Caro skyrocket with ‘Cold Comfort’

Every weekday, DIY’s new music know-it-all Neu brings you one essential new release to get obsessed with. Today’s Neu Pick comes from Caro.

This past month, those stumbling across the North’s showcase fests - Live at Leeds and Liverpool’s Sound City - might have found their new favourite band.

Caro are a Leeds-based trio sporting stately, delicately-arranged pop that’ll slap you round the face with a fish, unprompted. Sounds unnecessary and a bit mean on paper, but their fizzing new single ‘Cold Comfort’ ebbs and flows between two wild extremes.

One side to Caro is all softly-softly, playfully plucked romantics. Lyrics are smart and earnest, offering lines like “I told you I’d never web a lie around you.” It’s butter-wouldn’t-melt stuff. But in the middle of ‘Cold Comfort’, out comes a fizzing, razor-toothed chorus, not dissimilar to Glass Animals getting a life-altering electric shock. Frazzled guitars have hacked the mainframe, and just when the whole thing threatens to smash into smithereens, Caro bring things back down to a gorgeous, settled pace. In the future they might just opt for sweet serenades and all-out noise instead of combining the two, but there’s enough going on here to set pulses racing at dangerous levels.

DIY has the first play of ‘Cold Comfort’ below. Next month, they play Carlisle’s The Brickyard (1st July) and Leeds’ The Wardrobe (8th July).

Catch up with debut track ‘Admit/Resist’, while you’re at it.