News OUGHT

: Ought
Based: Montreal
Listen: ‘More Than Any Other Day’
Similar to: Sipping gin and juice for four days straight.

There ought to be an awful lot of puns about a band called Ought, but… oh never mind. Catapulting through the front doors of the internet like the guy at the party who wants all of the attention, Montreal’s Ought create dazzling post-punk that fizzes with eccentricity and infectiousness. They create the sound that rattles around your brain when you get up to fast in the morning - they’re the bleary moment of brilliance that only occurs so often, and if you blink you’ll miss it.

Falling somewhere on the scale between Talking Heads and Cap’n Jazz (or maybe more accurately the former’s return as Owls), Ought are the kind of guys who sit twiddling their thumbs anxiously when presented with the prospect of a quiet night in, and quickly turn the situation into a sugar drink-fuelled frenzy. ‘The Weather Song’ is a scatty, brilliant piece of forward-thinking pop that pays its dues to Gang of Four with skittering keyboards and sizzling guitar lines, while ‘Waiting’ meanders between off-kilter rhythms and razor-sharp instrumentation.

Having formed in Montreal in 2011, Ought say the Printemps d’Erable Quebec student general strike in 2012 “had a massive part to play in solidifying their sound,” but really you could just put it down to them understanding how to have a totally excellent time. They’re not the ones to blame for their full-throttle, explosive art rock anyway - it’s all those bloody e-numbers.