Four-piece Grandmas House have been an integral part of Bristol’s thriving post-punk scene for years and fans have been patiently awaiting their debut album, Baby You’re A Winner, which will be released on Friday via Brace Yourself Records.
Filled to the brim with the signature snarls from lead singer Yas, rock guitar riffs, and insightful lyrics about human connection, the album perfectly encapsulates what Grandmas House are all about and was well worth the wait. Shifting between chaos and harmony, post-punk drums and melodic interludes, the album is both varied and distinct in its style.
The band are showing us a more vulnerable side on the album, one that fans haven’t seen like this before. Drummer Poppy Dodgson says: “It’s the existential crisis of being alive, all the terrible things that happen like sadness and grief but then also falling in love, friendships.”
She says this is probably because of her illness – she struggled for three years and was bedbound for some of that time.
“I couldn’t make music the way we were making it before. That experience of having it taken away changed something in our brains. It gave the album the energy it has,” Poppy adds.
The reason the band made it through the illness and didn’t fall apart is a testament to their strong and supportive friendship. Poppy and guitarist Yasmin Berndt met at uni in London and one day just decided they wanted to start a band.
“We didn’t play any instruments or knew anything about it. So, we did it,” Yasmin says. “We just wrote about things we cared about, a mixture of things. Experiences you go through. It felt quite male dominated so we had some songs about that as well, being a bit more political. We were into poetry but putting that into a song is quite different.”
Bassist Zoë Zinsmeister and guitarist Polly Jesset joined the band when they came to Bristol, where they played Dot to Dot pretty early on, upstairs at Mother’s Ruin, back when it was still a tiny but popular music venue.
Yasmin says Bristol has always had a rich music scene and especially in those days, they were constantly being influenced by bands like Football FC, Love Handles and Wych Elm.
Yasmin adds: “We’ve been asked a lot, in Europe as well, what’s happening in Bristol, what’s in the water, everyone’s coming out of there. It’s such a close scene. When we were learning, Idles were starting out. I think that’s still the case, Bristol is so open.”
The new album is full of those experiences, illness and health and at the core of it, female friendship.
//Words: Clara Bullock//Photography: Marie Dutton//