Start Listening To: cyclist

Ben Parry discusses the instinctive freedom behind cyclist, Leeds’ thriving DIY scene and the Welsh influences that continue to shape his music.

Since moving from South Wales to Leeds almost a decade ago, Ben Parry has been everpresent in Leeds’ thriving DIY scene. For his most recent project, cyclist, he armed himself with little more than a Tascam Portastudio and committed to tape some of the most infectious lo-fi garage rock you’ll discover all year. The songs on his debut EP ‘popular appeal’, released on the mighty Esco Romanesco records, are hooky and immediate but dense with scuzzy guitars. cyclist was a well-timed antidote to the less fun parts of being in a band: the people pleasing, the admin and the necessary reliance on others. With this project, Parry is free to give in to his most pressing and his daftest creative itches immediately. The whole thing feels instinctive and free. We caught up with him to talk all about it. 

For those who might be hearing about cyclist for the first time, can you tell me a bit about how the project came about?

I guess it started ages ago because I recorded a lot of the super early stuff in 2023. Me and my friend Oscar got super into imposing rules to get some kind of creative juices out. Initially, I was like “it’d be cool to make an album of just low tom and vocals!” but it kind of grew out over time. I was really into Women and Preoccupations and ‘Thee House of Foggy Nation’ by Thee Oh Sees. I really fell in love with that kind of sound. I was living with Oscar and Lewis from English Teacher in Armley, which is a kind of rough area of Leeds, and I think both of them had gone away. I had the house to myself, so I sat in the basement with a four track. It had all been marinating for a few years.

You’ve been involved in a bunch of different projects since you moved to Leeds. How different was it having complete control with this project?

It’s definitely a lot more singular. With other projects I’ve been involved in, it’s sometimes been a democratic process and sometimes just trying to please everyone involved. It has been really nice with this to be as individual as possible and just scratch every really stupid itch. I can write a song that’s thirty seconds long and make it stupidly complex and go in loads of different avenues but I can also just write a song about my girlfriend being asleep on the sofa. In some ways, I think this is the complete antithesis to Fuzz Lightyear because it’s so minimal but there’s also through threads with The Oidz with the lo-fi stuff. Maybe it’s a response to the other projects I’ve been in, but it’s also just a way to indulge in my tape fetish. 

I think my favourite thing about the EP is that it feels very instinctive. You can kind of tell that you have complete control and can record these songs when and how you want to, without needing to have many conversations beforehand. I wonder if that rings true from your perspective? 

Yeah, for sure. I had one song from the early period of writing and then the rest I kind of shit out during a few days. I just tuned my guitar to Open D because I find it super easy to write that way, it’s a lot of new shapes and sounds and I can write really quickly. I think I wrote ten or eleven songs and would keep the ones that weren’t instinctively cringey. Most of the record came from that period. 

It’s a pretty intimate and insular writing and recording process that you’re describing, did it feel strange taking those songs to a live environment? 

I have a really natural relationship with everyone in the band, so it didn’t feel too intimate or anxiety-inducing when we started putting it together in the practice room. It just felt like I was opening up a bit more to my mates, which is absolutely fine. We’ve probably played them a little bit faster and with more energy to make it work in a live setting. Some of the newest stuff I’ve written is a bit punkier and that has probably been influenced by playing cyclist stuff live, which is funny because it was born of this tiny personal world. Seeing stuff that essentially lived on a cassette tape for two years get reborn in a new way is quite funny to me. 

I wanted to talk a bit about the scene in Leeds at the moment. It seems like good stuff is springing up all the time from that kind of Private Regcords and Esco Romanesco corner of things…

Absolutely. I’ve always had loads of bands going on personally, but there’s this really strong DIY creative spirit in Leeds in particular at the moment. It’s like, you can just start bands at will and something will stick. I think that’s my favourite part about the scene: bands will do like two gigs and then move on and do something else. 

From the outside, one of the cool things is how unpretentious the scene is. You’ve got like the more club-adjacent stuff with Kiosk and Bathing Suits, the power pop sound with Vehicle, more twee bands like Mother Said… but ultimately it feels like everybody wants to write good pop songs. 

Yeah, I can definitely see that. There aren’t loads of super arty  bands like Black Midi or whatever. Especially with bands like Vehicle, Mikey’s got his own head cannon of how music operates. In the press release for their newest song he’s going down an alternative history of music where synthesisers were never invented and writing a pop song purely with guitars. I think there’s a big appreciation of pop music in Leeds. Alex from Bathing Suits will reference Merzbow but also, like, EsDeeKid and Charli XCX. The range of influences is mad. DJ Subaru is doing Italo Disco stuff and also DJing at Berghein. James Vardy puts out nice emo stuff like April Tapes but also Kiosk and Bathing Suits. You’re right, everybody’s trying to make great pop songs. 

Leeds has obviously had a big impact on you, but how about your hometown?

I grew up in Neath, which is where I am right now. It’s a classic industrial town situation: destroyed by Thatcher and then left alone for years. But there’s loads of beautiful nature and I think that dichotomy of the rundown industry against beautiful nature has had an impact on me in lots of ways. There wasn’t much of an alternative scene when I was growing up, so that’s what I went looking for in Leeds. I really wanted to find a garage rock scene. Wales is a lot quieter, which is really nice to come back to. I’m slowly realising how much of an impact that had on me as a kid. I love the calm and the greenery, but I also think that growing up here means that I now find anything chaotic quite rebellious. 

Do you still carry any musical influences with you from your childhood in Wales?

Definitely. The folk music of Wales is unreal. I don’t know if it gets as much attention as the Gaelic or Scottish folk stuff, but there’s a lot of unreal choral stuff from Wales that has had a huge impact. In terms of Welsh language stuff, I really like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Gwenno, Cate le Bon and Tai Haf Heb Drigolyn but it’s really the choral stuff that hit home for me. I went to a Welsh language school so we’d always sing in Welsh and there’s a lot of Christianity floating around. In English, that feels a bit flat but in Welsh it kind of takes on this folklorish and otherworldly quality. I think the Welsh language probably influences me just as much as Welsh music does. 

What do you love right now?

Greg Freeman, I’ve completely fallen in love with his last couple of records. I’ve been listening to shitloads of slow jams. I’ve been finishing the annual Mac Demarco phase that everybody goes through. I’ve been loving girl groups from the 60s and all that Phil Spector stuff, he’s a bit of a problematic fave. I’m loving sending pig videos to my girlfriend. I love drinking lager. I love saving money for Green Man and obsessing over the Green Man line up. I love talking to my uncle about cycling, he’s been poorly recently but he’s been looking into getting an e-bike. I’ve been loving Keshed by Stu Hennigan, that’s a really good book. It’s from the perspective of an alcoholic and there’s no punctuation or anything, just straight up words on a page. Great book.

What do you hate right now?

Good question. I’m not a hateful person but there’s definitely stuff I could do without, like the rising tide of fascism or global warming. Today I went past a river in the forest next to my home and it used to be heavy and you’d have to jump on stones to get over it but today it was completely dry. That feaked me out. I hate creepy guys. I hate roadworks.