27 September 2022
Newsdesk
The Cribs were formed in 2001 by twins Gary and Ryan and their younger brother Ross Jarman. Originating from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, their last 4 albums have charted in the UK Top 10 and they’ve been considered “the biggest cult band in the UK” by Q Magazine. Long-time friends with the label, backyard dinner party banter with Portland-based Gary Jarman brought out tales of college-days recordings that were intended for a Kill Rock Stars’ submission. The band tracked down the demos and Kill Rock Stars jumped on the belated release.
Following the band’s USA tour with Modest Mouse, The Cribs - Vs. The Moths… College Sessions 2001 will be available across digital platforms October 28th. The orange vinyl is now up for pre-order, shipments arriving at or around October 28th. *Limited pressing of 500 copies*
The band says,
“OK, so basically we just REALLY wanted to be on the ‘Fields and Streams’ compilation - that was our primary motivation for making the tape. It seemed like such an unattainable goal for us kids, stuck in the isolated north of England, a million miles away from the punk-rock promised land that we imagined Olympia to be.
We had a long fascination with Kill Rock Stars due to its regional and community based nature - its championing of the misfits and its iconoclastic manifesto just really spoke to us. That ‘anyone can do it’ ethos inspired us that day to head straight to the only studio we knew - the one at Wakefield College - to make a demo. We had left that venerable institution the year prior under something of a black cloud, so had to book in under a pseudonym - hence “The Cribs” was born.
Listening back, the recordings are pretty wild. We were figuring stuff out as we went along, very much on borrowed time (literally hiding under the board when the security guard was on patrol), with nothing but a bottle of “whiskey flavoured spirit drink” (seriously!) to sustain us. By the evening, we were done and made our exit through the back window. That chaos is audible in the record…nothing edited out, hearts and influences on sleeve (Incesticide, early Unwound, Urusei)…the sound of kids screaming in suburbia.
In the end, we just didn’t have the confidence to actually send the tape…back in those days it would have involved dubbing cassettes and then finding a post office in Wakefield that offered international shipping etc…too many opportunities for our brutal internal critics to talk us out of it! Ultimately we just figured there was no way such a cool label was gonna be interested in our dumb tape.
We are so proud that, over 20 years down the line, this record finds its home on Kill Rock Stars. It was a distant dream for those self-doubting, teenage versions of ourselves - so we know they would be so thrilled to have this 7”.
