Tooth Rely on Instinct and Community for Their Debut EP ‘Restless In Bloom’

The four members of Tooth don’t operate like a band waiting for permission. Guitarist Ben Ashley, frontman Tom Pollock, bassist Charlie Arnison and drummer Roy Lowe met at school, but it was turning 18 that sharpened their sense of urgency. “When you leave school and your life isn’t timetabled anymore, it feels like there’s more at stake,” Pollock says. That feeling threads through their debut EP ‘Restless In Bloom’, out now after a year of relentless gigging.

They cut their teeth at a weekly residency in Soho’s Blue Posts, diving into a London scene where young bands compete for attention but also form a genuine cohort. Tooth’s sound — raw, grunge-leaning rock with a distinct Midwest emo twist — sits alongside peers like Keo and Wunderhorse, acts whose unreleased songs already get sung back by crowds. Ashley notes that audiences aged 15 to 25 are “actively there waiting to receive new music”, a hunger Pollock reads as a generational shift. “Kids nowadays want to claim something that’s their own and not have to look back into the past,” he explains.

The band’s own taste reaches beyond the obvious Pixies and Blur touchstones, absorbing country, jazz, and obscure emo. But it’s their early bond over Sonic Youth references — a shared private world at an age when no one else got it — that still anchors their purpose. The EP navigates the in-between space after adolescence, where growth and confusion coexist. Tooth didn’t rush to release it, refining the songs live until they felt essential. The result sounds less like a first statement than the documentation of a group already in motion.