Sitting in a dimly lit, gentrified bar in a formally industrial area of Birmingham, ex Bloc Party and Young Legionnaire bassist Gordon Moakes is stressing his innocence during the period we’re now supposed to refer to as indie sleaze. “I took the sleaze out of indie if anything,” Moakes sheepishly claims as his new bandmates in noise rock supergroup The None playfully tease him that there have been “oddly few” Bloc Party fangirls at their shows.
He is joined by the rest of The None, vocalist Kaila Whyte (Blue Ruth, Youth Man), guitarist Jim Beck (Cassels) and drummer Chris Francombe (Frauds). As the group cradle their pints of bad-tasting beer (the good stuff has apparently run out), they continue to mull on everything that surrounds the highs and the lows of being in a band, from the joys of Google folders to handing out free gig entry to fans with official band tattoos. “You could potentially do yourself out of a lot of ticket sales if you had a really dedicated fan base,” Beck muses.
Though the band are half joking, and mostly committed to one upping the banter, their conversation speaks to the fact that they could, perhaps, soon be followed by a legion of devoted, tattoo-bearing fans. In under a year of playing live since their first show in February 2024, The None have become one of the most talked about acts on the underground scene, landing coveted supporting gigs with Les Savy Fav and Mannequin Pussy, and performing at high-profile festival slots, including at End Of The Road and Birmingham’s Supersonic.
Inspired by fellow noise wielders like USA Nails, Shellac, The Jesus Lizard and Swans, The None are a band that want to make your bones shiver. Full of bottom-heavy bass thwacks and unforgiving wails of feedback, they ricochet across a cavalcade of genres. Stuttering early noughties inspired Brit rock is in their palette, but so is bullish hardcore grit and even Life Without Buildings-style post punk.
After releasing their debut EP Matter in August 2024, the band have released their follow up Care EP exclusively for tQ subscribers. Recorded mostly live in a few days at The Bookhouse studio with producer Tom Hill, the ethos was to prioritise capturing the right energy over perfection, so much so that mistakes and vocal bleeds from the guitar amps were kept in the recording. “I love those little bits,” Whyte says. “It’s all seasoning.”
The impetus for The None came in 2019, when Moakes moved back to London after living in Austin, Texas with the desire to form a new band that sounded ugly. “I’ve done things that have become indie pop, and I’ve also done sort of riffy stuff, but I wanted to do something more discordant,” he says. After meeting Beck in 2022 Francombe was then brought in on drumming duties.
Finding a vocalist who could find melody in The None’s instrumental onslaught proved to be tough at first. “If someone comes to audition to do vocals, it’s not like you can just play along,” Beck comments, “We’re really loud, and if it didn’t quite click, I think it would have been so uncomfortable.” Eventually the Birmingham-based Whyte, who Beck and Francombe had both played on bills with before in previous bands, was suggested and immediately fit in.
A now Black-fronted rock group, Moakes, Francombe, and Beck, had gone out of their way to ensure they did not slip into the homogeneity that defines many other alternative bands. “The one thing we didn’t want was just another ‘white punk singer dude’. So, it was like, okay what are the other options?” Moakes says, as Whyte laughs at the awkward moment. “I mean, not exactly that clinical as that,” Moakes clarifies, “But just something that’s not the same as any other band.”
Whyte was a keen collaborator. While the rest of the band worked on the music in London, they would send demos up to Whyte in Birmingham who used The None as an opportunity to fully explore the diversity of their vocal range. On record Whyte executes everything from throat numbing screams, bellowed soulful choruses, Midlands-accented rap, and falsetto flourishes.
“I just like too many different kinds of vocal,” Whyte confesses, adding that they are proud of the glaring juxtaposition between their softer moments and the band’s harsher instrumentals. “It’s a yin yang that makes it whole and more accessible, but not in a way that dumbs it down or takes away from the ugliness.”
To witness the full scale of The None’s beautiful ugly you have to see them live. Standing out front, Whyte commands the stage with a piercing glare as they twist and contort their head, singing into two different microphones while the rest of the band pour out a dissonant wall of noise. They quickly managed to find an audience early on, which Whyte attributes to the members’ collective years spent in the game.
“That first tour we pretty much booked the dates before we’d announced that we were a band because we all played for over a decade,” Whyte says. “In that time playing local and national shows you get to know the promoters, you’ve built some relationships, so now it’s time to take advantage of that. We’re not industry plants, we’ve just played for ages.”
It is their years of experience that keeps The None on course, only focused on making the kind of music they want to hear, and doing so only in the way they want to go about it. “We’ve never sat down and said ‘we can’t be too much like that or too much like that’,” explains Beck. “We agree if it feels good then we do it. At this point we’re long enough in the tooth and if it doesn’t feel good then why are we doing it?”
An album is likely to be coming at some point, but judging by how full the band’s gig calendar is, live is where they want to focus their efforts at the moment. “It’s always just been about shows really,” says Beck. “That’s the thing you experience and build lasting memories from. You don’t really remember all the people who streamed your song and it doesn’t really feel like anything selling records.”
Given the energy they’ve received so far as a band, Moakes is convinced that this all means they were right to follow their instincts. “I wanted to do something that sounded a bit like this and I would do it like this and the fact that people respond to it means that I’m not mad.”
Moakes sums it up. “There’s no hype there, just put four good musicians on stage with good instincts and this is what happens.”
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