What if the world really is ending, but it’s happening so slowly and awkwardly that all you can do is smirk? That’s the territory Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine sink into with Rear Meat—a four-track experiment in absurdity, anxiety, and barely-contained chaos, wrapped in seagull feathers and synth squiggles. It’s the Bristol outfit’s heaviest work to date, but still wearing its socks inside out and cracking jokes about donkeys.
The EP is a sleep-deprived protest, told through broken dreams and real-world dysfunction. There’s fear—the kind that chases you through REM cycles. There’s injustice, from mismanaged policing systems to social interactions that leave a bitter taste. There’s even a warning about gulls. Not metaphorical ones. Actual herring gulls, or “skyrats,” that, if you believe Smudge, are going to inherit the Earth.
And behind all that? The bones of Rear Meat are loose, untamed. Recorded in the basement of The Louisiana without a click track, its rhythms breathe and lurch with intention. “I really wanted to capture a flowing energy,” drummer Seamus says, “because when you play to a click sometimes that flow gets lost.” The EP moves like a dream—jagged, fluid, sometimes incoherent, but emotionally true. That energy is especially visible in Armadillo, a song born from a nightmare and built to mimic the strange mechanics of sleep itself.
The band’s playfulness doesn’t soften their commentary—it sharpens it. “Being facetious is our most important ingredient,” Seamus adds, and it’s in that spirit that Rear Meat even gets its name. A dyslexic misreading turned into a farmyard photo shoot for donkey rear-ends, now immortalised on the cover.
Yet beneath the antics is a deeper pulse—an unease with systems that fail you, dreams that betray you, and gulls that really might be watching you.
Check out the band’s track-by-track commentary—part monologue, part inside joke, part confessional. Dive in.
Armadillo is about a dream that Smudge had where a business tycoon would steal from everyone he could which made Smudge super scared but then he woke up and realised it was all a dream. The inspiration for this song came from Smudge having that dream, and then we as the band wanted to recreate the different notions of sleep we experience such as REM, waking up from a nightmare, the notion of falling asleep and not being able to get to sleep in a musical sense.
There Is Less Trouble When You Stay At Home is a song about changing our policing system. More specifically, it’s about people getting seriously affected by crimes that are committed, and cases are closed due to poor time management from the policing side. The inspiration behind this track was Smudge was assaulted at work by scaffolders and this was his first and final experience of raising his misfortune to the police. This included the dreadful experience of the investigator calling him up and responding to Smudge by the name of the individual that assaulted him.
ETA narrates both sides of a social meet up. The song starts with the surprise of someone arriving sooner than expected, but by the end of the social meet up you’d wished you never met the person in the first place.This song came from a jam we had in the rehearsal room. We tried to create a lot of space to let our instruments do a lot of talking, but it ended up being quite a busy song sonically and we also wanted to make something that had two moods/parts. Smudge and Cam’s guitar really battle against each other in the beginning of the song and Harri’s synths really helped both moods meet each other in the middle. The second half is just chaos unfolding.
We believe that Skyrats are the future dystopia of our planet. Since Smudge was 12 he’s given the Herring Gull it’s alter ego name Skyrat. This song is about how their numbers have multiplied and how they will take over the world if we don’t act now. Smudge had the main riff of this song and brought it to the practice room and then Seamus created the drums around the riff. Everyone started being a bit silly and going into a heavy metal theme and from there, Sky Rats was made in about five minutes including Harri’s monologue idea that you hear in the bridge/breakdown section. It just naturally flowed into what it is now, and it’s the last song in our set every time we play live.
Tour Dates:
20th May | Falmouth | The Cornish Bank
21st May | Blackpool | Bootleg Social
22nd May | Hereford | The Jam Factory
23rd May | London | Old Blue Last
24th May | Bristol | Dot To Dot Festival
25th May | Nottingham | Dot To Dot Festival
