Five Leeds DIY Releases you might not have heard

Hello, it’s Freddy here from Thank and Solderer and other stupid bands. I am a person who loves to rant about forgotten/underappreciated music, and Stub Quarterly has kindly given me the space to talk about five unsung releases from the Leeds DIY scene of years gone by. There are so many more of these I could cover, so if you’re the kind of pervert who wants to read more of the same then sit tight, because I might do this again in a future issue. 

Famine - Razzin' (2015) 

From 2015 to 2020, I was involved with a cooperatively run rehearsal-space-cum-music-venue called CHUNK. For a hefty chunk of that time (pun intended) Famine was one of the most recognisable bands associated with the space. 

If you follow Leeds grindcore and powerviolence then you might agree that Ona Snop pretty much perfected our city’s stoppy-starty slapstick mutation of the genre on 2018’s ‘Geezer’ and 2020’s ‘Intermittent Damnation’, but that band wouldn’t have existed without their predecessors Famine and Lugubrious Children (the main brains behind both of those bands ultimately teamed up to form Ona Snop). Although ‘Razzin’’ is very, very silly, it isn’t quite as silly as an Ona Snop record, and it’s also half the length. Point being, ‘Razzin’’ might be the perfect way in for any grind-sceptics reading this. 

I’ll admit that it took me a while to “get” grindcore, but seeing these bands (plus Gets Worse, The Afternoon Gentlemen and more) play live is what captured my imagination. Watching Famine perform at some ungodly hour during the first Renegades of CHUNK weekender, the same week that ‘Razzin’’ came out, is a memory permanently seared onto the back of my eyelids. 

Etai Keshiki - Etai Or Die (2010) 

I listen to a lot of annoying music around the house. An ex-partner of mine had a dog called Oscar who generally didn’t react to my music picks, but on one occasion he fully lost his rag over ‘Etai Or Die’. He fucking hated it. On a related note, my mate James once had his car stolen, and when it eventually turned up all of the tapes were gone apart from this album, which the thief had conspicuously left behind. I suppose what I’m trying to convey is that Etai Keshiki is very easily dislikeable music, dogs and thieves alike cannot stand it. 

‘Etai Or Die’ is an album of punishingly abstract screamo recorded in a living room in Sheepscar and performed by musicians who went on to form cool bands like Nape Neck, Fashion Tips, Guttersnipe, Commiserations, Penance Stare and more. 

Magnapinna - Split w/Abrakadabra (2014) 

This one might be contentious because Abrakadabra was very much not a Leeds band, but I’m just gonna talk about the Magnapinna side of the split which is, frankly, perfect.

If you attended any noise rock, emo or screamo shows in Leeds during the first half of the 2010s then there’s a good chance you caught a Magnapinna set. They played a lot of shows but released comparatively scant music, and this split is the best document of the band’s austere, tightly-wound, explosively dynamic take on minimalist post-hardcore. The opener ‘Pretend to Convert’ alone could go toe-to-toe with anything in Slint, The Jesus Lizard or Shellac’s discographies. 

Bodywork - The Grind (2013) 

Trumpets of Death was a Leeds band who played an odd concoction of post-rock, folk and noise.
They released the album ‘Teeth + Teeth = Teeths’ in 2011 and then mysteriously disappeared, reemerging in 2013 under a new name, Bodywork, and having rebranded themselves as “pop” and “R&B”. I’m sorry to say that ‘The Grind’ is absolutely not an R&B record, and even pop feels like a stretch when you hear something like the wailing atonal saxophone skronk that opens ‘Cruel Fascination’. But whatever you’d call this album, it absolutely rips. 

‘The Grind’ was released to even less fanfare than ‘Teeth + Teeth = Teeths’, and the band disappeared again for good soon after. To my knowledge, there was never even a physical release of this album, but if you’re looking for a 21st century take on something like Tears For Fears’ ‘The Hurting’, it’s a masterpiece. 

Human Certainty - Discography (2015-2017) 

Perhaps another contentious pick because this is actually uh… four releases. But hear me out! 

Human Certainty didn’t exactly make themselves easy to track down — zero social media presence, and the 16 songs they recorded were all untitled — but they might be in the running for the finest punk band Leeds has ever produced. Across four EPs, this band created a soundworld of gothic hardcore that isn’t quite like anything else. Yes, it cribs from the likes of No Trend, Arab On Radar and Saccharine Trust, but it avoids directly aping any of those bands. 

This is a great example of music that could disappear completely if (or more likely when) Bandcamp suffers the same fate as MySpace et al. ‘Oozing From Strange Wounds’ had a very limited cassette run, but as far as I know the other three EPs each only exist digitally. If I was independently wealthy, I would reissue all of it on one LP like Minor Threat’s ‘Complete Discography’.

Words by Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe.

First Picture: Freddy @ Brude in 2024 by Tom White (@tomw19)

The rest of the pictures: pilfered from the bands’ Discogs/Bandcamp pages.