London’s ACHERS have ended up in the catalogue of No Idea Records, twenty-five years after vocalist and guitarist Pat Smiley started putting the Gainesville label’s bands on mixtapes for college friends. Their five-track EP “Bottom of the Hill“, a wiry mix of 90s post-hardcore, noise rock and post-punk, dropped on 24 July 2026. According to No Idea’s Var Thelin, it was the label’s first entirely new release in nine years. The whole connection came about through the band’s first attempt at advertising one of their songs on Instagram.
For Pat, who grew up listening to Twelve Hour Turn and Planes Mistaken for Stars, finding himself on the same label all these years later was a pretty unexpected outcome. The timing of the first message was particularly strange.
“We posted an ad for one of our songs on instagram. We hadn’t done that before but thought why not, get a few extra eyes and ears on us,” Pat told us.
The promoted song was “Bottom of the Hill”. It brought some new followers and comments, and Pat found himself having a few genuinely nice conversations with people who had discovered ACHERS through the advert. Then a direct message arrived from No Idea Records. Var explained that Instagram’s algorithm had recommended the band to him. Its suggestions were often wide of the mark, but he heard something in ACHERS that reminded him of later Twelve Hour Turn.
The comparison had a funny connection to something happening in the band’s own WhatsApp group.
“The funny thing was the day before the DM we were discussing t shirt ideas in our band whatsapp and I sent a Twelve Hour Turn shirt design over for inspo and the next day Var from No Idea is DMing us and comparing us, somewhat, to Twelve Hour Turn. Was very cool and surreal. He also initially called us Archers like virtually everyone does lol.”
The conversations continued for several months. They talked about older bands, tours through London and Florida in the early 2000s, and people who had been involved in those scenes. Var was coming over to the UK on holiday and planned to catch ACHERS live, although he ultimately couldn’t make the show.
They kept in touch anyway, and eventually Var asked whether they would like to release some cassettes in the States.
As Pat put it, “we were, to use an Americanism, stoked ha.”
The connection to No Idea went back to a very particular period in his life. In 2001, Pat shared a class at college with somebody who mentioned being a fan of Alkaline Trio. That evening, he made him a mixtape.
“I had one class with him and he mentioned he loved Alkaline Trio so I thought ‘Close enough’ and made him a mixtape that night.”
Among the songs he chose were I Hate Myself’s “Less Than Nothing”, originally known as “Song Two”, and Planes Mistaken for Stars’ “Copper and Stars”. Both bands were part of the No Idea catalogue. Shortly afterwards, Pat got heavily into Twelve Hour Turn, another Gainesville band closely associated with the label.
He also owned Less Than Jake albums as a kid and had seen both them and Planes Mistaken for Stars live. Pavel Borisov, who now plays guitar alongside Pat in ACHERS, was a big fan of Hot Water Music and Defiance, Ohio.
And there was another detail Pat remembered after our initial conversation. His college record bag had a Twelve Hour Turn pin attached to it, alongside Indian Summer, Ten Grand, Antioch Arrow and Cat on Form.
Those names give a fairly good idea of where ACHERS’ musical interests come from. Their songs have the jagged guitar work and slightly awkward rhythmic movement associated with older post-hardcore, with a strong melodic side and plenty of British post-punk in the mix. You can hear why a label associated with Twelve Hour Turn might recognise something familiar in them.
Var heard considerably more than one band in their music.
“There is a strong sense of ACHERS being ‘one of us from London.’ Good people, grounded and sincere,” he wrote in his introduction to the release.
He also named Drive Like Jehu, Unwound, Wire, The Van Pelt, Moonraker, Gang of Four and Pavement alongside Twelve Hour Turn when discussing the band’s music.
That broad collection of influences makes sense with what ACHERS are doing. The guitars have a clipped, repetitive quality, sometimes getting considerably noisier, and the bass remains prominent underneath. Pat sings and half-shouts over pounding drums, with enough room in the arrangements for the indie-rock melodies to come through. There is something of the older DC and San Diego post-hardcore scenes in their playing, with the British influence particularly apparent in the guitar patterns.
The No Idea edition also came with an unusual distinction for the label. Var identified “Bottom of the Hill” as its first all-new release in nine years, to the month, and the first release of what he called No Idea’s 40th-anniversary year. The label had continued handling older recordings and reissues in the meantime, including records from the bands Pat had listened to when he was younger.
ACHERS themselves have a considerably shorter history.
Pat and bassist Sabrina Amade started the band in 2022 after deciding to sign up for London’s First Timers Festival, an event that gives new bands their first opportunity to perform and has previously helped get groups including Big Joanie started.
The two already knew each other through a previous band, but they entered First Timers without a full lineup or a single finished song. Pat had never sung lead vocals before either.
With only a few weeks to get themselves ready, they found Pavel online and recruited their original drummer, Illia. They wrote enough songs to play the show, made it through their first appearance and found the audience encouraging enough to keep going. As Pat previously remembered, people were kind and nobody threw any eggs.
After Illia left in 2023, Vicki Butler joined on drums. She had previously played in London post-punk band GHUM and had met Sabrina through Girls Rock London.
Sabrina also plays bass in Wasted Youth, the 1980s post-punk band who reunited in 2022 and subsequently returned to touring, including appearances at Wide Awake and Rebellion. Pavel has another musical life making electronic recordings under the name Frailtynine.
We’ve been following ACHERS for a while now. Back in September 2023, we invited them to introduce eight under-the-radar bands from London’s underground, with Ritual Error, tethered, Gorgers and Shake Chain among their recommendations. They were still working with their original two-song demo, recorded in their small rehearsal space on Cable Street in East London.
That early release included “Go In” and “Asahi Bear”, both of which eventually appeared on “Bottom of the Hill”.
We caught up with them again in December 2025, when they shared their favourite underground records of the year and talked through the songs on their upcoming EP. The title track had arrived as a single earlier that month, and “Blue Lights” followed in January before the complete UK edition came out through Everything Sucks Music on 5 February 2026.
The EP was recorded over two days in March 2025 at The Bookhouse Studios, with Rich Mandell handling production, recording and mixing. His previous credits include Supermilk, Cheerbleederz and Charmpit. Will Killingsworth of Orchid mastered the recordings at Dead Air Studios.
It was ACHERS’ first release with Vicki behind the kit, completing the lineup alongside Pat, Sabrina and Pavel.
The five songs had come together during a difficult few years for the band, with births, bereavements and the everyday responsibilities of family life all happening alongside rehearsals and writing.
“Weโre immensely proud of this ep. In the time itโs taken to get together and write it life has both come into the world and gone out of it for us. Becoming parents and losing parents. Itโs been a joyful and extremely challenging few years for us individually and the jams and friendships built around them has been a proper tonic.”
The title track deals with Pat’s experience of growing up working class in Britain and finding himself in middle-class environments where he didn’t know the unwritten rules. He writes about discovering how social capital works, realising that some people arrive with advantages others have to learn about much later, and feeling caught between different social worlds.
There is also the discomfort of feeling that you’ve somehow betrayed the people you grew up with by entering places or institutions you weren’t expected to belong to. The song keeps returning to the pull of home and the importance of remembering where you came from.
“Blue Lights” was written while Pat was raising a toddler and seeing images from the war in Gaza appearing on his phone. Some of the injured and dead children in those images were around his son’s age. The experience found its way into the song, with the chorus drawing on a nursery rhyme he used to sing to his child.
Elsewhere, “Asahi Bear” deals with personal accountability and the repeated work of trying to improve yourself, including the idea of taking a standing eight count and getting back up. “Go In” addresses anxiety and the effort of pushing yourself into situations that might otherwise leave you standing on the sidelines.
Those songs were already discussed in our previous feature, but the American release gave ACHERS a reason to return to “Broken Clocks“, which now has a new video.
Directed and edited by Sabrina, the clip was assembled from footage the band found together. They worked collectively on finding the images, with Sabrina taking care of the finished edit.
The song concerns young men looking for guidance and falling into the orbit of manipulative personalities online. Pat is particularly concerned with the self-appointed authorities who offer certainty to people searching for ways to improve themselves, often making a business out of selling that advice.The song encourages critical thinking and curiosity about the people offering answers. Pat sees nothing wrong with wanting to become a better version of yourself. He wants people to question the advice they’re given and consider who is trying to influence them.
One of the lines goes, “Bless your cotton socks, weโre all just broken clocksโฆ”
The video appeared alongside the US edition of “Bottom of the Hill”, giving the band another opportunity to introduce the five songs to listeners outside Britain.
The American cassette also looks different from the original UK release. No Idea prepared a first run of 100 copies with black printing on orange shells, housed in handmade chipboard O-cards. Each comes with a matching, two-sided fold-out lyric insert, with printing handled by Econopress.
ACHERS supplied archival imagery for the packaging, with the pictures referring to family life and growing up in London. The artwork has a different colour scheme from the British edition, and No Idea assembled the physical copies themselves.
“The US release has different colour artwork to the UK edition, and it’s handmade chipboard o-cards with matching fold out two sided lyric sheet with archival imagery that we added and No Idea lovingly put it all together DIY style, packing it all as a family.”
Pat particularly liked the way the label handled the whole thing. The cassette packaging was assembled and packed by the family connected with No Idea, with the same hands-on approach that had been part of the label for years.
The mail-order edition also includes an exclusive download link. For anyone outside the US, the EP is available digitally through ACHERS’ Bandcamp, with the British cassette available through Everything Sucks Music.
Even the current promotional photographs were handled within the band. When we asked Pat for the photo credit, his answer was simply that they were taken by “us and a tripod ha.”
The music and friendships around ACHERS have stayed an important part of the members’ lives as they’ve got older. For Pat, the label association brought back very specific memories of the records he was collecting and the bands he was discovering at college. He had been listening to No Idea releases for more than two decades before anyone from the label knew ACHERS existed.
“From listening to their bands in the early 00s to being somewhat longer in the teeth in 2026 with spouses and kids, finding ourselves being released by them was not on any of our bingo cards. It felt great. We made temporary tattoos to celebrate ha.”
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