Wordy and worldy indie four-piece, The Lathums, land somewhere between Bowie’s famous stroll across East Sussex sands in Ashes To Ashes, the heart-stopping catatonia of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and the monochrome menace of A Clockwork Orange in the absorbingly surreal, widescreen promo for their track, Foolish Parley. Cut to a distinctly conceptual, arthouse feel in deep black and white and interspersed with live footage from beneath the baroque splendour of Blackpool Tower, the Wigan band reveal their theatrical poise with brooding, poker-faced performances in full, rain-smudged make-up.
The growling, tremelo-warped Foolish Parley originally appeared on The Lathums’ Ghost EP in October, an essential cut from the band’s 2020 soundtrack, a year that saw them honoured with a place on the BBC Sound Of 2021 longlist, appearing on Later… With Jools Holland and enjoying a week-long BBC Radio One residency on the BBC Introducing Playlist. The new, James Slater-directed video finds the barely twenty-somethings nudged into noir and embracing the surreal, losing all sense of time and reality along the rugged, sea-lashed, British shoreline.
Inspired by traditional customs out at sea, in which warring factions would set down arms to negotiate, Foolish Parley’s lyrics open a door once more into the old soul of bookish front man and lyricist, Alex Moore. Of the track, he says: “Being honest, this just came to me out of nowhere, I can’t pinpoint from exactly where or why. Like a lot of songs, it was something that flowed freely, working first time and, sometimes, it takes no more thinking about than that.”
After looking ahead to an exciting 2020, where they would play their biggest shows to date in Manchester and London, pick up arena tour dates with Blossoms and accept the invitation from Paul Weller to open his UK-wide run of shows, The Lathums nimbly swerved the wreckage of the Coronavirus pandemic to remain stubbornly on the rise. They made their first impression on the UK Album Charts, settling at Number 14 for their vinyl-only EP compilation, The Memories We Make and took top spot in the UK Vinyl Chart later in the year for their Island Records debut, All My Life.
