Start Listening To: The Great Unwashed

The Manchester band discuss their debut EP, an unexpectedly emotional first gig and the friends who keep them going.

There’s a good chance that The Great Unwashed are your favourite new Manchester band’s favourite Manchester new band. Westside Cowboy, Shaking Hand and Holly Head have all gone out of their way to sing the praises of the self-described “post-post-rock” ensemble, who have surprise released their self-titled debut EP today. Having bonded over a mutual fascination with the weirder leaning of 90s alternative rock, the first incarnation of the band formed at university and has been subtly evolving in both sound and lineup ever since.

Reuben Munroe (vocals/guitar), Harley Priest (bass) and Josh Seddon (guitar) join me outside a frankly inexcusably busy Manchester pub to discuss the gradual beginnings of their band, bewildering early gigs and their sonic progression to date.

For those who are hearing about you for the first time, who are you and what kind of music do you make?

Reuben: We’re The Great Unwashed, we were trying to be a post-rock band but now we’re just a band.

Harley: We’re a band that writes music without worrying too much about whether it’s catchy or not.

Reuben: Funnily enough, it ends up a lot catchier than we intended for it to be.

Josh: We just make music that we want to listen to, basically. It’s very self-indulgent.

How did you all meet initially and what music did you bond over in the early stages of knowing each other?

Reuben: I met our friend George on the first day of music tech lectures at Salford University. I remember seeing a Jockstrap sticker on his laptop and being like “I love that album!” and then we got talking about that band as well as Sigur Ros and Radiohead. He said he’d introduce me to his friend Josh who had, in his words, a “pathetic” obsession with Radiohead. Me and Josh got chatting and I asked him if he wanted to do a Sigur Ros covers thing to which he replied “why don’t we just start writing our own music?” which made more sense. Josh knew our drummer Jacob through a function band that he was briefly in, and then Harley joined on bass a little bit later.

Josh: We got offered a gig when we had like ten minutes of music and they wanted us to play for, like, 40 minutes. We got to the end of our ten minutes and people were really into it so we just kept playing these weird repetitions with loads of delays and stuff. I think we played a bit of Blaise Bailey Finnegan III by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and then just a pure noise section and then whatever. It was, for some reason, an incredible gig. People were crying and hugging each other and everything. What a night.

Reuben: That’s still the highest that my ego ego has ever been.

Harley: I was at that gig, it felt a lot more rehearsed than that!

It feels like there have been several versions of the band. Were you ever tempted to change the name?

Reuben: Every variation of the band has its own secret name.

Harley: Yeah, when we played with Cruush at Gullivers, the venue put our name as ‘The Greater Good.’ I don’t know how they got to that.

Reuben: We played Jacaranda in Liverpool and they just put us as ‘Unwashed.’ We played with Kings of Leon and Red Hot Chilli Peppers tribute bands that night.

Tell us a bit about your debut EP.

Reuben: It’s good. We made it with our friend and mentor Samuel Jones Basically, I wrote a bunch of half decent acoustic folk songs and then everybody came in and made them very different and much better. Apart from one song, which Josh wrote the initial idea for.

Josh: Yeah, that was heavily inspired by Ben Howard. I love him. There are also loads of little references on there. At the very end, I start making the same sounds that I was making at the start of a live EP that we did a while ago. So you can listen to it like Nonagon Infinity and just go around over and over again.

Harley: It’s the only time I’ve not had imposter syndrome with something that I’ve been a part of. I can fully admit that it’s sick, which is really nice.

What themes did you find coming to the surface when you were writing the record?

Reuben: In terms of the lyrics, it’s all about the homies.

Josh: Yeah, we all lived together for some reason so all of the songs are about the homies. Except ‘Unfold’, which is about an origami party that Reuben went to. It’s mostly just about being chums.

Reuben: I feel like I write statements that elicit some emotional response in me, but they’re not exactly drenched in metaphor. I could probably do with more of them. I put a lot into the melodies and how the syllables work together which I think is definitely heavily inspired by Sigur Ros. We were way more post-rock early on and the vocals were far back so people couldn’t hear the words so much, but now that’s not the case so much. It’s something I’m thinking about a lot as we start working on newer stuff.

I feel like every band I know in the city really loves your band. How important has it been to have so much support from your peers?

Harley: It’s unreal. It just makes you feel like you’re not going insane when you get recognition from people like that. It makes you think you might actually be alright. There are so many cool people in the scene and it’s ultimately just really nice to feel involved. I love it.

Reuben: It makes me giddy, I’m not going to lie. I haven’t moved past that yet.

What do you hate right now?

Reuben: The trains. McDonalds. The congestion charge. The waiting times for your driving test. Klarna.

Josh: London. I hate that place. I hope I never have to go again. I also hate DJs that beat sync. I hate when they send letters about council tax when you’re a student.

Harley: Social media. AI. I hate that every takeaway menu looks the same now.

How about things you love?

Josh. I love the homies and Boddington’s and Levenshulme. I also love cranes. Kegs of beer too, it can be a table or a seat. You can do anything with them.

Harley: I really like puzzles. It’s nice to be able to spend hours and hours on something that is free.

Photography by: Liam Maxwell