Though Scottish music largely revolves around the country’s artistic capital of Glasgow, the Edinburgh-based Swim School are a band who are rocking the proverbial boat across the Scottish indie music scene.
The quartet have been steadily building their profile since 2019, and have released their anticipated debut EP, Making Sense Of It All.
The five-track collection – which includes all of the group’s 2021 singles – represents somewhat of a reemergence for the band; who, understandably, only released two singles in 2020.
Though lockdown slowed things down for them, it did provide the group with the opportunity to redefine their sound; 2021’s singles were the first to exhibit the band’s more expansive sonic makeup and Making Sense Of It All does well in consolidating their new sound.
The EP’s opener, ’Let Me Inside Your Head’, was one of the tracks that began life as a single and it seems to encapsulate much of what the band are setting out to achieve with their new sound. The song’s wide, sweeping body evokes bands like Desperate Journalist and The Cure, while the soaring choruses – sang by lead vocalist, Alice Johnson – give the song an all-conquering sense of height. The end result is an opening track that announces its presence with the kind of distinct confidence only wielded by bands who find themselves in their true element.
The band’s lockdown development was aided by their drummer, Billy McMahon, who joined the group in June 2020. He brought a heavy, bulky style to the group’s rhythm section, which has ultimately elevated the group’s sound into the more broad-bodied and padded out one showcased throughout the EP.
The percussive punch McMahon provides is best showcased on the EP’s penultimate track, ‘See Red’, which finds the drummer providing the majority of the track’s vigour; his driven, grunge-infused percussion ensures every gap in the track’s otherwise sparse layout is filled.
Though the EP, for the most part, features a percussion-driven DNA, it’s able to retain an overall sense of instrumental cohesion throughout. The guitars – played by Johnson and Lewis Bunting – give a number of the tracks an underlying sense of distance and the use of synths create a dreamy, almost psychedelic consistency. The guitars are given more of a leading role in the final track, ‘Outside’, which features distorted guitar lines that borrow heavily from contemporary indie rock.
Nowhere. though, is the sense of cohesion more palpable than on ‘Everything You Wanted’ – the EPs clear standout track – which begins with soft guitar lines, floating synths, and a lamenting, Wolf Alice-inspired vocal, before diving into a full-fledged crashing instrumental break that wouldn’t be out of place on a Smashing Pumpkins record.
With Making Sense Of It All, Swim School have given themselves a platform on which they can build. They sound like a band at one with themselves and, with Latitude Festival already under their belts, they’re now looking to build their profile further in the coming months.
Though they’re not yet a band at the forefront of Scotland’s indie music scene, if they continue to produce releases of this quality, there’s little doubt they will be.