Neu Casual Sex: ‘We’ve Had Our Wild Moments’

“I wouldn’t come to see us and expect to find a new Franz Ferdinand or Orange Juice,” Sam Smith, vocalist and guitarist for Glasgow’s Casual Sex, tells us in a backstreet pub in the heart of London’s Shoreditch. They’re one date into their summer tour, and so far the press that’s surrounded the emergence of their exceedingly raunchy sound has drawn comparisons to two of Scotland’s biggest success stories.

On the surface, the band’s music is incredibly quirky and concise - they produce short, sharp, quintessentially pop songs that channel all of the greatest post-punk and art rock bands, falling somewhere on the spectrum between XTC and Devo rather than the more mainstream indie acts comparisons like Orange Juice suggest. “In good grace, you do except that when you have a couple of guys [from Glasgow] playing guitar… the comparisons are going to happen, and we don’t wear it with any bad shoe – I just hope that people will see beyond that.”

Smith, along with the rest of the band – guitarist Edward Wood, bassist Peter Masson and drummer Chris McCrory – all met through the studio where Sam is the main sound engineer. It’s in this same studio that the band practice as well as record their material, making the recording and writing processes far easier for everyone. “It’s a primarily analogue studio. Not because I’m an analogue fascist, but mainly because I was getting frustrated going into ProTools studios,” Smith clarifies.



With a team assembled that formed around studio knowledge, the band is logically self-produced. But they’re not necessarily set on sticking to the same formula they’ve established forever and always. “If [a producer] came around that we liked I’m sure we’d be up for mixing things up a bit,” Smith says. The same goes for the band’s stance on location, with bassist Masson saying “I know in particular that certain members of the band, myself included, want to get a place where we can have a house or a cottage or something like that. Because as much as we enjoy the studio, we’re still within our home comforts – we’re only a phone call away from someone asking us if we want to go for a pint. I think we’d like to immerse ourselves more.”

The band’s debut single, ‘Stroh 80’ – which was released earlier this year on Moshi Moshi – gleams with skewed, heavily warped guitar lines that remain crystal clear and polished now matter how far left they get. It’s a slinky and seductive tale, one of being caught with your mate’s girlfriend after a drug-fuelled party, and it’s that dark sense of humour that sets the tone for the rest of the band’s material.

“They’re completely 100% genuine,” Smith says on the authenticity of his somewhat promiscuous lyricism. “It’s all drawn from a real place. We’ve had our wild moments and still might occasionally dip our toe in the water, but certainly we’ve all become a little more civilised. Sadly, the people who are involved are aware that the songs are about them. You always kind of wonder ‘hmm, I wonder if they know this is about them?’”



Read the full interview in the new edition of DIY Weekly, available from iTunes now.