HIGH HOPES
Gen & The Degenerates
Meet the “accidentally punk” rising alt.rockers fronted by a former circus aerialist.
“I SEE IT as a time capsule of what it’s like to be in your twenties, during the end of the world as we know it,” says Genevieve Glynn-Reeves. The singer/lyricist laughs, but there’s a sincerity in her tone.
At a time when spikily confessional voices like IDLES, Amyl &The Sniffers and Kid Kapichi are so prevalent in rock, Gen &The Degenerates’ debut feels ripe for success. Produced by Ross Orton (Gang Of Four, Arctic Monkeys), Anti-Fun Propaganda is a smart, funny slice of the modern age, told in riffy, punky alt.rock vignettes. Online living, gender politics and global tensions are explored with incisive energy. It’s silly, sexy and serious.
“I think we’re accidentally punk,” Glynn-Reeves say. “We like a lot of the 70s New York punk stuff, but we’ve hit a wave where punk is really resurging. Basically it’s the fact that I do the talky thing, but that’s more from me coming from a spoken-poetry background, because I did creative writing and drama at uni.”
As a queer student carving a niche in Liverpool, Glynn-Reeves pored over the works of Benjamin Zephaniah and local writer (also her tutor) Jeff Town. She found a sense of belonging with bandmates Sean Healand-Sloan (guitar), Jacob Jones (guitar), Evan Reeves (drums) and Jay Humphreys (bass). They shared a diverse pool of tastes, from Metallica to Green Day to the Eurythmics.
“We’re best friends,” Glynn-Reeves says, “we got into a band because we loved spending time together, and we had to work out how to make the music make sense. Alot of that was Ross [Orto
