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| Photo by Holly Whitaker |
London-based band Happyness, featuring Jonny Allan and Ash Kenazi, have today shared their brand new album Floatr via Infinit Suds. Over the space of a few years, they underwent a series of changes — describing that particular period of time in a statement as, "the best and worst years of our lives." Learn more about the influences that shaped Floatr with Happyness below.
Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron
Daniel Clowes is a well-known cartoonist/graphic novelist, probably best known for writing Ghostworld. "Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron" is an early-ish graphic novel of his. It’s noir-y and super weird and mysterious and has a ton of amazing characters like a dog who was born with no orifices that has to be given a special injection every day to stay alive.
The Glory
After Ash came out he needed to find an alternate space to develop his drag. The Glory is a super-inclusive space in London with hella good vibes and is ALWAYS decorated really well. There are a bunch of amazing drag acts who put on regular nights there. We started going there halfway through writing Floatr and it gave us a place to feel ok about ourselves. It also features quite heavily in our music video for 'Vegetable'.
Dark Star
(*Spoiler warning*)
This was John Carpenter's first film, it started as a student film, and got made longer later. There’s a scene in it where a beach ball with feet chases an astronaut around a spaceship that the whole movie Alien was based on (the guy being chased is the guy who wrote Alien, and co-wrote Dark Star). The sound is super eerie, there's loads of crackly space noise. Also there’s a scene at the end where a guy has to talk a sentient bomb out of exploding and killing them all which was kind of an early blueprint for Floatr.
Adrianne Lenker
Queer Icon, songwriting hero, legendary slayer of guitars.
NO MAG
NO MAG is a punk zine from California in the late 70s early 80s. It’s stylistically awesome and has features on a ton of bands that went on to become super iconic. Some of the content has definitely aged really fucking badly, to the point where we were gonna pass on mentioning it, but a lot of the art and words are absolute gold. Also it’s founder Bruce Kalberg was crazy on maybe a Tiger King level. He used to go everywhere with a liver on his head and ended up shooting a friend of his, but getting let off for some reason. We're not glamorising him at all, he sounds like a psycho, (there are other ways to attack polite society, like putting on a bodysuit and slut-dropping), but there's some cool stuff in his zine. The whole thing is online here.
Listen to Floatr by Happyness:
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