Humour announce debut album Learning Greek

Photo Credit: Megan Di Pinto

Humour continue to bring the hardcore with another loud as fuck tune after the paint stripping Neighbours threatened to beat us into submission with its glorious noise. New tune Plagiarist won’t let you down and bites your ankles like an angry Jack Russell with added barking melody. Read on…

Glasgow’s Humour share news of their much-anticipated debut album Learning Greek, landing August 8th on tastemaker label So Young Records.

The 11 songs of Learning Greek combine lithe riffs, throat-stripping intensity and a crushing take on the fabled loud/quiet dynamic, with the record following two critically-acclaimed EPs from the band – 2022’s Pure Misery and 2023’s A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me. With last year largely set aside to write new material, the band returned last month with Neighbours, a heavy, decisively robust comeback from the five-piece and one that saw Humour added to the BBC 6 Music playlist for the first time.

The band also share a further new single in Plagiarist, premiered by Steve Lamacq on his 6 Music show. Drawing further upon their post-hardcore influences, the song sways from off-kilter to jaggedly melodic, hitting a bittersweet spot between discordant and direct.

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Vocalist Andreas Christoloudis had the following to say about its themes:

“Plagiarist is about being a lyricist and having run out of ideas and inspiration. In the song, the character is under pressure to put words to music written by the band, and realises that he can’t even steal lines from his favourite books because he has already used them all.

He fears being discovered as a fraud and being punished for it with death.”

Produced by Idlewild’s Rod Jones at his Post Electric studio in Edinburgh, “Learning Greek” will be available on CD, standard LP, a Dinked edition LP with exclusive colour and sleeve design, and a Rough Trade exclusive edition LP paired to a zine with lyrics and illustrations from Andreas.

“Learning Greek” was not only inspired by frontman Andreas’ decision to start learning the language but the very idea of “returning to oneself by actively doing something, like learning about your history, reconnecting with things that were important when you were younger. In my case, it was the things I shared with my dad: poetry, music and language.”

But the album isn’t necessarily about looking back – it’s about understanding the circularity of heritage and culture. As he delved deeper, Christodoulidis came to see himself as part of this history, not an observer of it. In the same song his lyrics might make reference to the Greek military dictatorship of the late 1960s that his dad grew up in the shadow of, just as it drops in on his grandfather in Athens, an old man surrounded by art in an apartment that was curated “like a museum, almost as if in preparation for dying.”

“The idea of learning Greek stopped being just about learning the language,” he says. “It became about exploring and investing in the things that make one Greek or give one a sense of national identity, especially as someone who’s second generation. It’s not so much about Greece as about my family and that feeling. It’s about feeling disconnected, almost like you’re outside of your own life, which is something I’ve written about a lot. “Learning Greek” was an attempt to get back into my life and feel like myself again.”

“Learning Greek” takes these ideas and runs with them until its lungs give out. In responding to Christodoulidis’ searching writing, his bandmates buck and whirl through Humour’s most direct, coruscatingly exciting songs to date. They thrillingly run the patiently anthemic indie-rock of “Dirty Bread” in parallel to Neighbours’ feral post-hardcore swell and the almost elegiac title track, which finds Christodoulidis and his father reading from “On Philhellenes Street”, an essay by Andreas Embirikos that recasts being overcome by the heat of Athens as a metaphor for death’s coiled menace and the need to live as though it matters.

Scampering in and out are startlingly fresh melodic swatches and deft rhythmic switch-ups that offer a sense of light and shade behind lyrics that, even at their most surreal, remain unflinching in their dissections of loss, anxiety, guilt and the concept of legacy. “We’ve always tried to combine pushing horrible ideas, whether they’re dissonant or heavy, with really nice bits,” guitarist Jack Lyall observes. “For a while, it kept taking the form of a horrible verse and a nice chorus but we looked into other ways of doing that.”

The fizzing “Memorial”, snottily anthemic but emotionally gutting, is a perfect example of the high-wire act Humour have pulled off across “Learning Greek”. It finds Christodoulidis on the beach at Troy, using poet Alice Oswald’s titular reinterpretation of Homer’s Iliad to find a new context through which to understand the way death’s inevitability can sit on our chest. “Oswald describes the Iliad as a catalogue of death,” he reflects. “It’s a step by step description of all these people being slaughtered, but it’s described in an incredibly beautiful way.”

Underlining the idea that history is kept alive by connection, in Humour’s own retelling Hector and his wife Andromache wait next to buzzsaw guitars, the knowledge of what’s to come hanging heavy between them like the blow that’ll wipe the Trojan hero from the board. As Smith and bassist Lewis Doig ratchet the pace up and up and up, Christodoulidis reshapes thousands of years of granular history into a sharp point. It’s a joyful transgression — what if the Iliad ripped? — but it’s also a telling reminder that some stories should always be malleable in our mouths.

“I was very aware, like, ‘Am I going to write a song about these two characters from the Iliad? Is that just a bit pretentious?’” Christodoulidis says. “But then I thought it’s so unexpected that it would be paired with this song, which is very upbeat and almost pop-punky. I had a melody in mind. I thought, ‘If ever there’s ever a time to lean into that subject matter, it’s when you’d never suspect a song to be about something like that.’”

But amid the gore, Christodoulidis also found another linguistic framework to toy with, helping to encase in amber the dichotomy at the centre of the record. On “Neighbours”, he follows the Oswald-esque phrasing “I could easily be the first to die” with “face pressed to the mirror like an asshole.” There, next to the most serious thing he can think of, is a cold serving of mortal absurdity. It reflects the way the band’s dynamic, daring structures and cacophonous approach to melody cut back against the record’s ruminative heart at every turn, goading us to celebrate life even while its flame gutters out.

Alongside the album and single news, and with live dates across the Spring and Summer, the band have announced their most extensive UK headline tour yet for November in support of the record.

Tickets will go on sale at 10am this Thursday, May 1st.

Humour live:

25/05 A Stone’s Throw Festival, Newcastle
27/05 Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
28/05 The Ferret, Preston
29/05 Elephant’s Head, London
31/05 Supersonic Block Party, Paris
09/07-11/07 2000 Trees Festival, Cheltenham
02/08 – Multitude Festival, Milton Keynes
20/11 – Oporto, Leeds
22/11 – Yes (Basement), Manchester
23/11 – Bodega, Nottingham
25/11 – Dead Wax, Birmingham
27/11 – The Crauford Arms, Milton Keynes
28/11 – The Lexington, London
29/11 – Bear Cave, Bournemouth
30/11 – Cavern Club, Exeter
02/12 – Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
03/12 – Exchange, Bristol
04/12 – District, Liverpool
05/12 – Zerox, Newcastle
06/12 – King Tut’s, Glasgow

Pre-order HERE

Forewords by Wayne Carey, Reviews Editor for Louder Than War. His author profile is here

• Source: NEWHD MEDIA