You just have to sit up and listen when you hear a tune with such a solid and slightly sinister opener. Even a minnow website like mine gets sent far more music that it can possibly ever review, so it says something that within 5 seconds of listening to young Teeside band Gone Tomorrow’s debut track Escapist, I was sold.

The track is something of a shape shifter where at the end of the song, it is not quite what you thought it was going to be. The opener to Escapist has a real heavy rock vibe with a relentless and menacing opening rhythm. The vocals on this track then give a pleasant surprise as they rather remind me of Jake Bugg in style. I also get something of a 60’s US garage sound to the tune with the jangly fuzzy guitar and solid hard drums.

The song melds together well, but that it is not a classic rock vocal, just adds to that very tasty shifting sand feel. While the main part of the song moves to slightly lighter rocky territory, that hard insistent rhythm returns and underpins the tune. Gone Tomorrow haven’t made a good debut effort with Escapist. No, with its structure and complexity it’s a great effort.  

Escapist overall reminds me of my misspent youth where on alternate nights over the weekend, I’d flit between the hard rock crew in a dog-rough biker bar, and then join the fey and cool indie crowd. The lyrics too, remind me of that time in a small town waiting to go to Uni, where it felt that life was passing me by while I was bored stupid with the monotony of everyday and the familiar. I don’t think I’ve had those same feelings until lockdown, where of course we are all impatient to resume our lives. Like so many tracks of the moment, it might be conscious or sub conscious, but Escapist has something to tell us about these times.  

The band tell me there’s a full studio EP on the way; given the band have just been around for under a year and where they met at school, it feels both like a great way for them to break up those everyday blues, and to create something real and lasting from scratch. Gone Tomorrow? I suspect not.

Chris R   

• Images taken from the band’s social media.