Manchester’s inswingers, MARTIAL ARTS debut with WARSAW

Manchester’s talked-about inswingers, Martial Arts, show the gut-wrenching necessity of it all with debut single…

 
WARSAW

“Nothing else is of more importance” – shuddering debut from the five-piece consumed by reordering burning, literary sound to make live worth living
 
Martial Arts
Warsaw
OUT NOW

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The blood-quickening tumult of much-discussed Manchester-based, abstract-punk five-piece, Martial Arts’ eyeball-to-eyeball live outings are compressed into the band’s first, wailing-siren call release - Warsaw – OUT NOW. Packing angst and art into precision-cut convergences of razored riffs and fleeting oceanic harmonies, the band’s burning intent pours and pools in vast, melodic space then rattles in close, claustrophobic corners.
 
Melancholic modern prose torn from Fontaines DC’s copybook, the studied erraticism of Shame and the confessional lines of US poets, such as Frank O’Hara are pinned as eye-level catalysts as Martial Arts’ first, four-minute ransom note drops into listeners’ inboxes. Influences, however, have become a diminished, if not irrelevant talking point as they focus their ire, angst and ambition on the petrol-fire intensity of their transcendental, unrecorded performances.
 
Inside upstairs rooms and darkened, low-ceiling boxes, the band – of disparate UK-wide origins, yet fixed for now in the transient, twenty-something suburbs of their adopted city – have affected a fierce chorus of rumour and reputation. Concentrating every calorie and straining every tendon in the live experience way ahead of the studio, the band states that “we focus on getting people involved, make people feel like they’re partaking not spectating. It should be all about getting people more invested in the moment.”

What audiences have found – from recent outings at YES Manchester to an expectant London debut with So Young at The Social – has been and remains a compelling, complex and unpredictable construction of comfort-class-warring sound. New paradigm-enforcing performances, well captured across Warsaw’s scorched landscape, have seen Martial Arts pull apart songwriting, stagecraft and themselves to create the blocks of assembly for something of their own, non-prescriptive design.
 
“Warsaw’ was written resisting overanalysis to grasp a more genuine and unaltered end result,” says the band. “It’s only possible while momentarily freeing ourselves of doubt.”
 
Gazes fixed on their ideals and manifesting Martial Arts’ radical, experiential deep state at almost any personal cost, the band - Jim (Guitar & Lead Vocals), Matty (Guitar & Vocals), Browny (Guitar), Jude (Bass), and Tom (Drums) – timetable further dates to follow the release of Warsaw as follows:

Thu 29 Feb – London Old Blue Last w/Fifth Column Arts

Sat 2 Mar – Manchester, SOUP

Sat 9 Mar – London, Jaguar Shoes w/Permanent Creeps

Thu 14 Mar - Sheffield, The Washington w/Jarred Up

Fri 22 Mar – Manchester, Big Hands w/ Sour Grapes

To be updated on Martial Arts’ current and future live dates, as well as releasing plans, connect with the band online at:
 
https://www.instagram.com/martialartsband
https://twitter.com/martialartsband

Band Image: Richard Kelly