Tuff Love - Resort

Tuff Love’s three EPs - 2014’s ‘Junk’, and last year’s ‘Dross’ and ‘Dregs’ - showed them as one of the most promising fuzz pop bands in the UK, all sugar-sweet melodies and crunching choruses. ‘Resort’, a compilation of these trio of releases and discography of sorts, flows as an LP surprisingly well considering the fragmented time in which they were recorded and originally released.

Through opener ‘Sweet Discontent’ to recent ‘Dregs’ highlights ‘Duke’ and ‘Crocodile’, the progression Julie Eisenstein and Suse Bear have made across the three releases is abundantly clear. Placing all three EPs on one release now they’re undoubtedly a bigger band not only gives a greater exposure to the excellent but largely under-the-radar ‘Junk’ tracks, but ranks up the excitement for LP1 proper, which is expected later this year.

The lead single from ‘Dross’, ‘Slammer’, is the highlight, an intoxicating loud-and-quiet cut that deserves to be the hit it never quite became on original release, while closer ‘Carbon”s emo twang shows the pair to be far from one-dimensional. The ‘Junk’ tracks that open the record now possess none of the level-headedness and nouse of ‘Dregs’, but keep an exuberance and endearing naivety that could only come from a band’s very first songs.