Alter The Press! Presents: Last Lungs

Preston/Manchester-based instrumental pop group, Last Lungs continues the lineage of breath-taking sounds that Deep Elm Records has produced over the years; The Appleseed Cast, Moving Mountains and more recently Goonies Never Say Die.

Despite growing up to pop-punk, their latest release 'Look At That Old Grizzly Bear', the five-piece create a mesmerizing, inspiring sound that flows seamlessly and with little to no sign of influence of the latter genre. Instead the band head down an airy, atmospheric "post-rock" sound with much emphasis on structure and progression.

For Fans Of: This Will Destroy You, God Is An Astronaut, The Appleseed Cast and Moving Mountains.



Interview with Sean Doherty (guitarist).

Alter The Press: Why should Alter The Press! readers check you out?
Last Lungs: Readers should check us out because we're the kind of band that people think they wouldn't like, but when they actually give us a chance they really dig us. We play instrumental pop music (but we do have the odd lyrics here and there) and we put everything into our music. People may wonder what our style of music may sound like, and it is a pretty difficult thing to describe. We all grew up listening to bands like Nofx and a lot of other punk and pop-punk, and we're all really into bands with tech guitars and such. We kind of merge all our influences into one thing and it just comes out as our own music.

ATP: What's the story behind the band?
Last Lungs: We originally started the band as a way to express ourselves. We never thought 'right, let's make a band and become rock stars', that's not what we want at all. We write music because it's something we enjoy doing. Something we enjoy even more than that is when people tell us how much they love our music. The hear that someone likes something we've written together is pretty much all we've ever wanted from this band.

ATP: Single highlight as a band so far?
Last Lungs: It has to be signing to Deep Elm. We recorded our album this time last year, got the sleeve designed, got it mastered and then pretty much just sat around waiting for something to happen. We decided we'd send a copy over to DER and about a week later got an email back saying they were really interested in us. From then on things have just moved so fast and we've had more exposure than we ever have in the three years we've been a band. To think that our band has a record out on Deep Elm is just unreal.

ATP: What are your plans for the 12 months?
Last Lungs: Plans for the next twelve months are to just push the record as much as possible. We've got some awesome shows that we're working on at the minute, one of them is with This Will Destroy You in September, we've played with them before and they're awesome guys so we're excited to play with them again. Also, we'd love to have the record released on 12" at some point, so we're going to work hard and try and get that sorted out. Other than that, we're currently writing and demoing new material.

'Look At That Old Grizzly Bear' by Last Lungs is available now on Deep Elm Records.

Last Lungs on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

Words by Sean Reid