For anyone looking to show their mum what angry, organic, driving punk sounds like when it works better than coffee, this new single from Glasgow’s Ochre is a fair place to start. She may need the weekend to recover, but some damage will probably stay.
The band’s new wild single “Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder.” starts with one bent guitar note worrying itself out of shape, pushed in and out of time while the rhythm section keeps the floor under it. Tense, built around that ugly little pressure point where self-examination stops being abstract and starts getting loud, the single is the first drop from “PEN.”, the band’s upcoming EP, now set for release on July 3. A second single follows on June 19.
“Trouble” was the last song written for the EP, but it came together fastest. James says the track was written in around an hour, with the band following the feeling of the song rather than overworking it into something cleaner.
As a result, it lands as one of the clearest statements of where Ochre are right now: still tied to their earlier releases, still sitting somewhere between post-hardcore, post-punk, indie, emo, and hardcore, but less interested in picking a lane than in holding tension until it starts to show its teeth.
The track opens on the guitar riff that carries through the verse and returns at the end with a slight rhythmic shift. It is a simple part on paper: one note bent repeatedly out of tune, pushed in and out of time against the forward movement underneath. The effect is internal rather than outwardly explosive, more like a private argument turned up loud.
That same pressure sits in the lyrics. “Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder.” plays off the old line about beauty, but the title points somewhere less comforting: the uncomfortable work of looking straight at your own flaws and accepting that change starts there, or it does not start at all.
“Trouble pulls from various genres but still feels uniquely ours, bridging the gap between past releases and what’s to come on the full EP,” James says. “The track is aggressive and unfiltered in nature—from the repetitive guitar riff to the lyrics, everything is exposed.”
The EP was written over four to five months, with some songs finished in a single session and others taking longer to settle. Like Ochre’s previous EP “club,” the title “PEN.” carries several meanings at once: the writing tool used to form lyrics, the feeling of being enclosed in your own head like a penitentiary, and the name for a female swan, pointing toward grace, beauty, and transformation.
The artwork for “Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder.” comes from Glasgow-based artist and long-time collaborator Alexandra Faulds, who photographed a building behind Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow. The location was found during an unofficial walk through the city’s brutalist architecture after the band read an article in “Glasgow World.”
For Ochre, the link between that architecture and the EP is direct. Brutalist buildings expose structure, function, and surface without much room for decoration. “PEN.” keeps circling truth in a similar way, especially the kind that arrives without softening its edges.
Faulds sees the single artwork from a slightly different angle.
“This building is one of my favourites of all the brutalist buildings in Glasgow,” she says. “When we think about brutalist buildings we generally think of them as being strong and imposing. This section of this particular building is actually very small in person. Hidden among the trees at the bottom of a little path, it feels to me more like a miniature brutalist building. A wee treehouse made to look like a brutalist building.”
The people who gather there also change the place. Empty cans, bottles, clothes, chairs, stickers, and graffiti turn the spot into something lived-in rather than monumental.
“We took a lot of pictures that day with no particular intention,” Faulds adds. “This one stood out to me at first because it’s quite visually dramatic. I love the richness of the greens and the building’s shadows and the glow of the rooftop lights and the white sky coming out from behind the clouds. Then I noticed that Scott looks like he is floating, as I caught him mid-step on the path. It looks like this cosy wee place is pulling him in.”
A music video for “Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder” was shot at the same location, with a remix of the song also accompanying the release.
Glasgow runs through the band in a less postcard-friendly way. Ochre grew up there, live there, and carry the city’s culture with them, but they have never quite belonged to one local scene. They sit near hardcore without being purely hardcore, near post-punk without fully giving themselves over to it, near emo and indie without letting either soften the corners.
“Ochre exists within various local scenes, but we’ve never fully fit into any one of them,” James says. “We’ve always sat on the outskirts of hardcore, indie, emo, and so on. This band was formed with the intention of creating something different, and we don’t bend to fit anyone else’s idea of what Ochre should or shouldn’t be.”
“Trouble In The Eye Of The Beholder.” is out May 22. “PEN.” is out July 3.
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