Pleasure House is a Birmingham, UK-based indie rock quartet, that is part of a set of contemporary acts currently reinvigorating their hometown’s music scene, and with their anthemic, power chord-heavy Brit Pop meets shoegaze meets Foo Fighters arena rock single “Calm,” off the band’s forthcoming Sentient EP slated for a May 26, 2017 release, the up-and-coming band adds themselves to a growing list of bands writing and releasing furious and urgent protest songs over their current political climate — whether here in the States, in the UK or elsewhere.
As the band’s frontman and primary songwriter Alex Hefferman explains in press notes, “I’d been feeling increasingly disaffected, like many others’ guilty of scrolling through torrents of hateful rhetoric and petty politics that add to the fragile disparity within our society, creating a war amongst ourselves. I wrote Calm as a protest song against this. It’s what I feel myself screaming at my screen, constantly exposed to a carefully calculated war on peace, feeling angry and afraid and helpless all at the same time. I wanted to write a song with a message of hope. A message of positivity and resistance that would resonate with everyone who feels disaffected too, because it feels like there’s conscious change in the air, and we should never allow fear to forget who our real enemy is.” Considering how utterly confusing and frightening the 24 hour news cycle can be, the song is a powerful reminder that all of us must not be distracted from the urgent work ahead.
