AYRES

Harrow, North-West London · b. 2001 · FARA Records

AYRES (Sam Ayres, b. 10 March 2001, Harrow) grew up at the far end of the Metropolitan line, twenty-five minutes and a completely different life from central London. He was in bands from fourteen — three of them, all of which nearly did something and none of which did, which is a very ordinary way to spend your late teens and leaves a particular residue. What he came out of it with was a voice that had been used properly for a decade and no illusions at all about the music business. He found his way in singing in rooms too small for the volume, from fourteen — the only artist on this record who came from guitars, and the roughness in his voice is genuinely from years of doing it badly in bad venues rather than from any production decision. He met PULL through an engineer, which is how most of the good ones happen.

Rough, warm and unpolished, with real strain at the top of his range that he doesn't hide. He's the emotional counterweight to a very hard record — the whole reason the UK bass tradition puts a slightly broken male voice over a half-time bed is that the contrast does something neither element manages alone. He sings above the beat rather than in it and never lands on the grid, which drives engineers mad and is exactly why the chorus works. He doesn't read music and has never had a lesson, which shows in his phrasing in a way that mostly helps. His influences run the British tradition of putting a soulful, imperfect male voice on top of something extremely heavy, which he arrived at from the rock side rather than the dance side, behind it, ten years of bands and a lot of open mics.

Talkative and warm and entirely without side — he tells the story of the three failed bands to anybody who'll listen and finds it funnier than they do. Live he's the one at the front getting the room to sing, which suits him and suits PULL, who doesn't want to be. He doesn't land on the grid and refuses to be corrected; two engineers have quantised his vocal without asking and both were made to undo it. The roughness at the top of his range is from a decade of singing too loud in rooms that were too small, not from a plugin. He's the only person on this record who came from guitars, which he suspects is why the chorus sounds like it does. Open, self-deprecating, stubborn.