Based near Tomintoul, a small whiskey village in the Scottish Highlands, rising punk duo Bratakus — sisters Brègha Cuinn (guitar, vocals) and Onnagh Cuinn (bass, vocals) — formed back in 2015. And since their formation, they’ve been fiercely DIY. The duo ran their own label Screaming Babies Records and with no music on streaming services and no booking agent, they landed airplay on BBC Scotland and elsewhere, opened for The Hives and toured as far as Japan.
Last year, the band caught the attention of Venn Records, who signed the band and will be releasing their Johan Gustafsson co-produced album Hagridden, which is slated for a Friday release. Recorded at Stockholm-based Studio Gröndahl, the album, which will feature previously released tracks “Final Girls,” “Tokened,” and “Turnstile,” is ten tracks of screaming and cathartic punk.
“Tonight,” Hagridden‘s latest single is a bruising, old school punk ripper anchored around some incendiary guitar work and the duo’s howled lyrics., which focus on the timely subject of media manipulation. “It’s about how everyone is angry about the state of the world, but we are being thrown distractions to get us to hate the wrong people,” Bratakus’ Brègha Cuinn says. “The fact that some people are happy to just look the other way and let it happen if they perceive that it’s not going to affect them, but in reality, we’re all on this planet together, and if we don’t have compassion for each other, and help each other out, we’ll be left with nothing.”
Directed by Alice Black, the accompanying video for “Tonight” is split between the pair performing the song in a grungy, dungeon-like space and the duo walking about their town with creepy baby masks — the same baby masks the are featured on the album’s cover art. This is informed by the fact that the album thematically touches on the uneasy fact that life often feels like a waking nightmare.
“I’m an avid listener of the Blindboy podcast and one of the things he talks about that I find really interesting is how most adults nowadays aren’t really being offered the opportunity to actually grow up due to the current state of the world,” the band’s Onnagh Cuinn says. “The cost of living is so high that a lot of millennials aren’t even able to move out of their parents’ house, so it feels like a lot of the milestones that used to define adulthood are becoming more unattainable, so we’re left in this weird “in between” where technically we’re adults, but we still feel like kids. It’s something I think about a lot, and I think it ties in with the meaning of the song, so I wanted to try and create a kind of visual for that by going around doing a lot of regular day to day things while wearing the baby faces.”