Brighton’s Lime Garden spent their formative years experimenting with every genre from grunge to psychedelia, but it was a shared sense of pathos that finally tied together their different tastes. Their debut cheerfully leans into imposter syndrome and rejection: “embracing your cringe”, as they’ve elsewhere put it.
Musically, it’s heavily influenced by 2000s acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, but channelling less hedonism, more daily grind. That doesn’t stop them embracing a playful, experimental side, with energetic use of autotune in ‘Pop Star’ and ‘Floor’; or reflecting wryly on their own experience as performers in ‘I Want to Be You’, which confesses to wanting to eclipse their heroes.
The tempo wanes a little for ‘Pine’, a twitchy existential number: “Everybody wants to make it, yet no one seems to try / Scared of being forgotten, or scared to cry“. Equally, ‘Fears’ catalogues their every dread, from mortality to the trappings of success; the spiky disco-punk sound replaced with a fluttering computerised melody, as though adulthood were a glitchy game to be completed with limited lives. That feels true of the album as a whole, its emotional honesty bumping up against the impulse to be fun and tongue-in-cheek. “Don’t treat it lightly, this love I feel” warns singer Chloe Howard on ‘It’. One More Thing is a record that showcases Lime Garden’s ride-or-die friendship and musical chemistry, without shying away from the loneliness of lying awake at 4am totting up your woes.
