The Next Big Thing (No.26) : Drenge

For the last 20 years, Sheffield has been a great city to produce great bands. Pulp and Arctic Monkeys are a few names of bands that are produced in this city. This week’s the Next Big Thing could be the latest addition of the list, they are Drenge. Drenge are a Sheffield band consisting the Loveless brothers, Eoin (vocals/guitar) and Rory (drums). The brothers started gaining the recognition when they put their home-made music videos on YouTube and Zane Lowe even recommended their music. Before going any further to the band’s work, let us do some introduction of them. The band’s name came from the brothers’ obsession with Denmark. About a year ago, their school was visited by some Danish students. When the brothers were playing football against the Danish students, they were shouted with some Danish word, “drenge”, the brothers thought that it was an insulting word in Denmark, but after  cracking the curiousity, the brothers found out that ‘drenge’ means ‘boys’. As the word keeps stucking on their mind, they decided to use the name as their band’s name.

By the end of 2012, Drenge had launched two songs, ‘I Wanna Break You in Half’, ‘Dogmeat’, and ‘People in Love Make Me Feel Yuck’. Then followed by ‘Backwaters’ and ‘Face Like a Skull’ in 2013. By listening to these songs, you can religiously feel the rock n’ roll riffs and they also describe their music as a mixture of grunge and garage punk. It’s clear that Drenger are giving some high quality of raw materials in their music. You can easily do some headbang (for those who like to do it) whenever you listen to ‘Face Like a Skull’, Drenge definitely nail it both on guitar and drums. This year, many music magazines put Drenge as one of the hits of Brighton’s Great Escape Festival 2013, and along the great start, the duo also killed their debut at Glastonbury 2013 and Latitude 2013. On August 19^th 2013, Drenge will be officially releasing their debut album.

With some idealist fundamental in the band, Drenge claim themselves don’t care about the pressure of being the Sheffield-based or even being pushed for fame. “Calm down, we’ve only put up two videos! We’ve been playing music together for nearly 10 years, we starting doing shit covers of Keane to empty village halls and barn dances, and it’s always been for fun. We’d have given up years ago if we were looking for success” Drenge told Far Out Magazine a year ago when they only put up two videos online. After a year of creating music, we are safe to say that Drenge are in it to win it.