LISTEN: GIHE on Soho Radio with Fightmilk (21.08.25)

For this month’s GIHE show, Mari was joined in the studio by Lily from punk-pop favourites Fightmilk, bringing listeners an eclectic mix of new music tunes from some of their favourite female, non-binary and LGBTQIA+ bands and artists.

They talked about Get In Her Ears’ upcoming 10th Birthday celebration at The Cavendish Arms, the secrets of being in a DIY band, horror films, favourite famous dogs, The Macarena and lots more! The playlist included tunes from Cheerbleederz, Problem Patterns, Pink Shift, Jasmine 4t and more.

Listen back below:


We’ll be back on Soho Radio on Thursday 18th September from 4-6pm (BST)
 Make sure you tune in via DAB or the new Soho Radio app!
You can also listen at www.sohoradiolondon.com

Tracklist
Dolly Parton – Dumb Blonde
Fightmilk – Summer Bodies
Cheerbleederz – I Deserved Better
The Schla La Las – 1234
Problem Patterns – Sad Old Woman
Problem Patterns – Terfs Out
Efemel – Resuscitate
Cowboy Hunters – Breathe (and then you die)
The None – Pigs Need Feeding
adults – discipline
Wiince – Specific Rim
Lande Hekt – Impending Dooming
The Cords – I’m Not Sad
Flinch – I wonder if colin from endocrinology remembers me
Soot Sprite – Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon
Wench! – Yeti Legs
Pinkshift – Vacant
Strange New Places – YATPYFL
Tugboat Captain – Pest Control
Yuppie Supper – Neocanine
Ducks LTD (with Lunar Vacation) – Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken
Jasmine 4t – Woman

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Five Favourites: Fightmilk


We make no secret of our super fandom of Fightmilk here at Get In Her Ears. We’ve been following them since they first played live for us back in 2018, and now – after having had the honour of them headlining many more of our gigs, and being obsessed with their albums Not With That Attitude and Contender, our fandom has only continued to grow with the recent release of their new album No Souvenirs. Reflecting on themes of getting older, particularly as a woman in music, the album exquisitely showcases Fightmilk’s ability to hone their sound, creating perfect punk-pop; angsty and uplifting in equal measure. Instantly catchy singalong anthems, combining the band’s trademark tongue-in-cheek wit with a swirling energy and gritty raw emotion. From fuzzy sentimentality to fierce tirades against patriarchal society, No Souvenirs is a perfect culmination of how Fightmilk have continued to refine their sound. With shades of noughties punk-pop, combined with an injection of fresh queer joy and raging emotion, it’s at once cathartic, validating and empowering. But, most importantly, fun. A sound that’s uniquely Fightmilk; truly distinctive in its colourful charisma, but consistently evolving into something more. 

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspires them. So, following the release of No Souvenirs, we caught up with Lily, Nick, Alex and Healey to find out about the five albums that inspired the writing of the new album the most. Read about their five favourites, listen to the No Souvenirs on repeat, get tickets to see them live and watch the wonderfully DIY new video for latest single ‘Yearning and Pining‘ below:

Band pick:

Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
We all collectively, coincidentally, fell back in love with this album HARD at around the same time. It’s such a perfect cocktail of anger, positivity, self-reflection and FUN. It’s obviously also catchy as hell. The timing of our obsession coincided with Lily sending us a demo of the song ‘No Souvenirs’, which we definitely made a conscious effort of melding into something that could sit alongside those J.E.W songs. By the time we’d recorded the title track, we even learned ‘A Praise Chorus’ for a couple of shows in 2023, though damned if we can remember how to play it now.

Lily:

Olivia Rodrigo – Sour / GUTS
My name is Lily and I’m a sucker for a Gen-Z Disney star. Olivia Rodrigo’s songwriting is phenomenal. She is so self-aware, so funny, and so brutally (ha) honest – a lot of comparable artists who write music on themes of anxiety and awkwardness feel focus-grouped to death by people who haven’t been teenagers for a long time, or they bottle a feeling at the last minute and turn it into self-deprecation, but her songs feel like they’ve come straight from her diary. Lines like “I hope you’re happy, but don’t be happier” are such an economical, Ronseal way of articulating such a big, messy feeling – it’s such a skill to reduce all those complex emotions into one line. It’s very much the Kirsty MacColl/Alanis Morrissette school of ‘stuff I wish I’d said’. Sour was my big album for No Souvenirs, but I’m so glad we got GUTS halfway through recording too. I wrote ‘Summer Bodies’ before I’d heard ‘Pretty Isn’t Pretty’, which is one of my favourite songs on GUTS, and felt so much that it was written with the same exhaustion. I felt very seen: “I could change up my body and change up my face/I could try every lipstick in every shade”. I also love that during a time where guitar music is incredibly uncool, Olivia Rodrigo has released two big grungy rock albums. We have so much in common…


Nick:

Press Club – Late Teens
I absolutely love everything about this album. The aggression, speed & ferocity of it; the blown out vocals and the sparing way it was recorded, which is really no frills and designed to capture the rawness of a live show (I read somewhere that Nat does her vocals in the booth DURING the instrument takes, which is insane to me), and of course Frank’s drumming, which is fast and nuanced without being overtly flashy. There’s always a danger in this genre that you’re going to over-complicate stuff and have one instrument’s role overshadow the others, but the balance is right on this, and it was a wake up call to keep things simple – both in terms of our individual roles, and production, with No Souvenirs.


Alex:

Eiko Ishibashi – Drive My Car (Original Soundtrack)
The words and music on No Souvenirs are as accurate as you can get to the constant screaming static in our heads, as the four of us left the lockdown era, and tried to remember how to exist in the world, let alone be a band again. In the face of that chaos, the delicate arrangements and kinetic calm of Eiko Ishibashi’s Drive My Car score were my actual soundtrack to the period – a 45 minute gap in time where I could shut out the outside world and pretend it wasn’t going to come roaring back at me once the album finished. If you can’t hear that influence on our record, fair enough! But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t find a way in there somewhere.


Healey:

Lucy Dacus – Home Video
The early summer of 2021 was a super strange time, we were coming out of lockdown and all COVID restrictions were being removed but everything still felt scary and weird. Like Lucy Dacus we’d just put out an album, but we had no way of touring it yet and had sat on the songs for longer than expected. I went for lots of contemplative walks by myself round Peckham and I’d mainly just listen to Home Video and voice note demos Lily had sent to the band group chat. I got obsessed with this one early demo called ‘Swimming Pool’ – it’s a quiet song with just an acoustic guitar and double tracked vocals. It’s sparse, vulnerable and reflective. It caused the same gut reaction I get when I listen to Dacus’ music, a homesick nostalgic pang mixed with a dose of teenage embarrassment. While the title and some of its lyrics have changed, the core emotion is still there and I think Home Video was a huge influence on letting that track gently build to an eruption of fireworks at the end.


Massive thanks to Lily, Nick, Alex and Healey for sharing their favourite album choices with us! Watch the gloriously DIY video for ‘Yearning and Pining’ here:


No Souvenirs, the new album from Fightmilk, is out now via Fika Recordings and INH Records. They’re currently out on tour – very limited tickets left, but you may be able to find some here.

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ALBUM: Mammoth Penguins – ‘Here’

There’s a cliché that, as bands mature, they tend to drift away from something essential into experimentation. For Cambridge’s Mammoth Penguins – made up of Emma Kupa (vocals, guitars), Mark Boxall (bass, keys, vocals), and Tom Barden (drums, percussion, vocals) – their fourth album – Here – takes things way, way back. To such an extent that, though largely recorded at Norfolk’s Sickroom Studios, the band decided to make additions to the album in the simpler environment of a garden shed belonging to Tom.

It’s not surprising then, that the album blends some of the rawer elements of garage or US college rock, and smatters of math-rock, alt-country and post-punk, with the more whimsical instrumentation of British indie-pop. The lyrical approach of the latter, open-hearted and often confessional, is present throughout with narratives that appear to be drawn directly from songwriter Emma’s life. In that way, and especially given the album’s title, the whole appears to be an attempt to define where, in 2024, Here is.

The dozen songs on the album zip by, despite frequent switch-ups of pace. Structurally, the songs are mostly grouped thematically in pairs; this is most clearly demonstrated in the titles of consecutive songs ‘Old Friends’ (a lilt full of jaunty strums which has both bleeps and a full-on rock guitar solo in its middle eight and lyrics expounding on the positivity of reuniting), and ‘Lost Friends’, which is acoustic guitar led and brief (coming in at less than two minutes) but as poignant as its title suggests. Elsewhere, Emma’s lyrics discuss the relative ups and downs of being in bands – ‘Flyers’ with its bouncy bass, and ‘Blue Plaque’, with its overdriven lead guitar. She reflects on surviving the days in ‘Help Yourself’ (whose Camera Obscura style opener, blends into guitars full of whammy) and the gentler sound of ‘Success’, which opens with birdsong but still contains biting lyrics in its final chorus: “Fuck success, fuck expectation”.  

There are bops, in the shape of the album’s second single ‘Everything That I Write‘, where spiky guitar flecks and power chords belie lyrical discussion of someone dedicated to a band. Similarly, ‘Nothing and Everything’ is a full-on stomper, with spectral guitar and interwoven backing vocals, while lead single and album opener ‘Species‘ discusses Emma’s relative unimportance against the “between two-hundred and two-thousand species that go extinct each year”, as a flurry of percussion explodes beneath the vocal line.  

What the album really leaves you with, though, is the sense that there is an emotional core underneath the rock stylings. ‘I Know The Signs’ is alt-country (with shades of Courtney Barnett), and reflects on a relationship going south. ‘Here’ sits Emma’s yearning vocals prominently alongside acoustic guitar, with lyrics about waiting for an unknown person who will partner you in adventures. Album closer ‘A Plea for Kindness’ is the nearest to an outright political statement, as its title suggests. Its opening lines “I don’t care what’s in your pants, I care what comes out of your mouth” begin against a downbeat bass, but as the song progresses, with the same lyrics repeated throughout, it turns musically into a garage stramash, clocking in at five minutes ten. Directed at the completely ill-founded and unnecessary hatred and prejudice that transphobic people insist on sharing, it offers  a heartfelt message of solidarity with our trans and gender non-conforming siblings. A fitting summary of the album that has preceded it.  

For Mammoth Penguins then, Here is where you were, where you are, and where you’ll be, with someone new but thinking about those that have gone; not getting what you want, but striving for more anyway. And, in another year of social and political upheaval, what better directions could there be?

Here, the new album from Mammoth Penguins, is out now via Fika Recordings. Find it on bandcamp.

John McGovern
@etinsuburbiaego

Photo Credit: Gavin Singleton

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Track Of The Day: th’sheridans – ‘Luka’

Following last year’s career-spanning compilation, featuring tracks from over a decade on the scene, indie-pop faves th’sheridans have now returned with a delightful brand new release.

A cover of Suzanne Vega’s 1987 poignant country-pop classic, ‘Luka‘ is propelled by spangly, strummed hooks and an immersive scuzzy whirr. Whilst maintaining all the heartfelt twinkling emotion of the original as it tackles the song’s affecting theme of child abuse, th’sheridans have managed to add their own unique fuzzy musicality and a delicately melancholic sense of reflection. With a shimmering sense of nostalgia, they have created a wonderfully effervescent rendition; oozing a beautifully lilting grace and captivating charm.

‘Luka’ is accompanied by an original b-side, ‘Proving Yr Humanity‘. Fuelled by a raw, impassioned emotion and stark, stripped-back musicality, it’s a short, sharp blast of folk-infused, stirring and socially aware “critical pop for radical purposes”.

The artwork for this release is by beloved cult comics artist and illustrator Vanesa R. Del Rey.

‘Luka’ / ‘Proving Yr Humanity’ is out now via Eatery Records.

Mari Lane
@marimindles

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