Glasgow band VLURE on their dance-punk debut album 'Escalate' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“I want it euphoric,” demands Hamish Hutcheson on the opening track of VLURE’s debut album ‘Escalate’. “Give me a release,” he pleads two songs later. Before long, the bliss that he’s conjured out of thin air is being regurgitated back out to the world. “There are always better days,” he reminds his audience, before the record’s penultimate song requires only one lyric: “This is not the end.”

“There’s something quite cathartic about repeating a phrase that makes you believe it,” he ponders, nodding to these lyrics, speaking to DIY alongside guitarist/producer/mastermind Conor Goldie. “When you hear it over and over, you believe it yourself, and then you can push on.” This is the way VLURE operate: throw everything and the kitchen sink at it with enough tenacity and determination, and a breakthrough will come.

In the Glasgow five-piece’s world, such progress cannot be ascribed to any particular moment or accolade. Sure, they bulldozed their way into DIY’s Class Of 2023, and were then soon snapped up by label Music For Nations. Only last month, they blew the roof off at Reading and Leeds festivals. But the root of VLURE’s fundamental mission has no ceiling. When it comes to the human experience of euphoria (the title of the group’s 2022 debut EP - by no coincidence) there is always more.

“We’ll never stop asking for more,” declares Conor. “We move the goalposts, and then we push it further. Scottish folk are [often] quite self-deprecating - that’s probably why we’re so bad at sports, right? We don’t want to have that self-imposed boundary… let’s try to bring everyone with us and push this further than anyone’s given us a right to, based upon the way that we look at ourselves here.”

“We move the goalposts, and then we push it further.”

— Conor Goldie

VLURE’s ‘rave-laced punk’ - to coin an old phrase of Hamish’s - is a never-ending quest for transcendence. Dense, bulky guitars and a throbbing pulse hark back to The Prodigy’s ruthlessness, while there’s also a bluntness that keeps everything off the cuff. On ‘Escalate’, house and techno soundscapes dominate, as the band nosedive further into the Glasgow club culture that helped shape them.

“Our intention since the start was always to bring electronic influences into the band world,” says Conor. “The grey area is super exciting. Pulling together two opposing worlds [brings] a whole bunch of people into a space they sometimes don’t share. Then they start to share ideas, and that’s what art’s all about.”

Hamish’s brutish Glaswegian twang is VLURE’s secret weapon, his narrative showcasing different shades of the city, but perhaps most prominently, its hedonism, which he notes “can be your best friend but your worst enemy at the same time.”

“When I listen to the record, part of me sees the Broomielaw, a street that goes along the River Clyde, on a rainy Saturday night, when you’re walking from a club to your pal’s at 3am, and there’s all sorts going on,” he pronounces. Beyond the picture-painting, Glasgow’s founding principles are on display. “The honesty of this city, it’s a no bullshit zone. People see through it. If you’re not being authentically yourself, they’ll call you out on it,” he continues. “The world could do with more of a Glaswegian mentality,” adds Conor. “When you’ve got a room full of Glaswegians, it’s all of yous against the world.”

“I want to wake up when I’m 50 and know there’s nothing more I could have given [the record].”

— Hamish Hutcheson

The word ‘Escalate’ implies acceleration on an upward trajectory. ‘Between Dreams’ is a crash course in lightspeed-paced trance, while a re-recorded ‘Heartbeat’ turns unexpectedly on its head, much like a DJ flipping a track. ‘Let It Escalate’ oozes with momentum. “We tried not to bottle those [feelings],” smiles Conor.

By the end of the record, introspection enters the game, club hooks meeting industrial emotional outpourings, be it the bittersweet ‘This Is Not The End’ or ‘How To Say Goodbye’, written about someone close to Hamish who was unwell. “I had to get that off my chest and go through that,” he explains. “It was a perfect way for me to let out this huge bit of emotion, which we hadn’t really gone into throughout the record… laying my cards fully on the table.” It builds up to sombre closer ‘A Clear Tide’, arguably the sole moment of respite on the record, a grappling with immortality and time that perhaps also represents the tranquility of the empty streets as seen from the window of a night bus.

“The way that it comes after ‘This Is Not The End’ is quite poignant, because it’s about nostalgia, the movement of life and the concept of immortality,” says Conor, who wrote ‘A Clear Tide’ as a poem many years ago. “I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of trying to make something bigger than myself. When I cease to exist, this record will still exist. That’s all I’ve ever really cared about, making art greater than the means.”

Lending his hand to the track is Primal Scream legend Bobby Gillespie, who is from the same area of Glasgow as Conor and his brother (and bandmate) Niall. “He laid the foundations with those early Primal Scream records to have the ‘dance-rock’ band,” he grins. “When I wrote that poem, I would have been listening to ‘Screamadelica’ on my headphones.”

Though ‘Escalate’ marks the culmination of VLURE’s story so far, it’s important to remember that this is still only the start. Hamish, Conor, Niall, along with Carlo Kriekaard (synth/drums) and Alex Pearson (keys) have opened a window into their collective imagination, driven to seize their moment, however long it may last.

“I want to wake up when I’m 50 and know there’s nothing more I could have given to [the record],” affirms Hamish. “It’s about giving people that come to the shows something to believe in, collectively,” concludes Conor. “If luck doesn’t go our way, my knees don’t work anymore or my throat is blown, [I can] sit there happy and say, ‘God, I really went for it.’”

‘Escalate’ is out 26th September via Music For Nations.

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