Manchester seven-piece Mleko share their name with the Polish word for milk and, much like the dairy product, their music is rich, nourishing and surprisingly versatile. One of the standout acts on the city’s increasingly fertile scene, the band produce soundscapes more varied and joyous than those of most groups in the country. Their striking debut EP, recently released via Heist or Hit, blends delicate folk stylings with discordant noise passages and manic jazz breakdowns in equal measure. Speaking over a video call from a park beside the Etihad Stadium, the band discuss the challenges of life as a seven-piece, their “horror show” first London gig, and the big group chat of Manchester bands.
You’ve just released debut EP ‘The Feast of St Perpetua’ – was that release at all nerve-wracking, since you held it for so long?
Ed: Bits and bobs. I think we’re excited for the next phase, we’re already a bit ahead of ourselves and so it’s fun to put this out but I don’t think there’s as much pressure as there used to be because this it’s just a fraction of the songs we’ve got. It’s not as scary as I thought it might be because we’ve got loads more to offer. It’s not the be-all and end-all, it’s nice really.
Rory: Also I think the tracks sound great. When you play them live for so long, it’s nice to see that reimagined in the studio, it’s something extra special.
The EP is about some quite random things. It’s named after the patron saint of cows and features a track about Lego people having sex – all under the name of ‘Gub Rock’. What draws you to these silly, abstract themes?
Ed: I think a lot of the reasons why they’re about random stuff is we have different people coming up with ideas for writing and songs and we try and tie them in together. Like with the Lego sex song, it was a big battle between me and Rory about what it was going to be about, what words we were going to say. Ultimately that makes it more fun to do and for people to listen to.
Tom: We don’t ever write one song completely by ourselves and then bring it to the group, it’s all collective which is why we get some quite weird topics. I think we all sort of agreed that this EP was an experiment of sounds that we liked and wasn’t really that conceptual – it’s a mix between whatever emotions we might have been feeling.
Rory: Gub rock’s a weird one, people come and ask us what Gub rock is. We had to have a name for it that day and at the time Gub was a bit of slang used in our friendship group, we got obsessed with the word gubbins and everyone was like, oh, have you met him he’s such a gubbin. And then that got shortened to gub, it was in our vocab at the time.
I wanted to ask about milk – because Mleko means milk in Polish and the EP name is quite milk-adjacent. Is that intentional, and what draws you to milk?
Ed: I literally wanted the band to be called Corrupt Milkmen, then I realised that was shit. Then I thought we could call it milk, question mark. I still like that, but everyone else thinks it shit shit. Then we had a good friend of ours singing in the band and he was Polish and he was like, in Polish milk is mleko. And there’s only one other rapper with that name, we’re gonna battle to the death.
The EP has lots of different genre elements, like jazz, folk, post-punk and prog, but never sounds too chaotic. How did you go about maintaining space and cohesion whilst having all these different elements and seven people in the band?
Tom: I think we piecemealed lots of different chunks together, we’d have a structure that one of us had made at home and then we’d come in and piece it in with something that someone else had made and then we’d all melt around it.
Charlotte: We had to be really careful about knowing when to jump and bounce and change scenery – it’d be kind of janky but on purpose and then also them flowing, and that’s a really hard thing to master.
Rory: We spend a lot of time in bedrooms rehearsing or in small rehearsal rooms with shit amps and it’s really obvious if it’s just a wall of sound, so you have to make quite an effort. In big rooms with good gear, you can get away with everything going on at once but in most of the places we rehearse you just can’t.
Myron: And a lot of the smaller venues we play in, the soundsystems can’t really take everyone playing at once. It’s been a learning curve, I think there are bits on this EP where still a lot of us looking back are like, there’s too much going on there.
What is the best and worst thing about being in a seven-piece band?
Myron: We’ve got loads of friends, that’s one thing.
Ed: Worst thing? Fighting over space in the car to rehearsals is a big one. That seems to be the main issue we have, which is usually resolved by me getting an Uber home every week.
Rory: Quite often people think we are actually a cult and want to join us. We’re full! At the start it was always quite awkward telling people that they couldn’t join the band.
Tom: For a while, whoever asked we just said yes. I think we’ve had thirteen members in total, but we’ve been seven piece for a year and a half.
Charlotte: It’s a great size for a band. It’s like a sonic playground, there’s so much choice and we can do so much. You choose how you put them together and you’ve got endless opportunity. It lets us bend a lot of genres as well – if we just had two guitars and a drum and bass, you’re limited by what sort of sounds you can make, no matter how weird the pedals are.
You formed in Manchester, and the scene there is huge at the moment. What’s it been like to see that happen from the inside, seeing all your mates do so well?
Tom: It’s really cool, everyone’s so lovely. It’s odd because we haven’t really been in other cities’ music scenes so it’s hard to compare it, but it does seem particularly friendly. Everyone knows each other, there’s the big Manchester group chat where everyone’s joking around.
Rory: We’ve been given a lot of leg ups in the industry by other bands as well. I remember a lot of bands used to come to our shows early doors, like Martial Arts came to one of our shows at Rat & Pigeon and then we got another show off that, just from them seeing us and being really lovely. Everyone’s trying to give each other a hand and celebrate each other’s successes.
Ioan: Holly Head, Wyatt and The Slow Country have just been long listed for Green Man Rising and in the Manchester groupchat it’s all the bands piling in to say well done. Everyone’s showing up to each other’s shows and trying to wriggle in on the guest list once everything’s sold out – it’s nice that people are genuinely wanting to hear each other’s music and spend time with each other.
You recently signed to a Manchester label in Heist of Hit. What drew you to working with them, and what have they been like to work with?
Rory: Really, really, really great.
Tom: Easy going. We were just talking about how their office culture seems like the nicest ever. Their open office in Stevenson Square. That’s not what you asked but I think that reflects their personality.
Charlotte: They’ve given us so much support with a lot of our music, like Zach their A&R guy picked us out of the mud and gave us a shot when we probably weren’t that good, and kept coming to the gigs until the point where he was like, yeah, they’re good enough now. It was probably seven gigs he came to before he brought everyone else from the team.
Ed: We didn’t think it was ever going to happen, it was a real punt from them. I think a lot of us were a bit worried about a big bad record label getting involved and they’ve been fairly hands off but have steered us to make sure we’re getting things done on time. It’s difficult with seven of us to organise things.
Rory: And it’s super cool that they’re signing loads of cool Manchester bands, like Pyncher and Slow Country have just joined. Just enabling and funding the Manchester music scene a little bit, which is really nice and probably rare.
It feels like your music is quite distinct from a lot of the ‘experimental’ stuff coming out of London and elsewhere. Do you think you’d sound different if you were based somewhere like London rather than Manchester?
Tom: We’d probably have to push ourselves more, it’s a bit more cutthroat there.
Rory: We’d probably feel like we need to be weirder. I think in Manchester there’s less of a pressure to be super weird and out there, so we can make our own decision. It’s a bit more free up here – when we play London, people are quite critical of a lot of things you do. If you have a bad gig in London, you’ve got to really earn that back.
Ed: Our first London gig was a horror show, everything broke whilst we were on stage. It was like our in to start playing in London and we just kind of bombed. We were on the overnight coach back to Manchester which got in at four in the morning, and we were all just like, we fucked that.
Tom: When we were outside after we thought it was a good gig but we made the mistake of watching some videos. It was pretty tough. My mum liked it though, she was a big fan. My mum’s brutal about some of the tracks, she sent us a message after we put up a video of one of our newer songs and she just texted our band account saying, not for me that one. Mum everyone can read that!
I read that the band was originally trying to be an emo project and then a folk project for a bit – was there a specific moment when you landed on your current sound and it clicked, or has it been a natural progression?
Tom: That was when me and Bruno joined. Bruno was the most recent addition, and when he joined he was desperately trying to steer us into a quite abrasive emo band, which didn’t end up happening.
Ed: Originally, we always said we were post-punk because that was the only thing that was really happening at that time, three and a half years ago with a lot of bands like Fontaines and Black Midi and stuff like that. But we’ve sort of grown up now and we don’t really try and aim for a genre – we just try and write songs that we enjoy playing, and then the genre fits around the songs rather than the songs trying to be put into the genre.
Rory: At the start we also listened to a band called Ugly, we went to one of their shows and they blew us away so much that we decided we were going to beat them. We wrote an Ugly song and realised we just weren’t as good.
I hear that you’ve basically finished the second EP. What’s that sounding like, and did you take any lessons from the first?
Ed: Yeah, we’re pretty much there. It’s slightly more mathy and less moody, I’d say. It’s faster, a bit more calculating.
Charlotte: We’ve got more drive and flow to the songs, we’ve really enjoyed trying to sync up lots of parts together. Before, a lot of our music would come out of jamming an idea and then that sort of became the song, whereas this has felt like it’s had a bit more purpose. There’s a bit more thought behind it.
Rory: Sam, who produced the first EP, was quite good at making us realise that a lot of our music was everybody doing everything, trying to go a bit mad, and having someone on the outside going, let’s think about what we’ve actually got going on, was quite good.
Tom: And originally we were quite scared to tell other people that we didn’t like their parts. If someone said to me, I don’t like your sax part, it would be like, fuck you man I worked hard on that. Now we’re less protective over all of that.
You’re playing Left of the Dial, how are you feeling for that and what bands are you looking forward to seeing?
Bruno: Holly Head, we see them every month pretty much. There’s loads of Manchester bands heading up as well, so that’ll be good fun.
Rory: I haven’t seen Bathing Suits yet so that’s definitely one for me.
Tom: We’ve been looking forward to it for a while because we knew about it for a long time ago and we were applying for a while, and then some promoter in London told us there was a 99% chance we’d get it. That was like three months ago and we got told last week, so we were all overjoyed when we got that news.
Ed: It turns out 99% in industry talk is about 20% in real life, it often doesn’t come through like that. But we were very pleasantly surprised this one did come through, because we were starting to put together a European tour that was riding around us getting Left of the Dial.
Charlotte: Everyone that talks about it says it’s the most fun time for punters and for bands. We can’t wait to play on the bus.
Tom: I don’t think we’ll fit on the bus. We’re always mainly excited about the open bar. When Rory told us about this festival, it was like, oh, have you heard about this festival in Rotterdam? It’s got a free bar. And it’s like, whoa, we’ve got to play that.
Last week marked two years since you played for Akoustik Anarkhy at The Star and Garter…
Ed: No way! That was the first time we played Denuemont. I remember saying we had a new song called Denuemont, which is French, but don’t worry, I’m going to sing it in English. I thought it was really funny but everyone was dead silent.
Tom: I remember that quite simply because Noel from Akoustic Anarkhy told me and Rory off wearing short shorts and a pink cowboy hat. He didn’t like that. But that gig was really fun.
What does success look like for Mleko?
Rory: I just want to be able to go part-time at work and do this more. More time to do this would be success, basically.
Ed: Quitting the day job is the ultimate dream. Or even just start doing two or three days. Life will be better.
Rory: I’d really like to play The Purple Turtle in Reading, that would be success.
Tom: Glasgow would be sick. Green Man’s a big one, hopefully we’ll do that next year. So basically everything.
Ed: The goalposts keep moving as well. Originally it was like, we want to play a gig, and then we wanted to gig regularly, and then it was like maybe we can get signed, maybe we can release an EP. They’re slowly getting ticked off and it’s still really fun.
Words by Donovan Livesey
