Chalk

About

" A rhythmic exploration of guitar noise "

Belonging to the growing realm of acts that play a kind of pulsating dance music blended with edgy chordal guitar noise, Belfast act Chalk also sit on the cusp of traditional guttural guitar act and vibrant, visual club performers. The three-piece, made up of Ross Cullen, Benedict Goddard and Luke Niblock, are originally from Dublin but met during film school at Queen’s University, Belfast, and graduated from playing around with covers of Courtney Barnett and The Strokes, to a flying launch of their own sound.

The band released ‘Them’ in March 2022, winning Steve Lamacq’s career-launching RoundTable on cult BBC music station 6Music. This led to very early shows taking place to packed rooms at events like Brighton’s showcase The Great Escape, something of a marker of industry potential. With doors firmly opened, ‘Them’ became a calling card, bleak in tone and throbbing, almost oppressive in the way it dynamically builds.

Singles ‘Static’, ‘Asking’ and ‘Velodrome’ all sit on an EP entitled ‘Conditions’, also featuring a new title track. The EP is simultaneously cinematic and jarring, with Cullen’s vocals raw and emotional against a juggernaut of a morphing backdrop that carries a depth that’s staggering for a band of just three people. ‘Static’ has a throttlingly intense build leading to a throbbing chorus, while ‘Conditions’ showcases a slightly mellow side initially, before a dynamic shift into a sound with echoes of Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy‘.

“It’s about the seemingly eternal struggle to find out who we really are as people, wrestling to discover what our purpose is… and where we belong in this world,” the band says of the title track ‘Conditions’. If this is what an early exercise in self-exploration and understanding sounds like, we can only hope Chalk has an inner world as expansive as these early forays suggest: the potential here is massive.