The city of Sheffield has a rich musical history counting Arctic Monkeys, Pulp and The Human League among its offspring. Clearly, there’s something about the Steel City that inspires its residents to greatness. The latest figures to raise their heads above the crowd are Eoin and Rory Loveless of Drenge. The harsh and rather angry sound of the band’s name definitely suits their musical style, though Eoin explains “we didn’t want to use a word in the English language that would give you some sort of pre-conceived idea about what our music is about”. The word is Danish for ‘boys’, though the Loveless brothers, in true English fashion, have bastardized the pronunciation to something quite unrecognizable to any self-respecting Dane.
As one would expect, Drenge have a rich musical family history. “Our dad was a saxophonist in a jazz band,” relates Eoin. “And a blues band before that. We used to go see them play and loads of other jazz gigs.” Clearly at some point they moved onto material that would produce Drenge’s distinctively grungy sound; Eoin says it is difficult to pinpoint musical influences because “we’ve listened to too much”. He does manage to put his finger on something a little more specific though, explaining that “we revisited a lot of music that we’d listened to in the past like Nirvana and the White Stripes. For us, that gives the album a sense of nostalgia.”
Their back-story is nothing new: Eoin talks about “gigging in Sheffield and playing the same places over and over again” and even refers to their past as a “pretty standard band story”. It’s clear that Drenge have put in their fair share of hard-work, and though their story may not be anything special, one listen to their eponymous debut would convince anyone otherwise. Clearly the music world agrees: the album has received rave reviews from all quarters, and Drenge recently played their debut headline show in Leeds’ famous Brudenell Social Club to a near-sellout crowd.
One of the main things that comes across from Drenge during the interview is how down-to-earth they are. In football, they support non-league nobodies Sheffi eld FC, whose chances this season are “non-existent” according to Eoin. They didn’t rush into releasing their debut album, taking three years to write and record all the material. Eoin isn’t at all pretentious about it, saying that it’s “just a collection of the songs that we’ve been playing in the past three years. It’s a document, it’s not a thematic piece of art”.
He still doesn’t care about the media interest surrounding former MP Tom Watson mentioning the band in his resignation letter, and says that their songs have “nothing to do with Parliament or Westminster. They’re just rock songs”.
Maybe as the stars align further for Drenge they’ll lose their modesty and their northern pragmatism, but it doesn’t seem likely. They’re good lads.
