“It was really surreal,” recalls Moina Moin, of the day in 2022 when DFA Records founder James Murphy invited Mermaid Chunky, the duo Moin formed six years earlier with best friend Freya Tate, to sign to his label and support his group LCD Soundsystem at the Brixton Academy.
“We didn’t really know who he was,” admits Tate. “To be honest, I thought LCD Soundsystem was something like the Ministry of Sound.”
Delighting in playfulness, performance art and ambient-folk reveries, Mermaid Chunky may seem an unusual signing for the hyper-cool DFA. But after hearing tracks from their 2020 debut Vest on the online radio station NTS, Murphy was entranced, emailing to tell the duo: “You’ve restored my faith in music.” Now their first full-length album for the label, slif slaf slof, looks set to work that magic on the public at large. It presents a beguiling world where looped recorders tootle primitive melodies, where charmingly homemade house bangers rub shoulders with squelchy rodeo funk, and where a castlist of eccentrics (including dipsomaniac lift attendants with Henry VIII obsessions and lusty divorcees from the deep south) run riot.
Mermaid Chunky hail from Stroud, Gloucestershire, and met 13 years ago at Stroud Valleys Artspace, a complex of studios and performance spaces Moin’s parents helped found in the mid-90s. “We both shared this really stupid and bizarre sense of humour, based around being silly and breaking things down,” says Tate. Members of a local youth ska orchestra, they formed a break-off “girl band” with all the girls from the orchestra. “But then people started slipping off to uni, so it ended up just being Moina and me.”
The duo duly booked a gig at a local poetry night. “We rehearsed in my dad’s kitchen without any instruments, just me whacking a stuffed toy rabbit on the countertop,” remembers Moin, “and we made up this song around it.” The show itself snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, or perhaps vice versa. “It was chaotic: we forgot how to play the song; I fell and knocked over the keyboard,” says Moin.
“But everyone was laughing,” adds Tate. “And we were like: ‘Hey, that went well!’”
Tate moved to Brighton to study; when she returned and found herself “in that post-uni period, feeling like a weird blob, some sort of failure, like I’d dropped from outer space”, she and Moin refocused their energies on Mermaid Chunky (named after a kind of yarn). “We started experimenting with loops, and it got weirder and weirder,” says Tate. “We felt quite incubated in Stroud, able to jump around and do things.”
A mission statement took shape: Hang out, make jokes, dress up. “We’re quite visual and performative,” says Moin, who produces the band’s videos, as well as designing their onstage costumes with Tate. Mermaid Chunky’s lyrics are monologues, short stories and character studies that evolve out of late-night conversations on long drives where, Moin says, “all of a sudden these weird characters surface, and we have no idea what they will do next”. Moin plays saxophone, rather excellently in fact. Tate plays keyboards and operates a drum machine her mum got “for 20 quid at a car boot sale. I don’t really care about fiddling with technology. I’m not very Aphex Twin-y. I just grab the sound, I don’t care whether it’s cool or not.”
Their disregard for cool may be the gift that enables Mermaid Chunky to cook up such bewitching music. Céilí, the lead single from slif slaf slof, was born at a show at a warehouse in Hackney Wick, east London. “The night was called Sunday Service, and we were like: ‘Oh no, this looks weird and spiritual.’ It was all incense and candles,” says Tate. “But the audience was really focused; it turns out hippies really like to stare at things for a long time.”
Céilí took shape that night, as they ran recorders through loop pedals and added new-age synths, chanting and tribal drum patterns. “We were playing ‘stripped-down’, because we hadn’t been able to bring all our usual gear,” says Moin. “We were improvising on limited equipment, the stuff we’d started off with: Freya’s mum’s drum machine and the recorder I’ve been playing since I was really young; these two meaningful, characterful sounds that represent us. We were dancing, really taking these sounds seriously in a beautiful, celebratory way, seeing each other and hearing each other.”
They performed Céilí at one of their more remarkable performances, a “tiny dog wedding” they threw for May Day in Stroud. “We have a love/hate relationship with Stroud’s amazing ancient, seasonal celebrations and feel the need to take the piss out of them,” says Moin. The duo laid on quite a spread for their human and canine guests and, Tate says, “a dog pastor flew in from Las Vegas for the ceremony. Well, he was there on Zoom.”
“The bride and groom were ceramic,” adds Moin. “You could see jealousy in the eyes of the ‘real’ animals. And the groom lost his paw in the process. It was very stressful. I actually started crying, and had to perform in sunglasses. I really wanted the tiny dogs to be happy.”
Beyond the weaponised weirdness and arty playfulness, there is great emotion within Mermaid Chunky’s music: a celebration of these women and their friendship and the lives they’ve chosen. “We’re very in our own bubble,” Moin admits, but she knows their music affects people. “People will come up to us after gigs and say: ‘I related to that, I loved that so much.’ Younger women say: ‘I can’t wait to go and make some music of my own.’ And we still make mistakes at our gigs, but people are like: ‘I can’t wait to make mistakes of my own, and push something over as well.’ They really like to see that you can do things your own way. These songs bring a lot of joy, which feels like an honour.”
Not every audience member is seduced by the ways of the Chunky; Tate says their LCD Soundsystem support slot “inspired a whole Reddit thread arguing about us. I don’t want to read it, but I love that. We do split opinion.” But while they are proud outsider artists, Tate says Mermaid Chunky “make pop music, with hooky hooks. We want to be popular.”
For Moin, however, the process is the point. “Mermaid Chunky is about Freya and I connecting in this different realm. When we’re practising, it’s like a party – you feel mad, you feel really great, and you feel like you’ve won. It doesn’t matter how it’s received. It’s such an extravagant pleasure to be able to communicate with someone else by whacking a stuffed toy rabbit on a table.”
• slif slaf slof is released on DFA Records on 13 September.
