The Orchestra (For Now) capture the city’s fast-paced neuroticism with maximalist ‘London prog’

Lately, it seems London’s experimental rock scene is locked in a love affair with maximalism. Black Country, New Road have pivoted from the acerbic post-punk of their first album to the sprawling pastoralism of Joanna Newsom or Arcade Fire; Caroline make post-rock as an eight piece with its own complete string section. With their debut EP ‘Plan 75’, The Orchestra (For Now) have distilled this sound into its most essential form: sonically manifesting the neuroses that could only develop from living in a city like London.

Getting their start in cult venues like the Windmill and the George Tavern, The Orchestra (For Now) have become notorious for their hypnotically engaging live show. The band have spent two years gigging around this scene – even playing with Black Midi in their final Windmill gig. All seven members are so familiar with each other that they navigate through swells and troughs of their complex sound with the coordination of a military operation. ‘Plan 75’, as guitarists Bill Bickerstaff and Neil Thompson tell NME, is not only their attempt to “capture a particular moment in the studio”, but a snapshot of their life in contemporary London.

Although most of the band are not from the city, the EP reflects a specific London anxiety that Bickerstaff articulates as intense neurosis, explaining that he and frontman/songwriter Joe Scarisbrick “feel quite anxious about getting older, being left in the dirt. I think in ‘Plan 75’, the neurotic twisting and turning of the songs and the fullness of them was a symptom of that.”

“We are just people living in the here and now, we’re going to write honestly and be honest, musically,” Thompson adds. “And that means writing songs that are about the outrageous rent in London, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly in the lyrics.”

The London of ‘Plan 75’ is a constant churning high-strung mess, where to be young is to be entangled with a particular kind of existential anxiety. “One thing we’ve all got in common in the band is we’ve all met by being in London, studying there, most of us doing arts degrees,” Thompson explains. “Being in the capital, there’s so much competition around. You desperately want to be rising to the surface of it all, and in order to do that, there’s a naivety in the way that we’ve written the songs: it’s so in-your-face and maximalist, and I think it probably has some of that youthfulness in us.”

As such, the band describes their sound as “London prog”; a reflection of the diverse cultural influences of the city, blending genres as disparate as post-punk and jazz. But in spite of emerging from a scene most closely associated with the angular, politically-charged post punk of “crankwave”, Bickerstaff says their sound is rather a reflection of the city’s “appetite for a proggy kind of sound.”

“Our songs are quite carefully crafted,” he adds. “There’s a borderline unhealthy obsession over details in the way that we write. I think that kind of critical neurosis seems to be in at the moment.”

“London prog” can therefore be understood as the inevitable reaction to crankwave, instead favouring large bands with upwards of six members and instrumentation considered untraditional within the rock genre, such as violin or clarinet. Decidedly more art rock than punk rock, the politics of London prog are far more implicit, layered under storytelling in a manner akin to an autofictional novel.

“There’s a borderline unhealthy obsession over details in the way that we write. I think that kind of critical neurosis seems to be in at the moment” – Bill Bickerstaff

Although a sonic reflection of the city and the scene it emerged from, ‘Plan 75’ reflects this darkly neurotic version of London most deeply in its lyrical content. “There’s obviously a lot of pop culture in the lyrics, placed very intentionally to evoke a certain feeling,” Thompson explains. ‘Plan 75’ seemingly exists in its own self-contained world, one which might be plotted against a physical map of London reference by reference. While there’s obvious comparisons to be found in Isaac Wood-era Black Country, New Road, Scarisbrick instead produces a scathing critique of the emptiness of a contemporary cultural life which perpetually slides into the performative middle ground.

No one is spared, from middle class parents who read Zadie Smith and send their children to all the right schools in ‘Escape From New York’ to the mid-pandemic schmaltz of Fred Again’s ‘We’ve Lost Dancing,’ the lyrics inverted in ‘Wake Robin’ to state instead that “we’ve lost everything”. Bickerstaff elaborates on the nature of this emptiness with his own wry pop culture reference: “Modern life is always a bit rubbish.”

‘Plan 75’ also casts an equally paranoid glare on a world where the internet has become an omnipresent harbinger of austerity-induced hyperoptimisation. Bickerstaff calls this brave new world “such a fast moving ride,” with the lyrics emerging in parallel to “lots of very late, intense conversations about how fucked we were, how we’d missed our stop, so to speak.” Scarisbrick’s tendency to link death and the digital – be it the murder of an OnlyFans model in ‘The Strip’ or capturing casualties on BeReal in ‘Wake Robin’ – is a further reflection of the world young people must now navigate; one where more and more effort is required for ever-diminishing slices of the same pie.

Bickerstaff understands the urge to create in this environment as a double-edged sword. “I think you always feel like you’re chasing your shadow a bit,” he explains. “You always feel like you’re chasing some kind of grander version of you, a version that is bigger than life.” And yet, London is somehow both a source of creative neurosis and also central to the chase itself. When the band decided to move to the city, supposedly in a bid to hit the big time, Thompson admits, “I had no intention of that when I moved here.”

But Bickerstaff cheerfully disagrees: “I did. We want to be big. We want to be remembered.”

The Orchestra (For Now)’s EP ‘Plan 75’ is out March 28

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