Millie Manders and The Shutup have released their debut album Telling Truths, Breaking Ties. The Norwich/ London five-piece have created a plethora of DIY gold; a cocktail of punk and ska that perfectly rides the current wave of 90’s nostalgia that we’ve seen all over Instagram and Tiktok.
Opening track “Your Story” takes me back to watching Freaks and Geeks in my teenage bedroom and pining over Blink 182’s Travis Barker (Still do). This is an album you can truly sink your teeth into, have a dance and a bit of a stomp.
The band have already seen huge support from BBC Introducing and Radio X and appearances at notable festivals such as Boomtown and Rebellion. Lynval Golding of The Specials is a fan with “I love it. It’s refreshing. What a start to my day …”. Do not be hesitant to check out this album – it’s playful with its instruments, heavy in sound and ridiculously smart with lyrics. An album jammed to the brim with huge songs that would be brilliant for the likes of Slam Dunk Festival, Leeds Festival and above.
We talk about the evoking of nostalgia that this album creates. However, the lyrics are very far from being stuck in the past. Each song on TTBT manages to convey the high energy, high anxiety of living in this mad world. We can see this from the track titles: songs like Broken Record, Poor Man’s Show and Burnout narrate the strange and turbulent times we are in. You can hear how frustrated Millie Manders and The Shutups feel about important topics surrounding healthcare, the environment and other causes and have used the self-release of their debut for positive change. The album and campaign are helping raise funds for NHS Charities Together, The Survivors Trust and the mental health charities MIND and Papyrus.
When talking about track Bitter, Millie explains the song is about “abandonment, callousness, cowardice and maltreatment, and the bitterness that arises in the wake of it. As a band, we want to support charities throughout the cycle of this album, so the charity we choose for each run of limited-edition merchandise does not necessarily correlate directly with the content of the song, but they are charities that we feel connected to personally.”
To coincide with the release of BITTER, a limited-edition vest and T Shirt are now available from the band’s official website with £5 from each sale being donated to The Survivors Trust, an umbrella charity for survivors of rape and sexual abuse: https://millie-manders.com/
Photographs provided by Ian Cheek Press.
