Ever trawled forlornly through the raft of indie sleaze nostalgia accounts, craving the hedonism, unruliness and excitement of a party scene that prioritised giddy abandon over algorithms and fun over followers? You’re not alone. The Itch have too – and they’re ready to start bringing it back.
Splicing indie sensibilities and synthy dance proclivities into an infectiously moreish whole, the band – formed around the core duo of Georgia Hardy and Simon Tyrie – are already causing a word-of-mouth ripple across London and beyond based largely on their giddy, pleasure-seeking live shows. Among the often arms-folded crowds of new music festival The Great Escape, their last-minute surprise basement gig was like a sweaty scene from Skins.
Meanwhile, a slow drip-feed of singles so far – the seven-minute epic of ‘Ursula’, and the double AA side of ‘The Influencer’ and ‘Co-Conspirator’ – have placed them firmly in the lineage of LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture: bands with proper creative merit, but their crosshairs still set firmly on a good time. Their MO is simple: “What we’re trying to do with The Itch is to play fun nights that don’t feel like the industry’s got their hands all over them,” says Tyrie.
The pair met in their hometown of Luton as teenagers more than a decade ago. A satellite town that felt entirely detached from the capital (“Nearly 50 per cent of young people grow up in poverty in Luton, so the massive majority have never been to London even though it’s so close,” Hardy explains), their formative musical experiences came not from quick trips into their neighbouring city’s wealth of venues, but from heading out to the area’s one alternative bar, Edge.
“There was an indie disco downstairs and metal upstairs, and they’d do £10 entry with a free bar all night. We were too young to experience LCD Soundsystem and things like that, but the guy who ran Edge was massively into them,” Hardy continues. “He influenced our music taste a lot because he was DJing that stuff when we were 18 and going out.”
Immediately bonded by an ambition to do more with their burgeoning musical inclinations than Luton would allow, they dropped out of university to concentrate on writing together, but soon found that the nightlife scene they’d been so inspired by had – in the words of Tyrie – fallen “off a cliff”. “We’re just about old enough to remember that there was a really good time, but we’re too young to have experienced it properly,” he says.
“So many venues have shut down. I remember reading about Foals doing all these house parties, and none of that happens now. We have so many conversations about playing a really cool night where you can only fit 50 people in and you bring your own beer, but where the fuck is that?”
“Our booking agent hates us, but we just don’t want to do those traditional tours because there’s no benefit to it” – Georgia Hardy
Without an answer to their rhetorical question, then, the pair decided to create the remedy themselves. In the years since those early days, the two musicians have tested out an array of formative projects – most notably Regressive Left, who achieved a reasonable amount of acclaim within their short-lived tenure amongst the post punk-adjacent London alt scene.
The Itch, meanwhile, began following the two musicians’ involvement in Talking Heads tribute gig Byrne’s Night – an edge-of-seat collaboration between a host of the city’s buzz bands that Tyrie jokingly describes as “like the edgy London alternative underground version of Live Aid”. Elsewhere, Hardy can be found in her day job working for promoters Lanzarote, who book venues including Moth Club and the Shacklewell Arms, alongside running inner-city festival Wide Awake.
All of these experiences have shaped the way that they want to work as a band. “When you’re outside of the music industry, you think everyone inside it knows what they’re doing and there are rules you have to abide by – you have to play this show and get on that playlist,” says Hardy.
“But when you work in it, you know it’s all bullshit and everyone is winging it, so that gave me so much more confidence to be like, ‘The most important thing is the music and the creativity around it.’ “I mean, our booking agent hates us, but we just don’t want to do those traditional tours because there’s no benefit to it.”
Now signed to Fiction and I OH YOU with a debut album on the way, there are layers to The Itch, too. Named after a New Yorker article about how “the sensation of an itch baffles scientists; how it’s neither pain nor pleasure and we don’t know how the brain interprets it”, the duo have a similar duality to their lyrical approach.
‘Ursula’ was based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 utopian sci-fi tome The Dispossessed, while ‘Co-Conspirator’ takes aim at a TikTok they saw stating that “co-conspirators are the new influencers”. “It was reinforcing conspiracy theories, basically. They’re saying, ‘Your life’s shit, our life’s shit, this is why’. But everyone thinks it’s a love song…” Tyrie laughs.
On forthcoming single ‘Space In The Cab’, meanwhile, The Itch eulogise the nightlife scene they’re trying to bring back with a track that drops out from banging, vocoder-laced party tune to an unexpected woozy breakdown: “And the clubs are all empty / They’re all out of pocket / I’m all out of options / I’m having a crisis”.
For the duo, it’s about finding space for both – good times and real subjects, political undertones but also playfulness. “Some of my favourite lyricists, Jarvis Cocker and even Morrissey, their lyrics hit so much harder when there’s this element of dark humour to them,” Tyrie says. “When things are too earnest, I don’t take them as seriously because people aren’t like that.”
Now both aged 30, The Itch have learnt enough about what doesn’t scratch it for them to be able to create a project entirely from the ground up, without kowtowing to the pressures of the industry world and, instead, dreaming up their own far more exciting alternative to it. Far from just a nostalgic throwback to a simpler time, it feels like a radical window into something refreshingly new. “With The Itch, there is no framework and there are no parameters,” grins Tyrie. “They’ve all gone out the window.”
The Itch’s ‘Space In The Cab’ is coming soon via Fiction Records/I Oh You.