Track By Tracks: Puppet Kings - The Mountain (2019)

UK alt-rockers PUPPET KINGS are making new friends and pricking ears with their infectious and driving sound that has already earned the riff merchants favourable descriptors that liken the band to everyone from Foo Fighters and Guns N Roses, through to Queens of the Stone Age and Alice in Chains. PUPPET KINGS have a new video for the track, The Message - https://youtu.be/qFwYD9-wCiY , which has been taken from their forthcoming new EP, The Mountain, out Friday 1st March. We chatted with vocalist and guitarist Tomas Cochrane, and he exclusively talks us through the tracks on the EP:

1. The Message:

This is a cheeky song about money and how it so dominates our culture and conversation now. More so than even before the World is all about money. People have really brought in to money ideologically. There is no resistance or alternatives given anymore. I wrote this song as a reaction to that while at the same time facing the reality that you can’t really live without it. Money is a human concept, it’s created out of thin air and its quite funny when you look at it objectively and how seriously people take this made up thing. This game we play just to keep ourselves busy until we die. It’s quite strange and darkly comic in a way. The song is basically saying there are other things even more important than money (eg the environment, mental health, friendship, pleasure, sleeping and fun) that should not be forgotten or pushed aside in the cold hard pursuit of the pound, Euro or dollar bill. It’s got quite a simple punk/metal vibe and the idea was for it to be quite raw and in your face. In the Chorus I’m singing the low line while Harry doubles up with the Falsetto over the top which gives it a nice catchy hook.

2. Mountain Song:

I live and drive in London and the number of cameras and CC TV here is like nowhere else in the World. This song came about all because I got a ticket for momentarily stopping in a no stop area outside Clapham train station to let my Girlfriend out of the car. The Camera caught it and I had to pay something like 65 pounds for the pleasure. I then had this really strong desire to get out of the city, away from technology and back to nature hence the name Mountain song. I started thinking about how we now have all our lives uploaded online. Everything we do is monitored and recorded digitally and I’m not sure it’s at all healthy. Like with Social media, we upload this pretend façade of our real selves to impress our friends and peers and we live in this false reality.  We are addicted to our phones using up our attention spans and our endorphins and leaving us drained and empty and at the end of it.

3. Age Of Austerity:

As we are supposed to be coming out, bleary eyed and beaten, by a decade of Austerity measures placed on us by the worst government in my lifetime and probably in Britain’s entire history, I thought It would be a good title to give a song about missing someone and feeling a bit lost without them when they are away.

4. Bag Of Bones:

Bag of Bones is inspired by a dream where an ex-partner of mine laid me down in a basket in the river, Moses style, and waived me off. This is a song about the ending of a relationship and moving on. It looks at it from both sides. The feeling of guilt you get when you break up with someone or the feeling of hurt you get when someone leaves you. In the end though it’s a positive or defiant song. Life moves on and the lyric “this river runs in to the sea” sums it up. Sometimes when you are deep in a situation you cannot see the light or any hope but eventually you gain perspective and find yourself in new and exciting places. “

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