Words: James Frostick
Band image: Gen Kay

In August, Naarm/Melbourne-based aural agitators and power-punk pugilists Clamm will return to the spotlight to release Care – a new LP featuring 15 tracks of focused furore – through Chapter Music. The trio are getting the cogs of the hype machine cranking with lead single ‘Bit Much’, a sprinting spanker that funnels the anxiety associated with living in a collapsing society into a fiery three-minute fracas.

Few things play a bigger role in tugging at the loose threads of my already fraying mental state than a good ol’ doom scroll. Endless headlines relating to the pandemic’s prolonged presence, political and social unrest, microplastics in our bloodstream, Putin – there’s just a lot to digest right now and none of it is good. CLAMM reckons it’s all a bit too much to take. I’m inclined to agree. Ask them and they’d probably attribute their generation’s mounting weariness to a relentless onslaught of information and content. Headlines and vitriolic online discourse have overwhelmed everyone’s senses, frying our empathy centres and fracturing our ability to delineate between what is worth worrying about and what’s out of our control. How do they cope with the seeping comprehension that things are inexorably mounting to collapse? They yell about it, of course.

CLAMM’s newie, ‘Bit Much’ is a dizzying ditty – a brawny brawler that meshes chop, clang and chatter into a tight fleet-footed punk-inspired tumult. The song breaks out of the gate at a sprint, as if Jack Summers (guitar and vocals), Maisie Everett (bass) and Miles Harding (drums) are trying to outrun their anxieties or, perhaps, barrel headlong into them. It’s an understandable response. When Jack utters “I’m not sure exactly what to do“, he speaks to a generational bewilderment, a collective recoiling as the older generations destroy the world in front of us. Horrors surmounting horrors, headline after headline offering a running commentary on what seems like the end times. Who can blame CLAMM (and the rest of us) for feeling overwhelmed? What can one do? For a start, we can rage like CLAMM do here. It’s nothing if not cathartic.

Care by CLAMM will arrive on August 19 via Chapter Music. Pre-order a copy here.