Volk Soup test the finesse. The Leeds six-piece have spent the last few years building a sound that doesn’t resolve so much as pull apart from the inside. Their debut album, 10p Jazz, out October 3 on Dipterid Records and Cruel Nature, moves like something functional and sharp—more utility blade than sculpture.
Lead single “Reptilian Brain” sets the tone. According to vocalist Harry Jones, it’s “the most no-nonsense track on the album.” The song runs on impulse. “A simple structure that is tested by a frantic intuition to be loose,” he explains. It doesn’t search for sophistication. It stays blunt. It works.
Recording followed the same logic. “We wing it,” Jones says. Everything was tracked live. No building from scratch. No second-guessing. “We don’t dillydally in search of the perfect take.” Overdubs came with no plan—just feeling. That’s how they ended up with “ping-pong percussion”, a synth that hisses and curls, and a guitar played acoustically for no real reason. “Approaching the overdubs with an open mind certainly helped us to maintain some spontaneity,” Jones admits, although “spontaneity” undersells how the album actually feels: more like trying to keep hold of something as it slides off the edge.
Sometimes things fell apart in the right way. “Meet Me by the Willow” was already fading out when saxophonist Ryan Geach jumped back in with a drone, hijacking a “perfect take” and drawing the track out by a few minutes. “George was suitably irritated at the seemingly ruined take,” Jones says. “Which turned out to be one of the most beautiful moments on the record.” It’s that kind of accidental tension that keeps the whole thing from hardening into style.
Live, they don’t control much either—but they do steer. “I actually find that the live setting is where I have most authority over someone’s feelings,” Jones says. “Discomfort, arousal, suspicion, anything but indifference.” He plays off the room—audience size, sound, layout. “Typically there’s the desire to stir up excitement but it’s good to add a little danger.” They’re not looking to entertain. They want a reaction. “We’re prone to extracting some awkward laughter out of an audience,” Jones adds. That physicality doesn’t translate to record, but the mood swings do. 10p Jazz works like a series of left turns. Moments of pressure get undercut by calm, a hint of melody disappears before it lands. “We want people to discover things they weren’t expecting,” Jones says. “But if they don’t, they don’t.”
Volk Soup started in early 2020 with Jones and bassist Ryan Walker. Pandemic hit, they stalled. Their first live set wasn’t until October 2021, by which point Luc Gibbons had joined on drums and they’d already recorded as a wiry three-piece. The lineup expanded in 2022, bringing in Geach on sax, Luca Vitale on trumpet, and George Orton on guitar. The result was a shift—not just louder, but less linear. The band moved into a stretchier, more unstable sound, touring France and releasing the compilation Incompetent Hits through Swish Swash. That year, they also began working with producer Oscar McKie and engineer Shaene Hunter, who helped lock in the clipped, broken edges of what became 10p Jazz.
Jones doesn’t make much of Leeds as a scene, though the band are clearly in the middle of it. “Leeds has a particular incestuous scene,” he says. “Nearly everyone in our band is part of two or three other projects.” Still, he’s aware of the cross-contamination happening. “There’s been an underlying post-punk scene here that seems to be spawning bands that want to do something a little different… nearer jazz, or folk, or metal.” Many of them studied music formally. “They’re taking their education and applying classical training to something more experimental—something that lets them hang around with cooler people.”
The album’s influences aren’t genre-based and are rather a map of inputs. They’re dietary, cinematic, environmental. Among them: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney, The Danube, Tesco Dark Chocolate Digestives, being in France, and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Maurice Pialat. There’s a nod to Lou Reed’s Ecstasy, Dylan’s Tempest, Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, João César Monteiro’s A Comédia de Deus, and even a few tweets by Nick Pinkerton. “Indomie Veg flavour noodles gave me high blood pressure,” Jones notes, alongside praise for Leeds’ Kirkgate Market and a side shout to Sweet Saeeda.
Volk Soup will tour the UK this December with Gaol Bird:
December 4 – Manchester @ Soup
December 5 – Liverpool @ Kazimier Garden
December 6 – Leeds @ Hyde Park Book Club
10p Jazz arrives October 3 on Dipterid Records and Cruel Nature. Three vinyl versions will be available: translucent orange (“Heat Rash”), black swirl (“Jazz Damage”), and black. All limited. The tape’s out via Cruel Nature. Pre-order it at volksoup.bandcamp.com.
