Those Lot formed in London in 2025. Laurie Blayney and Stan Thompson arrived from Penzance in Cornwall. Seb Powell and Luke Faiers were already in the city. The four spent a year rehearsing before they entered the studio. The influences they name run through the Beatles, the Stone Roses, Oasis, the Verve and the Rolling Stones, with room for the Cure, the Who, the Kinks and the Real People. The mission they describe is direct. They wanted to put some of the old energy back into rock and roll. Or make it worse. Time will tell.
There is a particular kind of waiting that does not look like waiting. On certain stretches of the Cornish coast the tide does not keep a public timetable. It arrives when the water decides, and the person who stays on the rocks learns to read the intervals between one knock of the wave and the next. Those Lot have written the interior version of that arrangement. She Takes Me There is a song about emotional dependency inside a relationship that only opens when one person needs it to. The singer knows the pattern in detail. She keeps him running. She lets him down. She knocks on his door. He does not doubt that she will keep him around until she finally needs him. The knowledge sits in the open. It does not produce an exit.
The voice begins low and slightly distant. The long vowels on the repeated “she” slide across open chords as if the sentence is still deciding whether to finish. A clean electric guitar with a bright, reverberant edge and a steady tambourine set a walking pace that never quite arrives. When the full rhythm section enters and the guitars thicken into a denser wall, the voice does not fight its way through. It accepts the density. The surge is the confused, totalising moment when the door opens and the person chooses to step inside again. “You know she takes me there when I’m not all there.” The phrase is repeated until it becomes the condition rather than the exception.
After a long instrumental stretch the line “She’s gonna turn around one day and I’ll be gone, it won’t take long” arrives with more urgency. For a few seconds the possibility of absence is real. Then the refrain returns and the acceptance settles back in. “But I don’t mind, I don’t mind. You know she takes me there when I’m not all there. And it’s cold outside when you call, so I’ll walk your way. Until she finally needs me.” The song understands that recognising the trap can still leave a person willing to answer the knock. The cold is acknowledged. The walk continues when the call comes.
Recorded over two days at Strongroom Studios with producer Shuta Shinoda and mastered by John Webber at Air Studios, the production keeps the cycle intact. The opening section holds a suspended clarity. The denser passages fold the voice into the wall rather than lifting it clear. She Takes Me There holds its weight in the refusal to turn the knowledge into a clean break. The door stays available. The walk continues when the call comes.
