Meet Tooth, the London band making a hybrid of anthemic indie and heart-tugging emo
This band have come flying out of the blocks with a sound that’s born from experimentation as well as tradition
Life moves incredibly fast when you’re young. As we talk on his 21st birthday, Tooth singer Tom Pollock appears shy and embarrassed when discussing his band’s stunning debut single, ‘The Age of Innocence’. It was written only a few years ago, but he feels like a totally different person now.
The music of his band – a hybrid of anthemic indie and heart-tugging emo – perfectly translates these feelings of adolescent transience, with emotions that come and go quickly but feel overwhelmingly potent in the moment. “I wonder if it will always be like this,” he sings on the first song his band ever wrote, a track he has described as “an epilogue for my adolescence”.
Just after they had written the song, Pollock stopped off for a pint at Soho institution The Blue Posts, where we meet him and Tooth co-founder and guitarist Ben Ashley today. With his guitar strapped to his back that day, Pollock caught the attention of the pub’s manager, who was looking for a new house band for the pub’s Friday night residency.
Across the next two months at The Blue Posts, Tooth played increasingly raucous gigs and cut their teeth in a live setting. Initial promises of money for gigs turned into a rider of beer instead. After a particularly messy Halloween show where the band turned up with costumes but without their amps, the gig was up.
“It feels strange being back here,” Pollock says wistfully, looking around the 30-cap room that, in many ways, was the making of this exciting new band. To them, it feels like an entirely different life, and they race towards the release of debut EP Restless in Bloom and beyond with the, well, restlessness that only youth can stir up.
Read our interview with Tooth and listen to their music via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.
Tell us about the beginnings of Tooth and how you got to the point where you had the residency here…
Tom Pollock: We’d just left school and decided to dedicate all our time towards being a band and writing music and playing together. We’d spent the summer after we finished school just writing and rehearsing together. That September was when we started the slots here. It was a really, really great opportunity just to play all the songs that we’d spent the summer writing and to be 18 and playing a pub in the heart of Soho. It was pretty exciting.
It sounds like you’ve moved on from the sound and sentiment of ‘The Age of Innocence’ already – why did you release it as your debut single?
Pollock: That song and this EP are a testament to those years and those times. Now, the stuff we’re writing is in a different avenue and we’re different people – we’re older. It’s felt like a rite of passage to get the EP out because it’s the songs that we were writing as teenagers.
Ben Ashley: I still have fondness for them, but it opens up a different perspective you didn’t have before. You think about bands that have been touring for 20 years, and they’re playing songs maybe 20,000 times. You get a different framing of how you see the song, behave with it, perform it. Sometimes, as you get further away from its initial creation, you find a way to resonate with it and to perform it.
The two of you met at school – what music did you bond over, and how did that inspire what Tooth is?
Pollock: I felt very grateful for finding Ben at that age. Together, we had this mutual discovery of music. I had a foundational understanding of it through my dad, with The Beatles, the Stones, Beach Boys. With Ben, that’s how we discovered Pixies and Sonic Youth and Television.
Ashley: We were aggressively consuming all of pop culture.
As well as this indie and rock influence, there’s a big shadow of Midwest emo in your sound – how did that music reach you, and what do you like about it?
Pollock: Around the time we were playing the residency, I hadn’t really listened to much emo at all. I didn’t know who Title Fight were. When I was about 19, this whole wave of music just completely waterboarded me! I was just completely in awe of Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, Title Fight. I’d also just broken up with my girlfriend.
Ah, that’ll help you get into emo for sure!
Pollock: I listened to the first American Football album non-stop for six months!
Ashley: Musically, they were very inspiring as well. We’d gone through listening to some of the early 2000s indie rock, and you realise that a lot of them sound quite similar and are using similar song structures. Then, when you listen to American Football, you’re like, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’ But you can get on with it in the same way – it’s just given to you in a completely different format.
There’s a great mixture in your music of this emo-inspired experimentation, but you’re also not afraid to write a chorus…
Ashley: We wanted to merge that songwriting style with a traditional sense of a good song. You have a good chorus, you have a good hook, but how can you make the rest of the song interesting as well? Especially in England, I feel like everyone goes for the Oasis or Stone Roses vibe.
Pollock: It’s cookie-cutter music, which is everything we’re against. We like to embrace the songwriting tradition of structures and verses, but we don’t want to do it in a way that has been done a million times. Whenever we can, we want to try and throw in a bit of misdirection.
Taken from the June/July issue of Rolling Stone UK. Buy your copy here.