London-based trio Uncle Junior discuss their hardcore beginnings, finding their feet on the capital's grassroots circuit and how their debut single ‘Melt Me’ marks a new chapter in their songwriting.
Having first started making music together as teenagers in Hampshire, Uncle Junior have come a long way from playing questionable punk covers in their bedrooms. Now based in London, the trio of Oli, Isaac and Eric have been building a reputation on the capital's grassroots circuit, drawing on their hardcore roots while gradually developing a more melodic side to their sound. Their debut single, ‘Melt Me’, offers a first recorded glimpse of that evolution, swapping some of their earlier noise and intensity for a more considered approach to songwriting. With further music already recorded and more headline shows on the horizon, we caught up with the band to discuss their formative years, recording in rural France and why a broken Xbox might be their greatest current hardship.
For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?
We are Uncle Junior, our real names are Oli, Eric and Isaac. We met and formed in Hampshire but we moved ourselves to London because Hampshire is really, really dull. The music we make at the moment sounds a lot like indie rock but we have a lot of noisy, heavier influences which have helped to shape our sound.
Oli and Isaac, you’ve been playing together since you were kids. What do you remember about those first rehearsals, and when did it start feeling like something you wanted to take further?
In hindsight those first rehearsals were pretty terrible, thrashing out awful punk covers sung with our unbroken pre-teen voices, but the feeling of being 12 years old and playing loud music together was so fresh and fun to us that it really didn’t matter at all. As soon as we wrote our first song we knew it was something we were going to do for a long time.
Your old band Scumbag has been described as playing Black Flag rip-offs. What survives from those hardcore days in Uncle Junior, and what would your younger selves make of ‘Melt Me’?
Isaac’s drumming is incredibly influenced by hardcore as it is what he listened to and learnt during his formative years as a drummer. That influence is still present throughout our music, even subtly on songs like ‘Melt Me’ where the speed and intensity have been dialled back. We think our younger selves would have liked ‘Melt Me’, once we got over the surprise of that being what we sound like now!
Eric, you went from being in the crowd at the band’s shows to joining them onstage. What had drawn you to their music, and what did you want to bring to it when you joined?
I became friends with Oli and Isaac through going to gigs with them and attending Uncle Junior gigs. In lots of ways experiencing more live music in grassroots venues like The George Tavern reignited a once-dead passion for music, and made me realise that there was a side to music that I really wanted to take part in. Witnessing the music from an audience perspective made me come in with a detailed and critical perspective on their music. There was definitely a learning curve in trying to unlearn what I had seen them do in order to create my own space in the band and separate these two different experiences.
What was it like growing up and making music in your part of Hampshire? Were there places or people that helped you find your feet?
The music department at Oli and Isaac’s secondary school was incredibly supportive. There was great encouragement to be creative from them, and we think the standard of teaching was so much higher than at the average state school. I think for all of us it came down to various older people in our lives who supported us musically or even just introduced us to good music. For the most part it was a pretty humiliating passion to have in our peers' eyes but that was never too much of an issue and probably worked out in our favour in the end.
You’ve built a live reputation before releasing your first single. How much have those gigs shaped the songs, and why did ‘Melt Me’ feel like the right one to introduce yourselves with?
We always try and play our songs live for as long as we can before we finalise them in the studio. This helps us to gauge how an audience reacts to them but also brings on the subtle changes and improvements that come from playing the songs in the very exposed environment that a gig is. We feel like ‘Melt Me’ is a good middle point of our sound and a good gateway into the rest of our music, so we thought it would be the best introduction we could make.
You’ve said the four-chord structure and melodies on ‘Melt Me’ took you outside your songwriting comfort zones. What would a typical Uncle Junior writing session have looked like before this song, and what happened differently here?
We used to write in Oli’s bedroom in his parents' house. The room had slanted ceilings which created a really loud acoustic environment and made subtlety very difficult. Feedback and noise were impossible to avoid so we had to lean into those kinds of sounds. We would stitch lots of completely separate ideas together, without much consideration for how they functioned musically alongside one another. With ‘Melt Me’, we wanted to create something more cohesive, so we simplified our setup and wrote on acoustic instruments, being much more considerate of the way the different sections interacted.
‘Melt Me’ touches on lost time and the way memories affect your self-image. What was the starting point for the lyrics, and how did those ideas end up sitting together?
I (Oli) wrote the lyrics all in one sitting after a strange dream I had so they feel quite surreal to me and I hope they come across that way to listeners. I write lots of lyrics based around how things have presented themselves in dreams so the lyrics often take on a different kind of meaning when placed inside the context of a song.
You recorded the single in rural France. What took you there, and what do you remember most about making the track?
We wanted to escape London so that we weren’t distracted by our day-to-day lives. We recorded in Black Box Studios on the recommendation of our producer Tom Kellett. Lots of music we love had been recorded there and it had a fantastic live room sound. Also there were two dogs who lived in the garden!
Eric, you once wanted to play in the Berlin Philharmonic, until you realised how much practising was involved. Has anything from your time playing classical music found its way into Uncle Junior?
In direct musical terms, I think very little has transferred from my classical background to what I play and write for Uncle Junior. However, it did definitely give me a solid basis of musical knowledge and experience playing live with other people. This has definitely helped with Uncle Junior, even though we are just three people and not one hundred.
With ‘Melt Me’ out and headline shows ahead, what are you keen to try next? Does the single give us a fair idea of where Uncle Junior are heading, or are there other sides of the band still to come?
We’ve entirely finished our first recording project, and ‘Melt Me’ is just the first part of it to see the light of day. We’re excited for what more there is to share, but we’re really looking forward to writing our next body of work. Since writing ‘Melt Me’, our tastes have expanded significantly and also the way that we write has developed thanks to Eric joining the band. His membership has led us to write in a way that is far more collaborative than we ever did previously.
What do you love right now?
Isaac: Pickled onion flavour Monster Munch.
Eric: The Roku stick that Oli and I have purchased so we can watch TV after our beloved Xbox was taken from us.
Oli: Toby Carvery.
What do you hate right now?
Isaac: Backless benches.
Eric: The speakers in Isaac’s Fiat Punto that we’ve been touring in.
Oli: The vegetable bake at Toby Carvery.
Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you.
Eric: I'd say Blackstar by David Bowie. I was a huge fan of his music as a kid and I feel like as I have grown up my understanding and appreciation of him and his music has developed with me. Blackstar is maybe the best example of this as an album that I loved as a kid without really knowing why, kind of just because it was by Bowie. It's an album I still love and listen to regularly. I really like that I can understand and hear more in it now, without losing the feeling of what it was like to listen to for the first time.
Oli: My pick is Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy. I was 13 when the UK went into lockdown, and thanks to living in a fairly rural area I was able to go out and skate in the village with Isaac at our DIY skatepark that we built in the car park of an empty office block. I was listening to Fear of a Black Planet every single day, sometimes twice a day, and listening to it now six years later I am taken right back to that period. It is a 10/10 album.
Isaac: I’ve chosen Bad Brains' self-titled debut. It absolutely blew me away when I was much younger and it's always able to bring that feeling back. The energy of the album is completely untouchable and it encapsulates everything I love about music.
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them?
We hope that people like it. I think something we’ve always tried to do is to give people a sense of what it is like to be in the room with the music, and if we can do that well enough that it stays with people and draws them to our music then we’d be very happy.
