Heart wrenching guitars, soaring vocals and sinewy synth lines strapped to a freight train rhythm section. Influences include Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Buckley, Queen and Pink Floyd.
"If rock operatics are your thing, stick around. When they take the Muse template down a dark, dance-rock alley, they sound truly menacing" (NME)
Current album Lightning in the Mind, including a video of the title track, is available at all gigs. New E.P. Telescopes and Telephones has just been released and new album is out in the Autumn.
KING RAT
Breaths of mist and fog sank into the streets of a London music was forgetting, lost from sight and sound through the dark, brickwork cracks and cold, chattering drains. Dickensian descriptions and the ghosts of millennia swirled in the tea-dark rainwater that coursed through the labyrinthine channels. Waiting and growing, it fed on the portentous stew, stored up the emotions and passions of the great city's underbelly and listened.
Behind closed bedroom doors, vinyl grooves wore down, strings were played into dulled retirement to be replaced by countless others and determined plans took shape. History passed like a hand over the eyes of a corpse, expecting only silent complicity but there was a twitch, the glimmer of a steely eye and then... then the King Rat bit back.
It was time to play spine splintering rock in the grubby collection of venues where guitars spit defiant bolts of tuneful insolence at the mundane. It fell to five spellbound mortals to take up the fight and yeah, it might just be a shadow but remember, walk through the capital of England and you are never very far from a rat.
Queen, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead and Pink Floyd echo loudly in the band's music while the thrust of living in the present can be heard as synth sinews strap the tunes to a freight train rhythm section. Sailing out like ripples from some pool-plunged stone, vocal scapes elevate the concert of energies into the blue and, ever true, ever hopeful, the King Rat repertoire takes the listener to a better place.
However you word it, on stage and disc, King Rat may just be the best band in London.