Glasgow band Humour on embracing weirdness and evolving their sound for debut album 'Learning Greek' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Humour have made their home in the madhouse. Splicing together personal trauma and powerfully cut-throat energy, Glasgow’s feistiest post-punk/hardcore quintet are making their mark with their tongue-in-cheek yet brazenly biting debut album, ‘Learning Greek’.

“The title was a happy accident,” vocalist Andreas Christodoulidis reveals, speaking to DIY from the country itself. “It came from a throwaway line in a track that never made the album. We didn’t really think about it too much - it just had a ring to it. After that, I thought more about the [record’s] themes: exploring the past, nostalgia, the passage of time, and worrying about dying.”

Indeed, ‘Learning Greek’ manifests itself as an eleven-song crusade into Andreas’ private worries, taking shape as stories of intense paranoia (‘Neighbours’), class kinship (‘Die Rich’), and a heartfelt title-track that illuminates its central theme of personal history. As much as a debut album is always exposing, though, Humour didn’t get weighed down by pressure or expectation. Instead, they took risks, took their time, and took no prisoners.

Across the LP, the addictive hardcore elements and jagged, metallic edges that comprise the band’s two EPs to date (2022’s ‘pure misery’ and 2023’s ‘A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me’) are blended with more melodic guitar lines and layered pop-punk vocals - a move that wasn’t necessarily always on the cards. “We basically had a whole album’s worth of demos that never made it,” Andreas admits. “They weren’t bad songs, but they weren’t powerful enough; there weren’t enough gems.

“We reluctantly decided to record more songs, and from that the singles came really quickly, so we knew we’d made the right decision.” “I hope that some of those songs can be reworked, though - I really love some of those tracks,” drummer Ruairidh Smith levels. “But then we might go in a totally different direction on album two - who knows?”

“We’re trying to incorporate weirdness into songs that are designed to be well-structured and interesting, instead of just being mad.”

— Andreas Christodoulidis

Having started the band during the pandemic, Humour’s first years have been an opportunity to delve into the craziest parts of their collective psyche without tapering their ambition - an outlook, Andreas explains, has endured yet evolved. “We’ve retained the desire to be experimental; we still want to try weird things,” he notes. “I think what’s different is that, on our first EP, we were trying to freak people out - the whole thing was a punch. Now we’re trying to incorporate weirdness into songs that are [primarily] designed to be well-structured and interesting, instead of just being mad.”

“We all have different tastes,” Ruairidh nods. “The softer, melodic stuff comes from Andreas’ love of folk music, while I come from poppier stuff, so that gave the album more direction and focus. We kept a conscious effort to bring in hardcore elements, too.” He continues: “Because we wrote [‘pure misery’] during Covid, there was no one there to tame our weirdness. It’s been important in defining who we are, but now we’re trying to write more direct songs that push some elements a bit further. We push the noise, or we get Andreas to push his voice to its limit; [the album] embodies everything we’ve done so far, and adds something new.”

‘Learning Greek’ is out on 8th August via So Young Records.

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