Crawlers celebrate debut Top 10 album The Mess We Seem To Make: "We're a working class band...we had no f*cking money!"

Crawlers have been waiting a long time for this.

The Liverpudlian quartet - made up of Holly Minto, Harry Breen, Amy Woodall and Liv May - have just secured their first Top 10 placement on the Official Albums Chart with their major label debut album, The Mess We Seem To Make. 

It's the sound of a band who are unapologetically themselves; queer, working class and in your face. The Mess We Seem To Make is a whirlpool of genres; indie-rock, skuzz and pop melodies all folded into one, genre-breaking record that refuses to play by the rules.

To celebrate the group's first Top 10 album - capping off an extraordinary rise across the last few years - we met with the band and Pryzm in Kingston, on the eve of a very special live show, to get into it all.

This is Crawlers, and they're very much here to stay.

Guys, your debut album is finally out in the world - how do you feel?

It's become really real now! We started building our crazy little community very much when we were [just] online during the COVID years. And now we're getting to do this debut [promo] very much in person. We've spent the last two weeks either seeing Crawlers fans who have been with us since the very beginning, or new fans who came onboard through our tours or support slots. Some people have bought the album after only seeing us play live once. It's been great. It's been really intimate and special.

You got a lot of attention on you during, like you say, lockdown when eveything was through a screen - but you actually started as a live band, right? So you've come full circle

Yeah, we started out as a live band. We'd pay basement gigs, like three times a week and get paid shillings for it. We were just doing every gig possible, so when everything closed up, we decided to just really hone our craft and make silly videos promoting the music and the fan base and the community that we all wanted to build together.

So to suddenly go from playing gigs where there were literally fice people in the room to selling out a room like this [Pryzm in Kingston] and selling out a UK tour, playing in the US, and playing every festival we ever dreamed of.

[To start off with] it was a bit...stark. We just had the guitars on our back, but it was wen we got signed we decided to really invest in our live sows. It's been a lot of practise, a lot of hard work, Amy has become a jack-of-all-trades musical director and we've just kept growing. That's been fun!

You've been really engaged this release week with encouraging fans to buy the album - placing on the Official Chart clearly means a lot to you!

Honestly? It's rare that people like us get to be in the charts. We're already so fortunate that from a viral hit we got a major label deal, but we're working class people from the North West of England that had no f*cking money! We were putting all our stuff in Amy's Corsa, trying to look for any sort of queer representation in music.

So, to reflect on that...with our debut album in the Official Charts...it's ridiculous. Like, this doesn't happen. If you spoke to us when we started this band in a shed in Warrington and said that our first album would chart in the Top 10, I'd have been like "alright mate, yeah yeah." We literally did not think this would happen.

Speaking as a queer, working class person myself...that representation in music is still really hard to find at this level

Definitely. We were confined to these alternative communities when we were younger that allowed queer expression [but weren't necessarily queer themselves] and we just want to reflect that in our music. We talk about taboo topics that a lot of queer kids will relate to, and this is why pushing this album to people has been a bit difficult. When I was 14, I was really into alternative bands but I wouldn't have had the money to buy all the vinyl and stuff, so people who can do that are amazing.

But this is something I really want to say - it doesn't make you any less of a fan if you can't do that. The fact that you believe in us is incredible. 

How does it feel to now have a Top 10 album in the UK?

It is f*king crazy. Funny story, but I was on TikTok the other day and saw that Catfsh and the Bottlemen are coming back, we were so lucky to share a stage with them previously, but I can remember when their debut album reached the Top 10 [The Balcony peaked at Number 10 in 2014] and at the time, I thought it was crazy for a band like that to have that trajectory. 

That's the kind of thing we wanted to follow. So [to actually be in the Top 10] is a bit silly. It's obviously because of our art and our amazing team, but the fans are literally crazy. We are not some huge, arena-selling band, we're in the Top 10 because of our fans who support the cause and the community. It feels mad!

And obviously we're aiming for Number 1 with your second album, which is going to be hyper-pop right...we can get Charli XCX in on it

We actually love Charli so much. It's on our rider that every place we play has to print a picture of Charli out and pin it in the dressing room. We sing God Save The Queen to her before every song.

Oh, I know Charli will love this

Well, I hope so. We were in Scotland this week and someone printed out a picture of Lana Del Rey instead...

The Mess We Seem To Make by Crawlers is out now via Polydor.