The Howl & The Hum: ‘We want to explore soundscapes as well as stories’

As York band the Howl & The Hum release debut album Human Contact, Duncan Seaman talks to singer Sam Griffiths.
The Howl & The HumThe Howl & The Hum
The Howl & The Hum

Like many a musician confined to home during the Covid-19 lockdown, Sam Griffiths, singer and songwriter of The Howl & The Hum, has found himself missing the roar of the crowd.

In the run-up to the release of his band’s debut album, Griffiths and his comrades Bradley Blackwell, Conor Hirons and Jack Williams should have been out on the road, performing across England and Wales. Instead the four-piece, who are based around York and Leeds, found themselves giving livestream performances from their living rooms.

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For a band who have spent the last five years steadily building up an audience through gigging, the sudden lack of a live audience has been strange. “We’re feeling that now more than ever just through the sheer barrier of not being able to do those sort of things, to look out at people and see either bafflement or enjoyment in a crowd,” Griffiths says. “Now we look into a webcam or the back of an iPhone for these livestream gigs.

“We really miss the organic way of being able to build up a following; it’s probably the best part, being able to play. We’ve got fans in the Netherlands and Germany and France that we were meant to be going to see this year. We meant to be playing our first shows in Germany. That’s had to move to the new year, which is fine and hopefully we’ll be a better band by the time we get there and people will already know the songs, but it’s definitely reduced the organic component of being a live band and going around doing music old-style, actually playing in front of people.”

The Howl & The Hum’s first album, Human Contact, is aptly titled. “Apt is a very kind word,” acknowledges Griffiths, who formed the nucleus of the band with bassist Blackwell playing open mic nights in York’s “terrifying amount of pubs” when they were students. (Hirons and Williams joined later, from fellow city band The Littlemores. “There’s usually quite a lot of shuffling within the York band scene, it’s like musical chairs,” Griffiths notes.)

“We actually decided on the name of the album and the singles last year. We finished recording it in September, but I don’t think there was any mention of a pandemic then, [Corona] was just a mild-flavoured beer back then. We keep describing ourselves as seers or prophets but that’s maybe not the most positive thing to foresee. But ‘apt’ is definitely the word, maybe it’s a phrase that’s going to haunt us for a little while. Hopefully in the most positive way.”

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The album’s contemporary indie pop textures might sound a world away from Griffiths’ roots in folk and country music, but he says that’s still at the root of his songwriting. “I still listen to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell all the time because of the strength of the songwriting, there’s no one else that meets those standards, but the sounds that other people are using are influential,” he says. “They’re so key with what we want to do with the band.

The Howl & The Hum. Picture: Netti HurleyThe Howl & The Hum. Picture: Netti Hurley
The Howl & The Hum. Picture: Netti Hurley

“We want to explore soundscapes as well as stories. We still listen to those story songs but we try to incorporate elements of other genres as well.”

The album’s title track was, Griffiths suggests, “meant to be more of a digital association with how people talk to each other”.

“In a very modern context that would mean how people talk to each other through phone screens and constantly hearing wires and communications becoming a little more stretched as we get more digital. Now, over the last couple of months, the definition has sort of twisted itself because that’s exactly how people are able to communicate with each other.

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“Now I’m having chat with my family on Zoom, Skype and WhatsApp calls, it’s the only way I can see them. It’s flipped it on its head. Before I guess it was more about the negative connotations of what happens when we are physically further apart, when you can’t feel someone’s breath and you can’t see people’s eyes properly in real life. Now it’s sort of a longing for the fact that that’s all we have, this form of digital communication, and we’ve grown to be a little happier for it than we initially gave it credit for. Its definition has evolved over the last two months.”

Much of The Howl & The Hum’s album concerns itself with relationships. “Us being a band in our 20s, we each go through relationships and rises and falls, and we see people around us doing exactly the same thing, so it just felt the right sort of thing to write about because it was so present in us and our friends’ group,” says Sam Griffiths. “A lot of these relationships are very personal to me, one of our singles is called Until I Found a Rose which is about a friend’s relationship. There’s no emotion on the album that I haven’t felt. All of the feelings are my own even if the stories are other people’s.”

Human Contact is out now. The Howl & The Hum are due to play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on February 26, 2021.

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