Track by Track: Scrounge guide us through their new LP ‘Almost Like You Could’

Something strange appears to have happened in our particular sphere of the musical ecosystem recently. It’s like all of Joyzine’s long term favourite bands had a meeting during which they decided on mass to release their new albums in the space of a few weeks. Over the course of the past month we’ve had ‘best of 2025’ contenders from The Burning Hell, How to Swim, Cassels and The Scaramanga Six, and with new LPs from mclusky and Deerhoof plus an Art Brut box set on the horizon, the pace doesn’t show any signs of letting up. Joining this mouthwatering feast of new music are South London duo Scrounge, whose gritty, grungy, socially conscious sounds first grabbed our attention by the lapels and gave it a good shaking back in 2019. They’ve not let go since, featuring regularly within these pages with excellent tune after fantastic EP after phenomenal album, contributing to our 20 Years of Joy compilation album and playing the Joyzine stage at New York’s New Colossus Festival along the way.

They return on 18th April with new LP Almost Like You Could, which picks up the baton of 2022’s excellent Sugar, Daddy mini-album and runs off with it in a multitude of directions. It contains sacks of the grit and grime that textured many of the highlights of their debut, but it’s not all abrasive tones and righteous fury, the record’s gravelly surface is scattered with melodic moments like wildflowers poking through the gaps in paving slabs, and the lyrics while often vehemently political are also personal, open, vulnerable. Lucy’s guitar roars like a rush hour cacophony on opener ‘Higher’ and gleams like an orange sunrise over an urban lake on ‘UTG’, while Luke’s drumming, often complex and machine gun rapid, also knows when to take a back seat and leave space, notable by its absence on raw and poignant closer ‘Nothing Personal’, which sees him take the vocal lead. It’s a wonderful record, and one that will make that ever-growing end of year list all the more difficult to curate.

We caught up with Lucy and Luke for a track by track guide to the album.

Higher

Luke: This should be pronounced like ‘hiiiiyyaaaa’. From my point of view, this track is mainly about tension – which can be productive and liberating as well as abrasive or antisocial. 

Lucy: Luke came to the studio with the main riff and immediately I was struck by the frantic and gripping nature of it; it has a niggling urgency that propels you forward. As I’m in full time employment I find it hard to sit down and dedicate a set amount of time to songwriting so most lyrics are written on the move. At the time of writing, I was being pulled in completely different directions and the conversational tone of the lyrics illustrates the same mundane and cliched conversations I’d find myself in as a woman in my 30s. Over a period of a week, during my commute to work, I’d replay a rehearsal recording of the song and wrestle with the lyrics while sending voice notes to Luke and we’d iron out the details.

Pageant Queen

Lucy: As a woman in the music industry, you’re constantly being judged on appearance with people second guessing your ability as a performer and musician. When I wrote the lyrics for this song, I imagined myself as a pageant queen trying to list the reasons as to why I should be a winner while battling with all the insecurities surrounding self worth and self acceptance. 

Luke: This is one of the first things we wrote together when we started the band. We retired it for a couple of years but neither of us can properly remember why. It’s really nice to have it on the album – it means a lot to us, as a lot of the initial impetus behind the band is present in there. 

UTG

Lucy: As a queer person, it feels as though you never stop coming out; you’re always protective of that tiny bit of yourself that makes you ‘different’. This song is a reminder to look after and respect your queer and trans mates who are often not given the dignity and respect they deserve. 

Luke: In some ways this is the track that sums the record up more than any other. Fundamentally, it’s about looking out for people who are being discriminated against or harassed – specifically, queer and trans people. It’s meant to be straightforward in its overall message, but also complex in its details and angry when it needs to be. You could describe a lot of what we’re trying to do in similar terms. 

Waste

Luke: At the risk of sounding a bit too bleak, this is about the specific experience of the period right before you’re struck with a really rough bout of depression. It’s about the mix of dissociation and recognition that starts creeping in when things are getting worse, but you’re yet to realise quite how hard it’s going to hit you. When you’ve been wrestling this stuff for a long time, the onset of a bad spell becomes weirdly domesticated, and although it can be really difficult, there’s occasionally a sense of retreating into something familiar – which then falls apart around you (often, as implied in the lyrics, while you’re still waiting on criminally underfunded and overstretched mental health services to be able to help you do much about it). This tune is about that, both lyrically and structurally – it starts with a sense of space and suspended animation, before gathering momentum towards a big collapse in the middle. Slightly more happily though, it ends with one of the only sources of hope that can genuinely cut through the noise when you’re really going through the wringer – the calm voice of a friend checking up on you. 

Dreaming

Lucy: Many of my close friends’ daily lives are affected by bouts of depression and anxiety. Someone once told me that, along with their act of daily life, their dreams were being affected by their medication. Sleep, at its core, is meant to be healing and I really hated to think about a friend who couldn’t find any relief, not even in a time of complete rest. ‘Dreaming’ is meant to be a reassuring song that encourages you to seek solace in the comfort of easy, everyday activities. 

Luke: A lot of the arrangement for this was worked out at Lucy’s parents’ place in Woolwich, using a second-hand electronic drum kit she’d (temporarily) commandeered from the school where she teaches. Just speaking from a drummer’s perspective, you can sort of hear that the parts were partially written on something like that – you had to be both quite hard and quite precise in your playing to get it to register properly, so the beats are deliberately a bit clunky and repetitive, sort of mechanical-sounding. I really like moments when you can hear the material context of a song’s production leak into the actual instrumentation; this is a good example of that. 

Corner Cutting Boredom

Lucy: This song was written in isolation as I watched Whiplash; I had COVID and while my mind wanted to get on with it, my body couldn’t cooperate. I remember that I found it really funny as Miles Teller went through hell on screen and I just sat there singing about being bored. This song is a slow burner that culminates in the big ‘there’s not much I have taught you, but those who teach can’t do’. As a primary school teacher, I’ve learnt that what your students learn isn’t just about the stuff inside the classroom but instead about the ‘life lessons’ that you can offer and that’s what this line is about: get out there and show people the sort of person you are.

Luke: This track was one of two or three here that were partially built in the studio, which isn’t something we’d really done before – in the past we’ve been a lot more focused on getting the arrangement nailed prior to the studio time, so we could make the most of the sessions we had. But Dom is a really collaborative producer, and it felt right to plan to give him licence to experiment with this a bit and construct it all together, which is one reason it sounds quite different to a lot of our other stuff. I love the sense of space and glitchiness in it; I think it’s that quality which means that this track lends itself to a bit of improvisation and indeterminacy when we play it live. 

On that, we actually released a live version of this in spring 2024, but in a very particular and limited way. When we were in New York for a festival, we were invited by Leesta Vall, an independent studio and label based in Brooklyn, to record one of their direct-to-vinyl sessions – basically, you take a certain number of preorders for seven-inch singles, then play the song live that number of times, with each take being a unique record for whoever ordered it. So there are quite a lot of different versions of this track floating around in different parts of the world. There’s something nice about the idea that one of our most studio-first songs now has this second life as a totally live, organic thing as well. 

Melt

Luke: This is a song about community self-reliance and mutual aid – the rich and powerful, even the relatively well-meaning ones, aren’t going to come to the rescue as things get worse for ordinary people all around the world. It’s not that formal, electoral politics has absolutely nothing to offer in theory, or that large-scale political institutions can’t ever be used for good – but in a context such as ours, when those things are (perhaps not exclusively, but very frequently) designed and operated to serve the interests of the already powerful, most of us shouldn’t rely on them. We can only look after each other. 

Lucy: I love the arrangement of this track; it’s something we had to wrestle with in production but overall we ended up with a celebratory song that speaks on resilience and support. Luke always comes to the studio with great guitar riffs but this one is worthy of Match Of The Day highlights. 

Buzz/Cut

Lucy: Buzz/Cut is about pleasure: the need for attention, acceptance of self, frustration and its subsequent release. Written in a single night, this song is a cathartic release of tension. During the recording process, we knew that this song needed to demonstrate a closeness in the verse with explosive choruses that centre around the hook. This is by far our poppiest song to date and, at our live shows, it’s something we look forward to playing.

Luke: I remember Lucy sending me a voice note with a rough demo of a verse and chorus for this tune and listening to it on the way back from the pub one night. Immediately it became one of my favourite Scrounge songs, and we deliberately made the studio arrangement really simple and accessible to keep hold of that immediacy. 

Rat

Luke: This is quite a straightforwardly angry song (which is probably fairly obvious). It’s about the experience of watching various influential people – media commentators, celebrities, politicians – suddenly clutching their pearls and decrying certain of the many injustices of UK society after having spent a long time making sure – whether directly or indirectly – that those things were only ever going to get worse. It’s not only directed at the xenophobic right, but also people who should know better (and often seek to build their reputations on that kind of ‘knowing better’) who enable them time and again. 

Lucy: Rat is a song that I really enjoy playing live; people either get really into it or metaphorically clutch at the pearls, almost shocked at the racket that two people can make. At its core, this song digs at the xenophobic right but I love the superiority of the hook ‘Don’t cry coz you got what you wanted’. It’s a smug yet pointed line.

Nothing Personal

Luke: This is about how a city can change you, for better and worse; how trying to carve out a life in a place as intense and expensive as London makes you both more resilient and more fragile. This absolutely isn’t a song about ‘how awful it is to live here’ or whatever, or the difficulties of big, busy places more generally – city life can be beautiful in ways that I think are under-appreciated a lot of the time. But like any material context, a city shapes its inhabitants, just as those people shape it in return, and you can’t really escape that, nor put it down to something personal about yourself. This song is about those transformations and the way they’re constantly happening, whether or not we’re aware of them at the time; it’s nothing personal because city life it’s a collective experience whether we like it or not.

This track is also very deliberately written and sequenced as the closer to the album – the atmosphere has been built around simple parts to leave room for snippets of sound that appear elsewhere on the record. To a certain extent, these samples – and the relative quietness and reflectiveness of the overall arrangement – are intended to allow the listener to process all the stuff that’s come earlier on the album, so it makes more sense as a whole. 

Lucy: Luke is one of the most caring, earnest and thoughtful people I know and this song is a true reflection of how we both feel about living in London. Despite having grown up in London, I feel as though the concrete sprawl of big buildings can dwarf you while giving you the opportunity to go out and creatively explore the city. It’s a weird place to be caught in between and this track illustrates it well.

Almost Like You Could is out on April 18th via Ba Da Bing – pre-order on vinyl or digital download on Bandcamp

Album launch show at The Lexington in London on 26th April – tickets

If you’d like even more insight into the themes of the album and the band’s creative process, check out this specially recorded podcast

Scrounge: Facebook / Instagram / Linktree

Introduction by Paul Maps
Photograph by Joseph Elliott

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