Before we start, let’s clear one thing up:
Gengar: A poison/ghost Pokemon belonging to the original Red/Blue generation of games.
Gengahr: Your new favourite four piece band who, incidentally, always have a Gengar plushie on their amp when playing live.
A few months ago Gengahr floated on to my radar with a frankly jaw-dropping performance on the BBC Introducing Stage at Glastonbury and they’ve been happily haunting my radar ever since. The quartet, composed of singer and guitarist Felix Bushe, Hugh Schulte on bass, guitarist John Victor and drummer Danny Ward, hail from London and yet sound completely unlike anything else coming from our capital currently. Instead Gengahr sound like they’ve taken a leaf out of the sunkissed-haze book where MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Foxygen originally read from— which is probably why there’s one undying rumour about the band being American.
Aside from playing the biggest festival of the year, Gengahr cropped up at Knee Deep, Leeds and Latitude this summer as well as touring alongside Wolf Alice and, more recently, they’ve toured with both Darlia and Dry the River. If that doesn’t clue you in to why there’s such a buzz about the band then perhaps you better take yourself over to their Soundcloud ASAP to hear the hype in action.
Though there are only two tracks currently available (they’ve recently taken down ‘She’s a Witch’ and ‘Dizzy Ghosts’– though they are still on Spotify) you can tell that Gengahr are here to make music that gets stick in your head. Their melodies are what happens when shoegaze, summertime haze collides with indie-pop hooks: music that infects your subconscious like a contagion. Their musical prowess alone would be enough to lure you in to loving Gengahr, but it’s topped off by the most unsettling, ghostly falsetto from Bushe which frankly is as unnerving as it is sublime.
The strongest song in their repertoire– and debut single– is out on iTunes now, with a physical release on 27th October. You can catch them live at the Transgressive 10th Anniversary: New Faces show alongside Alvvays at Bethnal Working Men’s Club on 30th October.
