MEET W.H. LUNG, MANCHESTER’S NEW KING MONKEYS
“IWAS A gorilla this morning.” Suddenly emerging from the fringes of Hampstead Heath, W.H. Lung’s frontman Joe Evans describes what he’s been doing earlier as part of his acting course at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. While making his way to a bench by a pond, he explains that getting the eyes right is crucial, as they give nothing away: a gorilla’s actions aren’t telegraphed.
In person, the day-to-day Evans is amiable, direct and excited about W.H. Lung’s forthcoming second album Vanities, the follow-up to 2019’s Incidental Music. The band – Evans plus co-songwriter Tom Sharkett (guitar), Alex Mercer Main (drums), Chris Mulligan (bass, guitar/synths) and Hannah Peace (synths/vocals) – consciously made an album for dancing. Where their debut revolved around motorik rhythms, W.H. Lung’s new music is alive with the directness of house, an ecstatic dance-rock hybrid with shades of New Order and hints of a Happy Mondays swagger. The inspirations for Vanities actually range from Manchester’s Wet Play club nights, Andrew Weatherall, the countryside of the Calder Valley outside Manchester, the philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff, and Van Gogh’s channelling of nature. Evans has been undertaking intense self-examination through deep meditation and yoga, and the resulting lyrics can be oblique.
“It’s not as if I would go into myself to find lyrics,” he laughs. “It’s more that in the process you have a heightened sense of intuition and it all comes more freely.” During album opener Calm Down, he sings, “Souped up by decree, I drop my trousers to the monarchy.”
Vanities’ most immediate track is the lead single Pearl In The Palm, with a video Evans made in rural Ireland on an iPhone. A donkey named Winnie features. Figure With Flowers, meanwhile, seems to feed Peter Gabriel through a trance filter. The band, like so many, are itching to get back onto a stage where, during their white-light intense live shows, Evans exhorts the audience, inviting them forwards with open palms, dropping to his knees, freezing, often lost in the rapture. Collapsing into a foetal ball, he’ll roll side-to-side, surrendering to the music. After shows, he rarely remembers his spontaneous stage behaviour.
“We just want to perform,” he says. “To engage with the audience, to have that exchange. It’s what I’m compelled to do. That for me is the greatest expression of music, there’s nothing like sharing it.” And will the gorilla surface? He won’t know until it happens.
Vanities is out on Melodic on September 3.