GUV is the project of Ben Cook, who grew up moving between Toronto and England, and who carries a very real strain of UK lineage that separates him from the growing pack of hardcore kids sporting windbreakers and bowl cuts.
“My grandmother helped invent the miniskirt in London in the 60s, my parents met in a squat in Brixton”, he says. “My dad was the drug dealer, my mom the hippie runaway”. It’s a background that feeds into his music, shaped as much by “a little bit of a Bristol life” and early trip-hop and reggae as by punk and guitar noise.
New single ‘Blue Jade’ leans hard into punchy shoegaze, smearing hummable melodies beneath a thick gloss of distortion and texture. Cook says the idea was to channel “these last few years of the shoegaze wave alongside classic records by MBV and Chapterhouse”, and to then push it “somewhere punk and more driving… like a Blitz or Oi! record but bury it under a wall of guitars”.
Much of the track came together instinctively, with vocal melodies quietly sketched out during the sessions before being finished back in London, and that immediacy gives the song its force. It’s a sharp preview of new album ‘Warmer Than Gold’, out this Friday.
🎧 Watch the video for ‘Blue Jade’ below