London based four-piece Fightmilk have announced their third album, No Souvenirs, for release on November 15th via Fika Recordings & INH Records and is available to preorder here.
LTW have long since been fans of the Fightmilk who consist of Lily, Alex, Healey and Nick. The self proclaimed purveyors of sweaty, loud, shouty pop songs, who formed in the beer gardens of South London in 2015, follow 2018’s Not With That Attitude and 2021’s Contender (reviewed here) with No Souvenirs.
Of the album the band say, “Fightmilk have turned the distortion up and the indiepop down with rougher and rawer songs about body image, death, and being fired from bridesmaid duty.”
A taster for the album, Summer Bodies, was released back in June, a track which Lily explained, “Is about how women and femmes are constantly bombarded with media telling us how to be our best and most beautiful selves, or, bluntly, how to bully your mind and body into an image set by constantly moving goalposts—straight teeth, white skin, feminine but not girly, cool but not threatening, skinny waist, snatched jawline. Products that promise to shrink you in the guise of ‘wellness’. And if you don’t look like that, you’re supposed to hate yourself until you do. No thanks”
Alongside todays album announcment they have also released the titular track. Lily explains, “This is a song about surviving a loved one’s death and what you do with the leftovers. In 2013 a close friend of mine died and it messed me up for a really long time. It took ten years to write about it in a way that felt right, because I kept trying to articulate him and couldn’t get it down on paper.”
Lily continues, “So instead this song is about that balancing act of honouring a life whilst also trying to hold onto little bits of it. I kept everything – notes, letters, texts, even a packet of instant flan mix he sent me once as a weird joke – but at the back of my mind is the knowledge that it’s just stuff that I’ve given power. Souvenirs lose their meaning over time. The memory of him is really the only important thing. It’s a sad song about death but I wanted it to sound huge and final, like I’m putting something to bed.”
Guitarist Alex observed: “It might be the best song we’ve ever written. It’s definitely Lily’s best set of lyrics. The second we finished it, there was no question the album was going to be built with that song at its foundation.”
So far the band have announced the following live dates but we hope there will be more!
Nov 15: Paper Dress Vintage, London (Album Launch)
Nov 16: Blue Moon, Cambridge Indiepop Alldayer
Nov 28: Stereo, Glasgow
For all things Fightmilk visit their LinkTree
All words by Iain Key. See his author profile here or find him on X (Twitter) as @iainkey
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