, Esme on the keys and Polly on the cajon get the whole audience clapping and dancing. They certainly are sweet thieves, stealing the attention of everyone in the room.
Written by Justine Noble
GEM Magazine 