Feeder were on a magnificent roll, then came COVID. Since launching out of South Wales in 1992, they’ve maintained an enviable forward motion, all but uninterrupted, releasing 10 studio albums and over 40 EP’s or singles accumulating 26 Top 40 chart singles, spending 185 weeks in the UK charts and shifting well over two million albums in the UK alone.
One of the few flat-out rock bands still firing in the face of a predominantly synth-pop world, they secured new heights of popularity around the world with 2017’s ‘Best Of’. After following up two years later with their tenth album, ‘Tallullah’, which garnered another British Top 5, the sky was the limit for these indestructible sensations, until the pandemic scoobied everything.
Typically, however, mainman Grant Nicholas and bassist Taka Hirose have finessed a victory-defeat-victory combination from the jaws of lockdown, emerging with one of the strongest and heaviest records of their career. Called ‘Torpedo’, it unleashes some of the filthiest noises they’ve summoned to date. They have always been masters of marrying the light and the dark – illuminating the shadowy corners of their world to uncover something poignant and uplifting – and with tunes like the monster-riffing ‘Magpie’, the awesome title track, and the Nirvana-ish ‘Decompress’, they reflect on the universal experience of darkness, frustration and worry that we’ve all come to accept as reality in the early-’20s.
Emerging from a period of intense productivity and rejuvenation, Feeder’s latest material has so far tackled the mechanisms that we employ to cope with our journeys through the modern world. There is a palpable sense of hope and optimism seared into their fabric, each adopting a primal spirit, with grinding riffs that make way for sky-high choruses.
Torpedo signals a band refreshed, inspired by the new and not resting on the strength of their considerable successes. Like so much of the band’s high points, Torpedo is a communal experience that considers the processes through which we deal with what’s in front of us. Musically it acts a connecting thread between all they’ve journeyed through to date, and all they can still become in the future.
Tickets are available here.
Feeder Torpedo tour 2022
April
23 Bexhill, De La Warr Pavilion
24 Oxford, Academy
26 Southampton, Guildhall
27 Bristol, Academy
29 Manchester, Academy
30 Glasgow, Barrowlands
May
02 Newcastle, University
03 Nottingham, Rock City
05 Birmingham, Institute
06 London, Brixton Academy
