Wild Beasts brought a rakish joie de vivre to indie music

The band announced this week that they are splitting so as not to 'diminish' what they have created

A still from Wild Beasts' 'Mecca' music video

I was first recommended Wild Beasts’ debut album, Limbo, Panto, during my first year of university and it was quickly on firm rotation, soundtracking those introspective walks to and from lectures down tired roads that feel neither part of campus nor the provincial town surrounding it.

It came amid the era of glitchy riffs played on vertiginous frets (Foals – whom they supported in the beginning – et al) and felt a completely different proposition. While everyone else was trying to sound like a near future lunar landing, Wild Beasts – who announced they are splitting on Monday – harked back to the baroque and evoked a drunk countertenor melodramatically traversing the stage during rehearsals for an opera production. At a time when I was thinking: how do I suddenly make best friends with strangers I have seemingly nothing in common with? Why the hell did I pick this particular town? Do I even know how to look after myself? Am I just going to go to seed? What the fuck is the difference between biological and non-biological detergent?, the album’s transportive nature was incredibly welcome.

Frontmen Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming were, of course, instrumental to this, their hugely contrasting voices reminding you that duets can actually be incredibly powerful and moving and not just a setup that belongs to novelty pop songs.

Serving as each other’s foils, their good cop/bad cop – or good lover/bad lover, I guess – delivery was honed on the remarkable 2009 follow-up, Two Dancers, which saw a step up in the band’s instrumentation that helped them achieve the potential that was there with the vocals on Limbo, Panto. Lyrically, it was brilliantly decadent and dissolute, documenting the lusty gropes of youth:

“Trousers and blouses make excellent sheets, Down dimly lit streets”

“Oh, do you want my bones between your teeth?”

“Two Dancers (i)” and “Two Dancers (ii)” are an astonishing pair of tracks, built around the same melody and lyric exoskeleton, but creating completely different atmospheres.

Smother followed in 2011, a continuation of the sound that earned them a Mercury Music Prize nomination for Two Dancers and with a couple of standout tracks – “Plaything”, the breathiness and ominousness of which always threatens to send me into arrhythmia, and “Burning”, which I’m pretty sure sequences a hammered dulcimer in reverse to create this insanely moreish cascading sound as Fleming sings:

“I’m saved / I’m saved / I’m ashamed / I’m awake / I’m afraid”

Unfortunately, the band struggled to sustain after this release, and I think they’d be the first to admit it (their split announcement – above – explaining that they’re “caretakers of something precious and don’t want to have it diminish as we move forward in our lives”).

2014’s Present Tense had its moments (shout out to that drumstick falling arhythmically on the tom in “A Dog’s Life” and the piano and synth swell that hits later in the song) but the forays into higher BPM tracks weren’t working. 2016’s Boy King may have been their highest charting album but it felt cynically mainstream curious, best evidenced by the quite staggering nadir, “Alpha Female”.

Looking back on Wild Beasts’ output, their discography runs in completely the opposite direction to most bands, who start out with safer music – with what they know, with what they can get their heads around, with what they can afford – and become more experimental as they progress. Instead, Wild Beasts arrived with an album (Limbo, Panto) that still sounds completely original in 2017 and then gradually scaled back to more familiar electro-pop fare.

But when it was good, it was great. It was somehow simultaneously drinking bottles of Lambrini outside KOKO and being fed grapes on a chaise longue in Ancient Greece. It was ill-advised house parties in rental properties and swinging from the rafters with goblets of wine in candlelit mediaeval taverns.

Wild Beasts say goodbye with an EP of recording offcuts called ‘Punk Drunk And Trembling’ out 20 October, and three live shows in February 2018