A young man with a mullet plays guitar in the spotlight, and sings about electric kisses and razor-blade smiles. Such natural charisma threatens to give a bad haircut a good name.
Jacob Slater, frontman of Wunderhorse – one of the buzziest bands in UK indie – is formerly of snotty teen noise-mongers Dead Pretties, defunct since 2017. Although he is only in his mid-20s, his songs ache with bruised nostalgia. In interviews, he has explained that he stopped taking drugs when he split his old band. His writing, perhaps as a result, has the tender gaze of a sober artist looking back at his earlier life, and the lives of peers, with a clarity absent at the time. The keynote, always, is compassion, whether for the troubled home life of the girl in Purple or the too-much-too-young sexual experience described in Butterflies.
