Postindustrial Poets – Woke Up This Morning With Those Postindustrial Blues (EP)
Postindustrial Poets were founded in 2019 and started releasing music in 2020. The name comes from the types of venue where they saw gigs around that time – converted foundries, workshops and factories. But it is also meant to show a willingness to try out different styles and to care about the lyrics. Their sound is guitar based – with some influences from The Black Keys and White Stripes.
Their most successful releases are ‘It Didn’t Feel Like the End of the World’ – and pre-dystopian breakup track set in Norway; ‘That’s When You Blew My Mind’ – a jangly guitar track, that tells a love story stretching from Moscow to the Pacific; and ‘I Gave You My Disease’ – a very weird song indeed. All these three have more than 200.000 plays on Spotify.
Their EP ‘Woke Up This Morning With Those Postindustrial Blues’ releases 8th April. Pre-save the EP here.
Does the whole EP fit into a particular musical genre, or does it borrow from multiple forms?
“The EP features ‘Still A Stranger Here’ – the most recent single – which has a blues sound, but in a modern style. It has already done quite well for us – and hit Apple Blues streaming charts in many places in Europe. We noticed that people were also going and finding other tracks of ours with a blues influence. So we thought we would make it easy for people – and all the tracks on this album have a blues influence. But we are not trying to recreate any sounds from the past. We let those influences flow into new music.”
“And on the other side of the coin, we get people saying that they find us too eclectic. So we were trying to have a consistent theme going on. And we went back to a couple of older tracks to update them in the light of things we have learned since we first released them.”
“There are some guitar solos on the EP, and it ends with an instrumental, but we don’t fit into that “twelve bar blues and lots of guitar solos” bag.”
What does the album’s title reveal?
“It is a small joke. “Woke up this morning” is a line that begins many many blues songs – Lightnin’ Hopkins has a song with that title, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Taj Mahal all have songs beginning with those words. But the continuation “with those postindustrial blues” is meant to say that we won’t be trying to sound like those classic bluesmen, but we are going to do it our way.”
Do you have a favourite song on the album?
“‘Still a Stranger Here’ is a song that means a lot. There are two sad stories behind it – no need to go into them. But the uplifting part is that the song sounds just as it was first imagined, late at night about a year ago. This is harder than people probably imagine!”
Is there a story behind the cover artwork?
“The cover photo is by Derek Rotherford. Derek is probably best known as an author (of Dead Man Walking). He’s also a talented guitarist – Pete played bass with him in Gloucester for a few gigs, back in the day – and photographer. We told him the sort of photo we were looking for, and he had one that we were fine with. But he went the extra mile and returned to the spot one freezing morning to get a shot that was more atmospheric. We really appreciate this.”
Future plans:
The next Postindustrial Poets release will be called ‘Back to Basics’ and will feature two (or maybe three) stomping rock songs.
There will also be a Pete Poet solo release on 13th May – which will have a different sound – much more pop.
