LICE + YARD + MP3 CHAINSAW

Formed in Bristol, 5-piece LICE have become one of UK experimental rock’s most inventive and ambitious outliers. Their second album Third Time At The Beach arrives 20th September on AD93 (Loraine James, Overmono, Giant Swan, Moin): a three-part epic exploring our struggle to better understand the world around us. Darting between minimalism, rock, techno and more, it hurtles through time and space: featuring a cast of astronauts, cavemen and dinosaurs.

In 2021, LICE released their debut album WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear to international acclaim via their own label Settled Law Records. A concept album employing minimalism, experimental rock and hand-built instruments, it received acclaim from BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 1, KEXP, Gigwise (5/5), DIY (4/5), UNCUT (4/5) and The Quietus. Financial Times declared it “exciting, alive, packed with musical ideas,” while CRACK called it “a welcome lease of life for British avant-rock that plays with expectation at every turn.” This led to a string of major festivals including Reading & Leeds, Green Man and End Of The Road, an extensive EU tour supporting Sleaford Mods, and headline tours in the UK and EU.

LICE first emerged with 2018 Double EP It All Worked Out Great Vol 1+2 on their champions IDLES’ own label Balley Records. Accompanied by a run of incendiary DIY shows in unusual spaces (including a 13th century crypt and an old railway station), along with early supports for Shame, IDLES and The Fall, they were tipped by tastemakers including BBC 6Music’s Steve Lamacq, The Guardian and Loud And Quiet, who declared them “the most exciting, inspiring and genuinely deranged new guitar band in the country.”