The Snuts: ‘There’s no shame in being called pop. Guitar bands could do with getting over that’

Scottish indie band The Snuts have spent the past week locked in an unlikely chart battle with pop superstar Demi Lovato. Midweek, just 1,100 sales separated her comeback record Dancing With The Devil…The Art of Starting Over with their debut album W.L., which stands for Whitburn Loopy (the name for the young troublemakers in their hometown of Whitburn). But tonight, they emerge victorious: theirs is the first debut album from a Scottish band to top the UK Album Chart since The View’s Hats Off to the Buskers in 2007.

From the outside, indie rock made by four working class lads from West Lothian in Scotland going up against the pop might of a former Disney star might feel like a David and Goliath battle but for The Snuts, they’re not surprised they’re in this position.

In fact “it’s something we’ve been working towards all our lives,” vocalist Jack Cochrane tells me. “We always hoped we’d be here,” he continues before dropping the modesty. “We expected to be here. We’d be disappointed if we weren’t in this position to be honest.”

The Snuts don’t just want that shiny trophy for bragging rights or to look pretty on a shelf though. “The work we’ve put in, it was with the intention of changing the landscape for guitar music. There’s always the possibility when a band like us gets chart success that it can shake up the whole industry and get people dreaming a bit more.” He believes that indie music “needs everybody around you doing well” to really succeed and right now, that isn’t happening.

He also wants to encourage other working-class kids to dream big. Making music is a privilege, with many having to fit it around a day job that pays the bills. “Seeing other people like you doing well, to the stage where they’re competing with the giants, that’s how you inspire the next generation of people to come in, give it a go and believe that it’s actually possible.”

Their confidence apparently comes from how long they’ve been a band. Forming in 2015 after knowing each other from school, The Snuts are the only group guitarist Joe McGillveray, bassist Callum Wilson, drummer Jordan Mackay and Cochrane have ever been in. They quickly found success with a series of demos, some of which have been re-recorded for their debut full-length. “You can’t truly believe in yourself as a musician until you've got other people believing in you,” Cochrane tells me from his Glasgow home. “You need people to show you that your songs can be important, for you to want to take that next step,” which is what that early hype did.

When they formed, the four-piece wanted The Snuts to be their career but more immediately, it was to play live. “That noughties indie rock and roll thing was so appealing and we were so focused on being the guys onstage. Once we'd had a taste of that though, we realised there was more to it than being able to make people jump up and down,” so The Snuts asked themselves “How do we make a great record to back it all up?”

They signed to Parlophone Records in 2018, meaning they could quit the day jobs they were still holding down (roofer, mechanic, joiner, stonemason). “We thought it would be easy after that, but it was 10 times harder” and work began on their debut album almost immediately.

The first producer they got into the studio with was Inflo, who’s worked with Little Simz and Mercury Prize-winner Michael Kiwanuka. He pushed the band out of their comfort zone, to the point they considered calling it off after a few days and flying back to Scotland from L.A. They stuck it out and it was “the best thing that could have happened,” admits Cochrane who’s glad they dropped their egos. “We’d had a lot of success live and that would have dictated what the record was going to be and who we would have become as a band, if we hadn’t met Inflo. He had a bigger vision for the songs and us as a band.”

Trusting the producer, the band set out to try and break free from the chains of UK indie. According to Cochrane, “people are so aggressive and defensive about what a band can and can’t do in that scene. We worked hard on making sure we never felt pigeonholed into making one genre of music or playing to a certain group of people.” They wanted something “inspiring” rather than another record paying homage to what had come before. _

Four years in the making, W.L. has enough anthemic indie bangers to keep a baying festival crowd entertained. However, there are also aching acoustic numbers like Top Deck, Juan Belmonte is a finger-clicking garage rock turn, Elephants is a swaggering pop belter and Don’t Forget It is a snarling burst of punk fury. “It was either going to work really well or fail spectacularly,” grins Cochrane, knowing how much of a risk this album was.

With every member of the band bringing in a variety of influences, they never set out to make songs that just sounded like the Arctic Monkeys (“we’ve tried it and always failed”), instead wanting to create something that felt modern and new. “Longevity is always a worry with indie bands. The reason this record sounds so open ended is so people won’t be shocked at whatever comes next.”

With chart success in their sights, The Snuts had to embrace pop production without losing what made them special. “There is a line, but you don’t have to be constantly terrified of the line. There’s no shame in being called pop. Guitar bands could do with getting over that,” the 25-year-old explains before declaring “I’m going to be public enemy number one to other indie bands at this rate. F—k it,” he shrugs. “It’s what I believe in.”

There have been times when The Snuts have felt dismissed because they’re an indie band but they wanted to use W.L. to “prove we weren’t this basic, diluted subculture. You get that indie landfill term thrown around and we never wanted to feel like that was us. Instead of trying to relieve the golden age, we tried to take the genre forward. That’s how you stop it being looked down upon.”

Lyrically, The Snuts sing about things other than girls, lager and living for the weekend. Cochrane is inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Bon Iver and he’s used W.L. to speak about his own struggles and those he sees around him. There are tracks about not being able to express yourself because of your circumstances, Elephants is about self-doubt while All My Friends tackles the drug epidemic currently ravaging Scotland (1200 people died from drug misuse in 2020, a mortality rate 15x higher than the European average) and the lack of support being offered to those suffering from addiction. “It’s not very rock and roll, but it needs to be spoken about.”

“There's also a lot of celebration on the record,” says Cochrane who “always wanted it to be hopeful.” For many, these songs have provided a comfort blanket over the past few months. Wanting to hammer that home, the band teamed up with the Scottish Refugee Council for their single Somebody Loves You.

They donated their entire video budget to the charity, which works with people seeking asylum, alongside all the proceeds from downloads of the track. In return, they asked people who’d been supported by the organisation to film the things that were important to them during lockdown. The resulting music video is unifying and powerful, coming at a time “where everyone was going through the same anxieties. It was a humbling moment for us that made us forget about the vanity and the success you're trying to achieve being in a band. The whole experience was really beautiful.”

It also allowed the band to take direct action, get involved in their local community and “crush any ignorance we had on the subject,” according to Cochrane which is something he feels is more positive and useful than just sharing an Instagram post.

The Snuts have been constantly releasing music throughout lockdown. However a lot of guitar bands have shied away from that which, according to Cochrane, is a mistake. “Momentum is one of those things that drops so quickly. We wanted to come out of lockdown bigger than ever. We spoke about it straight away and we knew we couldn’t let this pandemic halt our ambitions.”

They even managed an album launch show. Their livestream, filmed at Stirling Castle and now available as a live album, took four months to put together. “We never wanted the release to feel diluted or lockdown orientated. We didn't want to put a mask on the front of the record”.

As well as growing in confidence, the past year has taught The Snuts that “there are new ways you can put your art across. For people who have embraced that, it’s been really healthy.” Carrying that forward, the band are heading out on a string of stripped back concerts in September ahead of a fully charged UK tour in November. It’ll be a chance to show off the softer, more emotional side of the band and make what they do more accessible. “Gigs can be quite exclusive and there's people that don’t always feel comfortable in a busy venue, so it’s nice to be able to open up what we do, and offer it to people in a less beer stained way.”

It’s not just working on a debut album to revitalise the indie scene that’s kept Cochrane busy during lockdown. In August he wrote First Minister Nicola Sturgeon an open letter asking for “a clean plan of outcomes and support to get our beloved industry moving again.” It gathered a lot of attention but Cochrane never got a reply. By January, there had still been no discussion in Scotland about live music and the return of events so he decided to send Sturgeon a letter every day until she did something about it.

Eventually the press picked up on what he was doing “which was good because it was costing me a fortune in stamps.” He soon received an email from her office that Cochrane felt was pretty dismissive and to add insult to injury, they claimed they’d only received one of his many letters. “I got an email from her office that just said, ‘This is what we've done, and we've only received one letter from you’. I was pretty offended by that. It didn't really answer any of my questions. I eventually got a handwritten response from MSP in Scotland which was much more personal and less statistic based.” The letter promised to address the return of live music and support for the creative industries. “Hopefully those discussions will be held but if they’re not, I’ll be right back in about it.”

Ultimately, Cochrane wants The Snuts to be a force for good and a force “for kicking the door down and making sure we’re being heard. This week we've been so caught up in this chart battle nonsense, that it’s easy to forget why you were writing these songs in the first place. It’s important that your music is having an impact culturally, socially and on people as individuals.”

W.L is out now