Dustin Cohen
Savages — a provocative all-female band from London — played Madison’s High Noon Saloon in September 2013. In fact, that gig is the first thing drummer Fay Milton mentions to Isthmus during a recent interview from her New York City hotel room.
Back then, the quartet was just starting to build a reputation in the United States and was touring in support of its debut album, Silence Yourself, released four months earlier.
Fast-forward two and a half years and Savages — fresh off appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (“That’s so mainstream,” Milton laughs) and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — returns to the High Noon on May 20. The band’s dark, hypnotic and bass-heavy second album, Adore Life, is generating universal adoration from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times and NPR’s All Things Considered.
“Between record one and record two, there’s definitely been some growth,” Milton says. “We’ve pushed forward sonically, and the audience is growing with us.”
Silence Yourself, band members admit, was filled with ruthless aggression and militant politics. Adore Life, conversely, charts new lyrical territory, delivering haunting images of love over hate, eroticism over embattlement and pleasure over pain.
What the band lacks in musical subtlety, it makes up for in its mysterious and, in the case of vocalist/lyricist Jehnny Beth and guitarist Gemma Thompson, vaguely androgynous presentation. But that’s not necessarily the intent.
“Nothing we do is prescribed,” Milton says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s be mysterious.’ We were always into the music first. The music has to lead, and we’re the force behind that. The insight into who we are comes much better from the music we play.”
And they play with penetrating vengeance, as if the public’s adoration for their music could all come crashing down tomorrow. Beth, from time to time, even borrows a page from Iggy Pop’s playbook and walks on the shoulders of Savages fans in the crowd. But then, on “When in Love,” she spews such couplets as “Oh I hate your taste in music” and “I want your fingers down my throat.”
Reviewers have attached the term “post-punk” to Savages’ sound, a term Milton, who listens to a lot of jazz and boasts a classical music background, doesn’t even pretend to understand. “I’ve never recognized post-punk as a genre,” she says. “The music is just a sound, a sonic expression.”
While there’s unquestionable urgency here derived from the British punk scene of the 1970s, the members of Savages dig deep into their own psyches and wander into electronic and experimental territory. The comparisons to PJ Harvey and Siouxsie & the Banshees are inevitable, but Adore Life also has reminded some critics of Soundgarden, with “Surrender” echoing early U2 in both name and sound.
Savages is booked for 30 festivals worldwide this summer, and the band plans to spend a good chunk of 2016 touring the United States — including a sold-out two-night stand at Red Rocks in Colorado in August with a reunited LCD Soundsystem.
Says Milton: “It’s going to be pretty insane.”