Mandy, Indiana

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Mandy, Indiana’s emergence last year seemed sudden. Based in Manchester – a city where the speed of word of mouth means new bands rarely remain unknown for long - the outfit’s brutally abrasive post-punk noire has forcefully grabbed attention in a way that feels as if it’s come from nowhere.

Formed by Scott Fair (guitar/production) and Valentine Caulfield (vocals/lyrics), the band have signed to Fire Talk, attracted media coverage from the The Fader, Brooklyn Vegan, The Quietus and gained fans amongst the likes of Daniel Avery, Girl Band and Scalping. Their music to-date ranges from the warping techno of six-minute stomper Alien 3, to the likes of hallucinogenics-gone-dark industrial noise of Nike of Samothrace. These are tracks disparate in nature but connected by an explosiveness - a pyroclastic flow of energy that’s erupted from intense ramped up pressure. It’s music built on raw energy over meticulous composition and emotion over clinical structure.

“It’s less about musical virtuosity and more about feeling and mood” says Fair. “From the beginning, we’ve scrapped anything that sounded too normal. It takes quite a while for the songs to come together, but that’s because we discard anything that doesn’t thrill us.”

If Mandy, Indiana’s arrival seems quick on the surface, it isn’t something that’s happened overnight. Fair and Caulfield first met a couple of years when their respective previous bands shared a bill in Manchester. Caulfield was drawn to the guitarist’s aspirations to write beyond genre, while Fair was instantly taken with the French-born vocalist’s stage presence (“she’d be sitting down during tracks and just drifting around the stage like she could be at home in her living room or something”).

Since then, they’ve worked away in private. Fair creates the group’s sonic environments, drawn from countless hours of an ever-expanding library of home demos and recorded ideas, before passing them onto Caulfield. She pens her lyrics in impulsive reaction and delivers them in her native French. Her spoken word style arches away from the currently in-vogue ‘sprechgesang’, in favour of something altogether harsher, more visceral and full-blooded.